Everyday Infidels: a Social History of Secularism in the Postwar Pacific Northwest

Everyday Infidels: a Social History of Secularism in the Postwar Pacific Northwest

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Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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Together, British Columbia and Washington State have constituted a uniquely secular region. Residents of the Pacific Northwest were (and are) far more likely than their counterparts elsewhere to reject or ignore religious institutions, and religion itself. Historians have devoted little attention to this phenomenon. This dissertation draws on a wide range of manuscript, quantitative, and oral history sources to interrogate the nature and meanings of Northwest secularism in the years between 1950 and the early 1970s. Scholars have typically depicted secularism as something produced and disseminated within institutions and by cultural elites. Inspired by the rich literature on popular and lived religion, this study departs from convention and explores secularism at the social and everyday level. It does not reveal any coherent doctrine of secularism, nor does it suggest that the Pacific Northwest was a region of atheists. Just as church involvement is not the sole measure of religiosity, atheism is not the singular expression of secularity. Northwesterners were secular in multiple, ambiguous, and contested ways - ways that did not exclude encounters with the sacred. This dissertation traces certain widely shared elements of secularism in the postwar Pacific Northwest, including an indifference towards organized religion, and ambivalence around personal religion and belief. Influenced by normative ideas of race. class, gender. and family, postwar religious and cultural commentators blamed the distinct irreligion of the Northwest on single, working-class men in the region. Northwest secularism also tended to be constructed as a problem particular to whites in the region. In rejecting religion. white Northwesterners were seen as contravening dominant expectations of respectable whiteness. This study argues that Northwest irreligion was broadly based rather than anchored to a particular demographic group within the region. It challenges the assumption that secularity had.


The Secular Northwest

The Secular Northwest

Author: Tina Block

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2016-07-22

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0774831316

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The image of a rough frontier – where working men were tempted away from church on Sundays by more profane concerns – was perpetuated by postwar church leaders, who decried the decline of religious involvement. In this pioneering book, Tina Block debunks the myth of a godless frontier, revealing a Pacific Northwest that consciously rejected the trappings of organized religion but not necessarily spirituality – and not necessarily God. Secularism was not only the domain of the working man: women, families, and middle-class communities all helped to shape the region’s secular identity. But rejection of religion led to family, gender, and class tensions. Drawing on oral histories, census data, newspapers, and archival sources, Block explores the dynamics of Northwest secularity, grounded in the cultural permeability of the Canada–United States border, the independent spirit of those who called the region home, and their openness to secular ways of experiencing the world.


Infidels and the Damn Churches

Infidels and the Damn Churches

Author: Lynne Marks

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2017-06-09

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0774833475

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British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon from the 1880s to the First World War. Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settler women. White, working-class men often arrived in the province alone and identified the church with their exploitative employers. At the same time, BC’s anti-Asian and anti-Indigenous racism meant that their “whiteness” alone could define them as respectable, without the need for church affiliation. Consequently, although Christianity retained major social power elsewhere, many people in BC found the freedom to forgo church attendance or espouse atheist views. This nuanced study of mobility, gender, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into BC’s distinctive culture and into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.


Orca

Orca

Author: Jason Michael Colby

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0190673095

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Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and the author's own family history, this is the definitive story of how the feared and despised "killer" became the beloved "orca", and what that has meant for our relationship with the ocean and its creatures


Religion and the Demographic Revolution

Religion and the Demographic Revolution

Author: Callum G. Brown

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1843837927

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In the 1960s Christian religious practice and identity declined rapidly and women's lives were transformed, spawning a demographic revolution in sex, family and work. The argument of this book is that the two were intimately connected, triggered by an historic confluence of factors.


Havens in a Hectic World

Havens in a Hectic World

Author: Star Weiss

Publisher: TouchWood Editions

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9781894898690

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Describes the elements and benefits of sacred places, highlighting areas of the British Columbia coast.


Household Counts

Household Counts

Author: Peter Baskerville

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13:

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"The Canadian census taken in 1901 has surprising things to say about the family as a social grouping and cultural construct at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the nuclear-family household was the most frequent type of household, family was not a singular form or structure at all; rather, it was a fluid micro-social community through which people lived and moved. There was no one "traditional" family, but rather many types of families and households, each with its own history ... to explore the demographic context of families in Canada using the 1901 census. Split into five sections, the collection covers such topics as family demography, urban families, the young and old, family and social history, and smaller groups as well. The remarkable plasticity of family and household that Household Counts reveals is of critical importance to our understanding of nation-building in Canada. This collection not only makes an important contribution to family history, but also to the widening intellectual exploration of historical censuses."--Pub. description.


Religion at the Edge

Religion at the Edge

Author: Paul Bramadat

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2022-04-01

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0774867655

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The Cascadia bioregion – British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon – has long been at the forefront of cultural shifts occurring throughout North America, in particular regarding religious institutions, ideas, and practices. Religion at the Edge explores the rise of religious “nones,” the decline of mainstream Christian denominations, spiritual and environmental innovation, increasing religious pluralism, and the growth of smaller, more traditional faith groups. The first research-driven book to address religion, spirituality, and irreligion in the Pacific Northwest, past and present, Religion at the Edge expands our understanding of the nature, scale, and implications of socio-religious changes in North America, and the relevance of regionalism to that discussion.