Book Review: Religious Studies Review: Justin Wilford (2012), Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism

I am pleased to announce that Religious Studies Review has published the second of my reviews of Justin Wilford’s wonderful 2012 book on Orange County’s Saddleback Church, Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism (New York University Press).

Over the last year, I was asked by three journals to write reviews of this book. The first was published last September 2013 in the AAG Review of Books. This piece in Religious Studies Review is the second one. The third will be part of a review forum on the book in Social and Cultural Geography and will focus on the usefulness of Wilford’s text for the Asian American evangelical activism that took place in September and October 2013. [Note: while I initially wrote a draft of that third review before the activism took place, I substantially rewrote it afterwards in order to observe how useful Wilford’s study was in the interplay of academia and activism.] The editors of the various journals understand that I have placed reviews that explore different angles of Wilford’s book, and in the spirit of transparency, I have sent copies of the different reviews to Religious Studies Review, the AAG Review of Books, and Tristan Sturm (who is organizing the SCG forum) to guard against self-plagiarism.

This present review in Religious Studies Review presents Wilford’s book to a religious studies audience. It is a very short review–what Religious Studies Review calls more of a ‘note’–that observes that Wilford has made a substantial geographical contribution to the social scientific study of religion. While geographers have often not been part of the broader conversation in the social science of religion, this book begins a conversation that I hope will continue to make inroads into a conversation of which we should be an integral part. In particular, I observe that Wilford’s ingenious examination of Saddleback’s usage of secular space for theological purposes subverts the religious studies obsession with defining ‘religion’ and calls religious studies scholars to closer analyses of how theologies are grounded in space.

For those who are wondering still if they should get this book, my answer in this review is a definitive yes. Following my thoughts in the review, I have discovered that Wilford’s text is an excellent starting place to talk about current work in geographies of religion. When I am asked at conferences about geographies of religion (i.e. where my work on Cantonese Protestant and younger-generation Asian American and Asian Canadian engagements with publics fits in the discipline), I often refer my interlocutors to the New York University Press book stands to pick up this book. As it was recently observed at an ‘Author Meets the Critics’ session for Sacred Subdivisions at the Association of American Geographers, books like Wilford’s remind geographers that publishing monographs would be helpful to advancing human geography as a discipline in interdisciplinary conversations. I am happy to endorse this text as a fruitful beginning point for such engagements, and I look forward to the conversations that it will generate both within and without geography.