Whether driving Texas back roads, interstates, or grocery store parking lots, you cannot avoid the window decal of a cowboy holding his horse by the reins kneeling before a cross. Spurred by this growing connection between cowboy culture and Christianity, Marie Dallam's Cowboy Christians is the first academic foray into understanding their religious roots, beliefs, and structure. She defines this new religious movement as Christians “who closely identify with a North American subculture revolving around a matrix of concepts that can include cowboys, ranch work, rodeos, rural life, and nostalgia for aspects of the ‘Old West’” (3). With her project described as half history and half sociology, she aims to chart the past, present, and future of the cowboy church movement. She situates the cowboy Christians in the larger historiography of religion in the American West and traces the development of cowboy faith from 1865 to the present. The book then offers a brief history of the different cowboy Church denominations, an assessment of church structures, the gendered dynamics of contemporary cowboy churches, and posits some future problems facing these churches.

Dallam is at her best when she analyzes her fifty oral history interviews and the over two-hundred surveys she collected from women who attended the “Cowgirl Get Together” conference. The book's historical analysis could be better contextualized. Dallam offers only passing glances at the Jesus People as another unique branch of twentieth-century evangelicalism and other muscular Christian ministries like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but for the most part her characters exist within a religious fishbowl. She also admittedly does not include race or class as categories of analysis, choosing to focus exclusively on gender. Readers may be puzzled by the lack of class analysis in a movement that intentionally exudes working class values, especially considering the current white working-class revolt in the United States. This lack of context and analysis raises unanswered questions about why these cowboy Christians’ religious preferences do not resonate with mega-church, American evangelicalism.

In all, Cowboy Christians provides the first critical analysis of this fascinating new branch of American Christianity. Readers and future researchers interested in late-twentieth-century religion, masculinity, and oral history will find the book valuable. While historians may chafe at her personal narrations that serve as the glue holding much of her narrative structure together, they will undoubtedly be indebted to Dallam's extensive and groundbreaking research.