A monkey from my ass
The eastern US is old society; established, dominated by blue-blooded conservatism. Out west, in the tradition of the pioneers, there is a greater acceptance of the savagery of life inasmuch as even people like me who never went to war, don't like boxing, but occasionally want to see pro football go lethal ... well, out here the post-Edwardian and pseudo-Victorian social distortion was weakened by necessity. A lady never? Well where are you gonna squat for miles that people can't see you?
And from such seemingly small things, everyday practicality, there is a different sensibility about right and wrong on the west coast than in the midwest or the east coast. Nor do the midwest and east mesh perfectly or, in some cases, even well.
Think about it: retirees in Vegas lower the percentage of unaffiliated in Nevada. I mean, Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle in the 1990s ... (Los Angeles is almost cliche.)
In the nineteenth century, Seattleites imported Japanese women for brides.
What I'm after is that the context of what God is seems very different from back east, to judge by what comes out of the South. (Things get weird enough in Washington, DC, but if you hop into Virginia ... well, Pat Roberts is there, and a few others ....)
I would have to drag out a massive citation from Jack Cady's The American Writer, and frankly I'm not up to it at the moment. But the fact that the west coast has Russian and Japanese and other such influences, combined with the degrees and conditions of society coastal pioneers were able to wrest from the land and the locals lays a different foundation for perceiving the relationship between the individual and God.
Look at that band of Idaho, Utah, Arizona. The numbers are low for the West. Mormon, Mormon, I-can't-quite-explain. The mishmash of post-American Christianity, pseudo-nativist religions, and new age spiritualists could explain Arizona, perhaps, but all I can explain about Montana is that urban Montana, inasmuch as (A) it exists, and (B) I've seen it (Missoula) reminds me of Corvallis, Oregon, or Puyallup, Washington. "Huh? Where?" you might ask. And that's my point about Montana, but compared to North Dakota next door, who cares?
Out west we worry less about who God is or what He tells you to do, and more about how the pieces of the mysterious Universal puzzle go together. Out west there are some who believe in God only because it lets them laugh harder at the "Hey, Darwin!" line from Robin Williams' performance in San Francisco in the early 1980s.
But a church label? Hell, I have a friend who was raised Quaker, went to a Catholic high school, attended a Southern Baptist Convention youth group (one of three) ... quite obviously she's done with labels. (Although she's not, as of this writing, out west.)
I think that even among those out west who believe in God there's a greater tendency to dwell less on affiliations and more on the questions God represents.
Hell, I have one friend, a former Seventh-Day Adventist, who is so determined to be unaffiliated that he's started his own r ... I mean, it's not a religion.
(Yeah, right.)
Hell, I ... that's right, I, me, my own damn self, Tiassa ... I won't even perform blood rituals.
It's not a religion?
In my best valley-voice: What-ever.
It's a different America out west, especially on the coast. That difference is so severe that the two-state division of Washington and Oregon ought to be a north-south division along the Cascades. Seriously, go inland across the Cascades and Washington is almost a foreign country to me. The difference between, say, Astoria, Oregon, and Le Grande, Oregon is ... equally severe.
Did Steve Miller ever make it to Alaska?
I'll even nod to my neighbors to the north, in B.C., for their contribution. Keep it green, boys and girls. Keep it green and kind and beautiful up there.
But I don't think we'll see the eventual flip to atheism in America during my expected natural lifetime. We'll see what technology brings; I might yet get to see how things work out.
(At least it wasn't pigs flying out of ... er ... never mind.)
:m:
