Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
The concept of region has been perhaps the most important in the historical study of religious geography in the United States. Its centrality is due at least in part to its having been proposed as an organizing principle at the inception of that field in its modern form by historian Edwin Scott Gaustad and geographer Wilbur Zelinsky about four decades ago. But the concept has been, and remains, highly problematic. This brief essay first explores the development and problematization of regionalism in U.S. religious history, and then offers potential new bases for its continuing vitality.
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35. Barlow, Philip, “Time, Space, Motion, and Faith: Shifting Patterns in American Religious Geography“ (unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, Washington, D.C., January 1999), 15. The problem of pluralism is magnified by the expansion of American religious diversity to include nonwestern religions since the revision of immigration laws in 1965; this development suggests that the standard regional schema, proposed before that crucially transformative year and based entirely on Christian groups (counting Mormonism for present purposes as a Christian group) may require substantial modification.Google Scholar
36. Newman, William M. and Halvorson, Peter L., Atlas of American Religion: The Denominational Era, 1776–1990 (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2000), 30, 36.Google ScholarI have expressed my own concerns about the future of U.S. religious regionalism in Carroll, Bret E., The Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 131.Google Scholar
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38. Stump, Roger W., who emphasized quantitative approaches to American religious regions during the 1980s, has recently made a similar qualitative shift in his own study of the geography of religion in Boundaries of Faith: Geographical Perspectives on Religious Fundamentalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).Google Scholar
39. Chidester, David and Linenthal, Edward T., eds., American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995);Google ScholarHall, David D., ed., Lived Religion in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).Google ScholarOn sacred space, see also Jackson, Richard H. and Henrie, Roger, “Perception of Sacred Space,” Journal of Cultural Geography 3 (1983): 94–107, which offers a tripartite categorization of sacred space: “mystico-religious,” “homelands,” and “historical.“ Williams's conclusion that regionalism remains apparent at the vernacular level of church architecture likewise points to the potential of the sacred space and lived religion approaches.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40. Livingstone, David N., “Science and Religion: Foreword to the Historical Geography of an Encounter,” Journal of Historical Geography 20 (1994): 367, 368, 373. The word “discourses” is italicized in the original. The close kinship between Livingstone's proposed historical geography of ideas and the sacred space approach is evident in his suggestion (378 ff.) that the evolution controversy was an episode in “the management of scientific and theological space.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar