The Pacific Northwest is the American religious future

Northwest Iowa Center for Regional Studies

People crowd the University of Washington quad to view cherry blossoms in Seattle in April 2017. Photo by Joe Mabel/Creative Commons

SEATTLE (RNS) — Early in this century, the academic center that I direct undertook a research project to examine religion and regionalism in American public life. Of the eight regions we divided the country into, the most distinctive was the Pacific Northwest (PNW)—Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.

The distinctiveness had everything to do with the region’s low degree of religious identification — something that had been the case ever since Anglo-Americans began settling the place in the 19th century. For that reason, we subtitled the volume dedicated to it “the None Zone.”

So begins religious historian and journalist Mark Silk’s essay on religion and the Pacific Northwest. (Full disclosure: I participated in the research project he mentions, but on California, Nevada, and Hawai’i, not the Pacific Northwest.) You may read…

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