In her review, Emily Conroy-Krutz writes that “One of the joys of working in scholarly community is learning from each other when we approach the same set of sources with different questions and different interpretive lenses.” The essays in this roundtable reflect the questions and lenses that these brilliant scholars bring from their respective areas of expertise, and they reflect the joy of being in conversation and community with each other. I so appreciate Michael Baysa, Conroy-Krutz, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, and Rachel Wheeler for engaging with my work so generatively and generously. I am also grateful to Katherine Carté for organizing the panel on Heathen at the 2024 American Society of Church History meeting and to Jon Butler for organizing our comments into this roundtable. While I do not have space to respond to every point raised, I will respond to themes that I see cutting across the reviews.

California has historically been imagined as larger than life – a place of excess and grandeur. The organizing power of the myth of the American West is especially evident in the work of Ferenc Szasz, which has helped historians think about the distinctiveness of religion in the region. In the years since Religion in the Modern American West was published, the region has emerged as a productive test site for exploring religion’s relationship to colonialism, the formulation of diverse racial and ethnic groups, and the role of place and space in scholarly analysis. The work of Jonathan Ebel and Lloyd Barba adds to this literature by uncovering the religious dynamics hidden in California’s non-coastal cities. Located in an area known as the Central Valley, cities like Bakersfield, Tulare, and Wasco are bordered by mountain ranges that separate the interior from coastal metropolises and beach towns. Far from the Pacific Ocean breeze, these cities are hot, and their reputations as “rural” towns propped up by an agrarian-based economy have historically fueled stereotypes about the people who live there. As such, the region has tended to be dismissed as a site of serious study.

My driftin’ memory goes back to the spring of ‘23.

I am grateful to receive such thoughtful responses to my book and to have it placed in conversation with Lloyd Barba’s powerful work. The questions raised by the responses and the points they make about pedagogical usefulness, terminology, sources, and methods are all so important. It is hard to know where to begin. But it is mid-November as I write, and my mind is on our current moment. It is clear to me that we continue to blame the displaced for their displacement, and the migrants for migration. Migration is indisputably essential to the functioning of the American economy, yet migrants continue to endure suspicion, fear, anger, and hatred.