Making Religion, Making the West

This essay surveys the parallel trajectories of U.S. western history and U.S. religious history to suggest what each of them can gain from deeper mutual engagements. It argues that U.S. western history and its adjacent fields can benefit from more sustained attention not only to particular religious practices and traditions, but also to the dynamics of religion-making or, in other words, to the social processes that configure “religion” and shape assumptions, both popular and scholarly, about where it can be found and how it operates. This essay is the introduction to a special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” guest edited by Tisa Wenger. The special issue consists of this introduction; articles from Carleigh Beriont, Danae Jacobson, Jonathan Calvillo, Cori Tucker-Price, Tiffany Hale, Dylan Yeats, and Jeffrey Turner; and a conclusion from Quincy Newell.