Review: <i>Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality, and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest</i>, edited by Paul Bramadat, Patricia O’Connell Killen, and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme

Religion at the Edge presents a collection of essays that analyze the most irreligious regions of the United States and Canada, namely the Pacific Northwest. Also called Cascadia, the area encompasses British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and even parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and northern California, although the book focuses on the first three provinces/states.The book is an exemplary model of how a diverse group of scholars can create a coherent volume. Working through the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, the authors met in person two times, read and discussed each others’ articles multiple times, and made revisions as a result of those encounters. They also drew from a common pool of resources, such as interview transcripts, focus group data, archival materials, and perhaps most important, results of the Pacific Northwest Social Survey (PNSS). The result is a cohesive volume that examines Cascadia’s unique, or “peculiar,” configuration of religion, spirituality, and secularity.The PNSS, conducted in 2017 (Wilkins-Laflamme), found that 49 percent of residents of British Columbia claimed no religion, while 44 percent of Washingtonians and Oregonians reported no religion. The essays in the book explain the historical and contemporary reasons for Cascadia being the “None Zone,” and speculate as to its anticipation of a post-Christian America in the future (Silk). They consider the influence of indigenous traditions and settler colonialism (Horton, O’Brien), the environmental beauty of the region and a concomitant “reverential naturalism” (Bramadat, Morrill), the tradition of irreligion across generations (Block and Marks, O’Connell Killen), and the effect of secularism upon Evangelical and Liberal Protestants (Wellman and Corcoran, Wilkinson) as well as upon minority religions (Brown).Readers seeking information about secularism, the spiritual-but-not-religious cohort, environmentalism and religion, and the future of religion across Canada and the United States will want to read Religion at the Edge. As Mark Silk points out, “Cascadia has proven to be not an outlier but the advance guard of religion in the public life of the two countries of which it is a part” (128). Highly recommended.

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