Fall/Winter 2005: Belief

Believing in the None Zone

The sacred shape of the secular Northwest

By Mark Shibley

I begin each fall quarter by asking my sociology of religion students at Southern Oregon University whether they find the culture of southwestern Oregon, the Rogue Valley in particular, to be relatively religious or secular compared to other places. Invariably, some students tell me how shockingly irreligious it seems, but most students perceive it to be an oppressively religious landscape covered with Christian churches full of staunch Bible-believers. In fact, both views are inaccurate and say more about my students' particular religious worldviews and anxieties than they do about the cultural landscape itself. The real story is more intricate and fascinating.

As religious historian Patricia O'Connell Killen wrote in The None Zone, a new guide to the religious geography of this region,

The defining feature of religion in the Pacific Northwest is that most of the population is "unchurched." Fewer people in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska affiliate with a religious institution than in any other region of the United States. ... [And] more people here claim "none" when asked their religious identification.

My southwestern Oregon home, it turns out, is in the least-churched part of the unchurched Northwest--the epicenter of the None Zone. Yet this remote province, which locals call the State of Jefferson, is fast becoming a national mecca for spiritual exploration outside official religious institutions. An Oregonian feature recently dubbed this region "Guru Country," thanks to the presence of Neal Donald Walsch and many other prominent New Spirituality leaders.

What precisely do we know about religious belief and practice in southwest Oregon and the broader region? To what extent are the core beliefs that guide our daily lives religious and widely held? How is our religious/secular landscape different from other cultural regions in the United States? And how do our particular convictions about the sacred shape our public life? While fewer people in this region affiliate or identify with organized religion than elsewhere in the country, beliefs and practices regarding sacred things pervade the area, particularly ideas that elevate the self and revere the natural world. The unchurched Northwest, therefore, is not so much secular as it is, by national standards, unconventionally religious.

The Unchurched Northwest

Beginning in the 1960s, cultural geographers and religious historians developed a regional framework for exploring religious pluralism and homogeneity in American culture. Significantly homogeneous regions are now well known: the Baptist Southeast, the Lutheran Upper Midwest, Catholic concentrations in the Northwest and Southwest, the Mormon Basin, etc. The Western region was described as religiously diverse with strikingly low levels of institutional affiliation. The West Coast, especially Oregon and Washington, was said to have the least recognizable religious personality of all the nation's regions. Because most Northwesterners were and are religiously unaffiliated, the region has come to be seen as a secular anomaly in American culture. As reported in The None Zone, we now know a great deal about affiliation and identity patterns in the Pacific Northwest.

Remarkably, a larger percentage of the population is more conventionally religious now than at any time in the region's modern history. The proportion affiliated with a religious organization, now 36 percent, doubled between 1890 and 2000. In recent decades the number of Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and Mormons has grown steadily as a result of immigration, natural increase, and conversion. As the twentieth century unfolded, religious affiliation patterns in the Northwest came to look more like the rest of the country. The Northwest remains, however, the least-churched U.S. region, by far. Nearly 65 percent of all Northwesterners do not affiliate with a historic religious tradition, compared to 40 percent nationwide. The reasons for this difference are complex, having to do with frontier settlement history, the relative weakness of social institutions in the West, ongoing demographic mobility, and a paradoxically forbidding and seductive physical landscape.

Furthermore, survey research estimates that 25 percent of the population in the Pacific Northwest has no religious identity; that is, they self-identify as "None." There are twice as many Nones in the Northwest as there are in the Bible Belt, and no religious tradition in the Northwest has nearly as big a share of the spiritual pie. Nones are the largest "religious" group in the region. In New England, there are more than twice as many Catholics as there are Nones, and in the South there are more than four times as many conservative Protestants as there are Nones. The upshot? This is a relatively open religious marketplace that provides fertile ground for both new spiritual movements and proselytizing Christians.

Put simply, there are two vibrant centers of religious energy in Oregon today--earth-based spirituality and resurgent evangelical Protestantism. The former cuts across institutional boundaries and pervades popular culture, while the latter is a church-based, conservative Protestant subculture. In the absence of a dominant religious tradition (e.g., Baptists in the South), both movements have flourished here in recent decades and offer very different ideas about how we ought to live together. Earth-based spirituality reveres the natural world and is foundational to regional identity; evangelical Protestantism is more other worldly and offers a cultural vision that, paradoxically, is both reactionary and accommodating.

Faith in Nature

In turning to popular culture, social scientists have discovered religious forms, movements, and organizations that were not visible previously. My contribution to The None Zone explored three clusters of popular religiosity in the Pacific Northwest: New Age spir- itualities including neo-paganism, metaphysics, and the "new spirituality" literature (e.g., The Celestine Prophecy, Conversations with God, The Power of Now); apoca-lyptic millennialism of a loose set of anti-government groups, such as Patriots, white supremacists, the Militia, and various kinds of survivalists; and earth-centered spirituality. None of these movements is unique to the Northwest, but each has a relatively high profile in regional culture that is extraordinary. The ideas, activities, and organizations comprising the third cluster seem most central to the cultural ethos of our region.

