The American West has served as a vista for an imagined future for the agents of settler colonialism, as well as a place where crises shape institutional negotiation of religious identities and boundaries. This panel examines how actors in the American West have navigated these visions of a modern future amid crisis. Collectively, the panel demonstrates that religious life in the West has functioned as a site of contestation over who is considered worthy of protection, membership, and authority in a region often imagined as a testing ground for the nation’s future. Emphasizing the intersections of place, mobility, and power, the panel contributes to broader conversations about how the American West has functioned as a site of futuristic imagining for religious people as well as a site of anxiety for those confronting shifting moral and religious boundaries, contested forms of belonging, and the uncertainties of a modernizing nation.
This paper examines how railroad circuses shaped religious and cultural narratives of the American West. As one of the most popular forms of entertainment from 1872 to 1920, circuses circulated myths of the West through performances, publicity, and embodied rituals, reaching audiences across North America and beyond. This study explores how circuses commodified Native American life, exoticized non-Christian religions, and staged eclectic religious ceremonies like the one the paper opens with, a memorial service blending a Protestant sermon with Native dances. These spectacles reinforced racial hierarchies and Protestant ideals while simultaneously creating spaces for improvisation and innovation. By tracing the intersections of religion, mobility, and empire, this paper argues that circuses were powerful instruments of U.S. colonialism and myth-making, projecting visions of the West as both wild and morally ordered; a future shaped by ideas of Protestant progress and animated by exoticized spectacle.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s response to the 1918 flu epidemic provided an opportunity for the church to demonstrate its modern, secular character—and, by implication, its legitimacy as an American religion. By “secular,” I mean that in public, church members separated the category of religion from the category of medicine and subordinated the former to the latter. As they navigated the epidemic, Latter-day Saints strove to embody a vision of modern white American citizenry toward which they had been working since at least their arrival in the Great Basin in 1847. But even in this crucial moment, secularization was uneven. The 1918 flu epidemic, and Latter-day Saints’ responses to it, illuminate a range of ways that Latter-day Saints were modulating their religious practice and working out how to do religion “right” in a modernizing US—while not fully surrendering their identity as a distinctive religious group.
Southern California was a key location for the emergence of the modern anticult movement in the mid-twentieth century. The movement, which began as a loose network of parent support groups that opposed new religious movements they called "cults," was part of a larger debate about the future of religious freedom in the West, and the nation more broadly. California’s history of religious experimentation had fostered a religious diversity that many wanted to continue and expand. Yet, by the mid-twentieth century, the Cold War context and the migration to of the defense industry to California, gave rise to the religious and political conservatism that marked new groups as dangerous. As the anticult movement worked to exclude new religions from constitutional protections, it advanced the project of American Empire building and exemplified the long-standing dialectic between acceptance and opposition in the history of religion in the American West.
This paper examines how boundaries between “religion” and “spirituality” were negotiated and re-negotiated in three interrelated but distinct San Francisco organizations that engaged people with AIDS in the first four years of the epidemic. The three groups overlapped in personnel, purpose, and history. They came together in Ward 5B at San Francisco General, the first hospital ward dedicated exclusively to AIDS. They all engaged in work that could be deemed spiritual, and all had functions that traditionally fall under the rubric of religion. The paper examines how each group claimed and/or disavowed “religion” and “spirituality” in both what it did and how it described itself. It shows that grappling with “spiritual” versus “religious” is not just a question of individual identification but also an organizational grappling with particular tensions in a field, tensions that encourage groups to embrace and/or disavow religion and spirituality internally and in relation to other groups.
| Brandi Denison | b.denison@unf.edu | View |