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The Emergence of California in American Religious Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Eldon G. Ernst
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On Sunday, October 23, 1983, a notable event occurred in San Francisco. A celebration of music, word, and prayer commemorated the five-hundredth birthday of the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. Leaders of the Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Lutheran traditions took part in the service. Representatives of many other denominations marched in the processional singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Choral settings from the Greek Orthodox service framed the liturgy. Most remarkable, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco opened the ceremony, and the event took place in St. Mary's Cathedral. Reformation-rooted Protestant Christianity thus was recognized by a broad panorama of world Christian traditions that had lived side by side for well over a century in the strongly Catholic City of Saint Francis by the Golden Gate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Winter 2001 , pp. 31 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2001

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References

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4. The Graduate Theological Union is a consortium of schools and institutes representing Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant, Unitarian, Jewish, and Buddhist traditions, plus a doctoral program in religious studies in cooperation with the University of California in Berkeley. See Fischer, Mark F., The First Twenty Years (Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, 1982)Google Scholar.

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22. No account has been written of the full scope of religious life during this period in California, but suggestive is Frankiel, Sandra Sizer, “California and the Southwest,” Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, 3 vols., ed. Lippy, Charles H. and Williams, Peter W. (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1988), 3:1514-20Google Scholar; and in more depth but limited in scope is Frankiel, Sandra Sizer, Californias Spiritual Frontiers: Religious Alternatives to Anglo-Protestantism, 1850-1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

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24. On the 1915 exhibition, see Douglas Firth Anderson, “Through Fire and Fair by the Golden Gate: Progressive Era Protestantism and Regional Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1988), 495-99, 817-26. Portions of the following discussion of population shifts are taken from my “Church Divinity School of the Pacific and the Quest for Christian Identity in the American Far West, 1906-1943,” Anglican and Episcopal History 66, no. 2 Qune 1997): 218-20.

25. Barth, Gunthar, “Los Angeles, California,” in The Readers Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Lamar, Howard R. (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 678.Google Scholar

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28. For the larger context, see Sandoval, Moises, ed., Fronteras: A History of the Latin American Church in the U.S.A. since 1513 (San Antonio, Tex.: Mexican American Cultural Center, 1983), 223–338 Google Scholar. See also Sanchez, George, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

29. See Nash, Gerald D., “Blacks in the Wartime West,” in The American West Transformed, 88–106 Google Scholar. Creative new studies of California's African American religious history are appearing, such as DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell, “The California Black Gospel Music Tradition,” in California Soul: Music of African Americans in the West, ed. DjeDje, J. C. and Meadows, E. S. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 125-75Google Scholar; and James Anthony Noel, “Search for Zion: a Social-Historical Study of African American Religious Life and Church Culture in Marin City, California, from the Migration Period to the Present, 1942-1996” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1999).

30. On the larger context, see Takaki, Ronald, “The Watershed of World War II: Democracy and Race,” in his Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 357–405 Google Scholar; and Chan, Sucheng, “Changing Fortunes, 1941-1965,” in his Asian Americans: An Interpretative History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 121-42Google Scholar. For historical background, see Ryo Yoshida, “A Socio-Historical Study of Racial Ethnic Identity in the Inculturated Religious Expression of Japanese Christianity in San Francisco, 1877-1924” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1989); and Hayashi, Brian Masaru, “For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren”: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895-1942 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

31. References are to Thompson, William Irwin, At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972)Google Scholar; and to the late Herb Caen, popular columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, whose writings document the cosmopolitan life of the city. See Herb Caen's San Francisco, 1976-1991 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992). On the 1940's, Marty, Martin E. refers to “the new times” ushered inby World War II, thus ending his Modern American Religion, vol. 2: The Noise of Conflict, 1919-1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 392 Google Scholar. In Modern American Religion, vol. 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1968 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Marty offers the first substantive broad account of religion during the 1940's. See also the in-depth history and analysis of the wartime years in Sittser, Gerald L., A Cautious Patriotism: The American Churches and the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

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33. “Trampet Ready in the West,” editorial in Christian Century, September 21, 1951, 1040-45. The irreligion question was analyzed early in the century by Whitaker, Robert, “Is California Irreligious?” Sunset Magazine 16 (1906): 382-85Google Scholar. For his own account of the venture, see also Thurman, Howard, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 139-62Google Scholar, in a chapter titled, “The Bold Adventure—San Francisco.”

34. On the East Bay Temple, see Paul Cobb, “Mormon Temple a Beacon on Hilltop,” Oakland Tribune, September 30, 1998, 4-local. On Fuller Seminary, see Marsden, George M., Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987)Google Scholar, with an account of “the Graham connection,” 91-93. On the San Francisco celebration, see American Bible Society, One Hundred Thirty-Fourth Annual Report, Pacific District (New York, 1950), 121-26. For background to the Institute for Buddhist Studies, see the pamphlet “Buddhist Churches of America” available at national headquarters in San Francisco.

35. Quoted in Avella, Steven M., “Transformation of Catholic Life in the Twentieth-Century West: The Case of the Diocese of Sacramento, 1929-1957,” California History 72, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 163 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Starr, Kevin began the series with Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. For a penetrating analysis of McWilliams, see Kerwin Lee Klein, “Apocalypse Noir: Carey McWilliams and Posthistorical California,” Morrison Library Inaugural Address Series No. 7 (Berkeley: University of California Doe Library, 1997). For an analysis of the historic tension among California church leaders, see Ernst, Eldon G. and Anderson, Douglas Firth, Pilgrim Progression: The Protestant Experience in California (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Fithian Press, 1993), 61–65 Google Scholar.

37. Two books by Ellwood, Robert S. interpret the period: The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press), 1994.

38. “Buddhist Sects Flock to L.A,” San Francisco Examiner, November 15, 1998, D-8.

39. Malone, Michael P. and Etulain, Richard W., The American West: A Twentieth-Century History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 205 Google Scholar. Statistics are from Gillian, Harold, “Elbow to Elbow on the Land,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 27, 1997 Google Scholar, zone 6-3; and Ramon G. McLeod, “Immigrant Numbers Highest in California,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 9, 1997, A14.