In the Northwest, earth-based spirituality amounts to "nature religion," which, according to historian Catherine L. Albanese, is an elusive pattern of thought and action that is historically difficult to follow in the United States, in part because of its grass-roots origin and plural character. In the book Nature Religion in America, Albanese writes, "Unorganized and unacknowledged as religion, [Nature Religion] is--given the right places to look--everywhere apparent. But it is also a form of religion that slips between the cracks of the usual interpretive grids." Using a popular religiosity lens, earth-based spirituality is ubiquitous in the Northwest: in regional literature, in rituals of leisure, in environmental movement ethics, in indigenous spiritual traditions, and even in official religious institutions. Thomas R. Dunlap's book Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest is another essential guide for interpreting this form of popular religion. Very briefly, here is a bit of the texture and scope of this religious form in our region.

The idea that nature is sacred permeates the canon of Northwest literature. Throughout the modern history of the region, writers have been obsessed with the landscape and share a fundamental belief that human redemption depends on reinventing the human-nature relationship. In On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature, Nicholas O'Connell argues that the most important contribution Northwest stories make to American literature is in articulating a more spiritual relationship with the landscape. In Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, for instance, the Alaskan tundra is a crucible for learning to see fundamental relationships between human and non-human nature, connections that are understood to be spiritual as well as ecological. Many contemporary Northwest writers share the view that industrial civilization is spiritually sterile, and they seek to reconnect human culture with the environment. Remarkably, these are not countercultural sentiments but, rather, are the heart and soul of Northwest literature.

No writer more aptly illustrates the prophetic voice of Northwest nature religion than David James Duncan. My Story As Told by Water is an autobiographical collection of essays that wrestles with the moral and spiritual implications of environmental degradation. Several essay titles suggest the religious themes explored therein: "A Prayer for the Salmon's Second Coming," "Estuary from an Afterlife," "Khwaja Khadir" (a spiritual fishing guide, derived from Islamic mysticism), and "god." In Duncan's work, nature writing, popular spirituality, and environmental activism overlap, as seen in his response to then-Senator Slade Gorton's (R-Wash.) reference to salmon as a "remnant species." Duncan wrote, "[S]almon are not just a vanishing species: they are a holiness, a divine gift."

Perhaps the separation of church and state means the state must define salmon as "just a fish." Let's assume it does. Let's temporarily refuse--like a congressperson with a lobbyist's brass ring in his nose--to see our wild salmon as anything but protein units. We run into problems even so. Because even insofar as salmon are "just a fish," so is Earth just a warm, wet, finite ship sailing a sea of cold and uninhabitable space. And in irrevocably annihilating one of Earth's invaluable food species, we rip irreplaceable planks from the hull of our ship for all time.

This in itself is reason enough to save them. But I would begin at the very beginning--Bible, page one--and remind our lawmakers that four federal dams are unmaking a holiness, that four dams are performing a hysterectomy upon the Columbia/Snake Prayer Wheel, that four Snake River dams are uncreating the primordial waters' response to the touch of the spirit of God.

For writers like Duncan the earth is sacred, and its degradation is a spiritual as well as ecological catastrophe. Healing nature thus requires a spiritual antidote. Duncan exemplifies the role Northwest writers often play in framing debates about policy concerning natural resources as moral and spiritual issues. The authority of Northwest nature writers may involve sound references to ecological science, but more fundamentally that authority depends on religious metaphors. Such apocalyptic images routinely frame environmental issues in our region as urgent problems.

Of course, religions are patterns of action as much as they are thought systems. So even though this literature is widely consumed, shared ideas alone do not constitute popular religion. "To be religion," Albanese says, "the symbol of nature must, so to speak, get out on the street."

In the Northwest, religious experience--the charged and creative moment of encounter with the sacred--is rooted historically in contact with the landscape. This concept is true in Native American cultures. Euro-American settlers, too, found the vast and imposing geography of the Pacific Northwest both overwhelming and awe-inspiring, by turns a savage wilderness and the Garden of Eden. The Journals of Lewis and Clark, for instance, show a preoccupation with the physical grandeur of the country, experienced in light of Manifest Destiny and of the frontier myths explorers carried with them. Still today, Northwesterners find moments of mystical illumination in contact with nature.

Perhaps the prototypical religious experience of nature in the American West is the mountain epiphany, embodied in the adventures of John Muir, who wrote of a sojourn into the wild, "I will touch naked God." Muir rejected the dogma and piety of his strict Presbyterian upbringing but not his belief in an imminent God. Rejecting church-based religion led not to irreligion but, rather, to the creation of nature-based religion. Ultimately, Muir became the patron saint of the twentieth-century wilderness preservation movement--the political expression of an ethic and spirituality that makes wild nature sacred.

