Concluding Reflections: Alternative Routes and Roads Not (Yet) Taken

Thinking about religion in the American West helps us understand more fully both religion and the American West. Beyond that, by putting these terms together and thinking about “religion in the American West,” we are able to see clearly the role of religion in the extension of U.S. empire and in the negotiation of and resistance to white Protestant cultural, economic, and military dominance. This essay forms the conclusion to “Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” a special issue of Pacific Historical Review.