Because most large tracts of undeveloped land are in the West, as the twentieth century came to a close, the crusade to save wild nature played out most dramatically on the last-frontier landscapes of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. In the Pacific Northwest, "saving wild nature" became the movement's Holy Grail. With the issues framed in ultimate terms, it was no surprise then that several years into conflict over management of public forestland, U.S. Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) observed, "This controversy has begun to resemble a religious war: those who deviate from the true faith--whichever true faith--are condemned as sinners, heretics, or worse. There is no compromise for the true believer."

As with any religious movement, there are prophets and zealots. During the 1980s and 1990s, strident voices and radical activism played dramatic roles in sacralizing Northwest forests. "And perhaps most important," one movement flier said of our ancient forests, "in their beauty and tranquility we find spiritual enrichment and renewal." To the extent that people find redemption and purpose in working to save nature, the environmental movement in the Northwest has a religious character. While the region's most potent myths, symbols and rituals represent sacred nature, the most vibrant form of American religion is evangelical Protestantism. It, too, is flourishing in the Northwest, although it is less central than nature religion to our regional identity.

Entrepreneurial Evangelicals

Evangelicals are Protestants who believe that a "born again" experience is central to Christian identity, who interpret the Bible literally, and who proselytize. One in four people in the Northwest identifies with that tradition, and there are twice as many evangelicals in the region as there are liberal Protestants. In Oregon, evangelicals outnumber Catholics (the only place outside the South where that is true), and they are growing in number at a faster rate than the population as a whole. However, not all evangelical congregations share equally in this growth. Resurgent evangelicalism in the Northwest is largely a suburban mega-church phenomenon, which is linked to entrepreneurial, growth-oriented ministries that emanate from southern California. Congregations affiliated with older denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, Assemblies of God, and Church of the Nazarene, are often stagnant and, increasingly, lose members to new suburban mega-churches. Contemporary, nondenominational churches that embrace popular culture, not their more sectarian forbearers, are the congregations experiencing dramatic growth. Three of Oregon's largest churches illustrate this trend.

Beaverton Foursquare, on Portland's suburban west side, is the largest congregation in Oregon (an estimated 6,000 regular, weekend participants). It is affiliated with the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a Pentecostal revival movement originating in Los Angeles. The Beaverton congregation grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s as the western suburbs expanded. New Hope Community Church (perhaps 5,000 weekend participants), located on the I-205 corridor east of Portland, was started by an associate of Robert Schuller, who pioneered televangelism and built the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California. New Hope grew rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s and also benefited from suburban sprawl. The entrepreneurial leadership in these two congregations effectively exploited suburbanization by offering contemporary, professional, and inviting styles of worship. Like mega-churches everywhere, these churches offer a wide assortment of small group activities to meet the social, psychological, and spiritual needs of their congregations. They are theologically conservative, but they are growth-oriented and thus more willing to adapt to the surrounding culture than their fundamentalist forebearers.

The Applegate Christian Fellowship, nestled in the foothills of the Applegate Valley, fifteen miles southwest of Medford in southern Oregon, illustrates evangelical accommodation to the culture. Started by a protege of Chuck Smith (Calvary Chapel's founder) in the early 1980s, the church is part of a movement that began by saving burned out hippies on the beaches of southern California. In less than two decades the church has became one of Oregon's largest congregations (roughly 4,000 weekend participants). One key to this church's growth is that it creatively--and strategically--melds conservative Protestant theology with youth-oriented popular culture. To be accessible to a new generation, worship is energetic, congregants' dress and demeanor are casual, the message is upbeat, the sanctuary contains no overt Christian symbols, the contemporary Christian music makes gatherings feel like rock concerts, and the sprawling campus includes a beautifully landscaped outdoor amphitheater so the congregation can worship in nature. These contemporary evangelicals are the key to understanding the resurgence of born-again Christianity and how it will contribute to public life.

A century ago, evangelicals set themselves apart from the secular world, retreating into a subculture that saw science, liberalism, and other modern values as corrosive to Christian belief and practice, and kept the faith. Oregon has many congregations that are descended from that sectarian tradition and are the cultural reservoirs for the issues that have animated the politics of the Christian Right in our region (i.e., homosexuality, abortion, and assisted suicide). But these congregations aren't the ones that are growing, because the sectarian impulse is self-limiting. As sociologist Donald P. Miller observes in Reinventing American Protestantism:

Religious relevance is a function of achieving in each new historical epoch a compromise between the radical teachings of primitive religion and the culture in which the religion is now being practiced.

Miller concludes that, inevitably, religious institutions survive and grow by adapting to their culture. That is, notwithstanding the ascendance of Christian Right politics across the land, contemporary evangelical, not the world-rejecting sects, are growing in the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, evangelical Protestants benefit from the demise of these fading sects. During the 1990s when the Applegate Christian Fellowship enjoyed its most rapid growth, most conservative Protestant denominations (Southern Baptist Convention, Assemblies of God, Church of the Nazarene, and others) in southern Oregon lost membership at rates between 15 and 20 percent in a single decade.

Evangelical Protestantism is not the culturally reactionary monolith religious liberals and Nones often assume it to be. Simply put, not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. By engaging the culture, the entrepreneurial leaders of Oregon's mega-churches are remaking the evangelical Protestant tradition. Sociologically speaking, it is impossible to be in the world and not of the world. As a result, the hard sectarian edge of evangelical Protestantism is wearing away in our region; fewer evangelicals are old-style fundamentalists. They may sound the same theologically, but they are culturally different. Most contemporary evangelicals join churches to nurture their experience with Christ, not to fight a culture war over "family values."

Religious Beliefs in Public Life

The Constitutional principle that separates church and state in American life was not intended to keep the religious beliefs of individuals from creating a public culture. In a pluralistic democracy, our civil society requires that religious voices downplay sectarian identities and focus on the common good. Unfortunately, the loudest religious voices in our region now--evangelical Protestantism and nature religion--often fail to provide the moral and spiritual touchstones needed to build a broadly inclusive public culture. Social scientists have observed that practitioners of such contemporary religious movements typically respond to their perceptions of a deficient moral order by developing dualistic and millenarian worldviews: good and evil are clear cut, and the untenable social order is collapsing, to be replaced by a perfect new order. These worldviews help explain why, in Oregon, our most pitched political battles in recent years have been over social and cultural issues, such as assisted suicide and gay marriage, and natural resource policies, such as the preservation of old-growth forests and restoration of native salmon runs. Firm convictions about what is sacred have helped set our public agenda, but unchurched and religiously liberal Oregonians have rather consistently rebuffed efforts to institutionalize sectarian expressions of those religious values.

During the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, local arms of the Christian Right in Oregon campaigned against legalizing assisted suicide and for limiting the civil rights of homosexuals, and they lost twice on each issue. Religious conservatives tend to be well organized, but they are nowhere near a majority of the population. More importantly, contemporary evangelicalism is growing by enlisting soldiers for a culture war. Many studies, including my book Resurgent Evangelicalism in the United States: Mapping Cultural Change Since 1970, show that people join contemporary evangelical churches for Christian community and spiritual nourishment. Nevertheless, 57 percent of Oregon voters voted in 2004 to amend the state constitution and define marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman (Measure 36). In ten other states, similar ballot measures carried by 4:1 and 5:1 margins. Oregon was the only state where the contest was even close. While the Christian Right has in recent decades influenced local elections with extraordinary efforts to mobilize their constituents, the movement has never gained as much traction in our statewide politics as it has in other parts of the country. No doubt most evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics supported the ban on gay marriage, but that victory depended on support from socially conservative mainline Protestants and non-Christians as well. If the passage of Measure 36 was a significant skirmish in the culture war, as proponents claimed, then it sounded more like the last gasp of a retreating army than it did the clarion cry of an oncoming theocracy.

Similarly, Oregonians rejected a ballot measure to ban clear-cutting on private land in 1998 by a surprising 4:1 margin. It was supported by the Sierra Club and Oregon Natural Resource Council (ONRC) but came to be seen by most citizens as an overzealous approach that was ideologically driven and technically unfeasible. This happened after a majority of Oregonians rallied behind state and federal efforts to implement ecosystem-based forest management practices on public land. Most Oregonians want to protect the environment, and popular sentiments that revere nature have helped justify the transformation of our resource extraction-based economy, often at great cost to rural communities.

At the end of fall quarter, my students and I explore this relationship between faith and politics. I ask them what role, if any, religious values ought to play in public life. Being mostly Nones, they uniformly recoil at the idea that religious convictions might help shape our public policy. They energetically embrace the institutional separation of church and state, and they are often naive about the way their own religious worldview (i.e., nature religion) shapes their political behavior. I suggest to my students that it is neither possible nor desirable to limit the ability of individuals to freely express their core values, religious or otherwise, in the public square. Their legitimate concern, of course, is that religious believers will pursue a sectarian vision in public policy. It is telling that my students have no idea that there are civic-minded, ecumenical religious communities in Oregon that have played collaborative and constructive roles in public affairs, as with the struggle for civil rights. I hope that moderate, unchurched Oregonians--the middle majority--will continue to resist any effort by sectarian religious communities to create an exclusive public culture, and I hope they will welcome those religious voices that articulate a broadly inclusive vision that is just and compassionate.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2005 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2005 Oregon Council for the Humanities