American Protestants have long been a people on the move, and historians have long recognized this. It was nearly six decades ago that Sidney Mead postulated the centrality of space—by which he meant room and freedom to move—to U.S. religious history. In Wandering Souls, independent scholar S. Scott Rohrer joins the more recent and still small group of historians who have sought to develop Mead's fundamental insight more systematically. In his view, scholars too blithely attribute the westward migrations that suffuse American history to “secular” social and economic impulses and too often identify land as the main force behind Americans' wanderlust. They also accentuate migration's disruptive impact on communities and religious institutions. Such “simplistic” portrayals, he says, overlook the “underlying religious motivations” of many migrations and their potential to generate and reinforce social and spiritual ties (247). Likewise, existing migration theories—push factors, pull factors, betterment migrations, generational and chain migrations—are useful but fail to address “how religious values fueled mobility” (7).

Rohrer begins with a question: What was it about Protestantism and the American environment that made the migrants so restless? His answer, in part, echoes Mead: the New World setting encouraged religious migrations by fostering a dissenting tradition and by offering dissenters plentiful, cheap land to which to relocate. But he extends this answer by identifying three kinds of religious motives operative across time, space, denomination, and ethnicity: religious Americans migrated to achieve salvation, community, reform, or some combination of these. Far from undermining American Protestantism and community, migration strengthened them through a “symbiotic relationship” (5) in which religious values prompted people to move, and their migrations in turn carried Protestantism westward and galvanized their shared spiritual commitments.

Rohrer organizes the migrations into two categories. In those of the first type, religious, economic, and social factors combined to prompt moves by individuals, families, or congregations. Examples, each the subject of a chapter, include mobile Virginian Devereux Jarrett, who sought salvation by fleeing the religious indifference he sensed among his fellow Anglicans; the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who sought ethnoreligious community by leaving Puritan New England for the Maine coast and Anglican Virginia for the southern backcountry; the Moravian families who moved from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to keep their religious movement vital; and the reform-minded Methodists whose shared distaste for slavery led them from Virginia to Ohio in the early nineteenth century. In the second type of religious migration, more purely religious motives drove churches or congregations to move in order to launch religious utopias, escape persecution, or alleviate internal conflict. Dissenting Baptists, for example, journeyed from New Jersey to western Virginia in 1789 for a fresh start after years of revolutionary and post-revolutionary turbulence; Inspirationists sought to reform themselves, find spiritual purity, and live communally by fleeing the worldly temptations of the burgeoning Erie Canal region for the relative isolation of Amana, Iowa; and the much-harassed Mormons moved several times to pursue their vision in peace. In all cases practical economic considerations—the lure of land in particular—leavened the migrants' religious motives, and in all cases they acted quickly to establish religious institutions in their new locales. The precise circumstances behind these migrations varied widely, of course, as did the relative importance of such factors as kinship networks, economic conditions, and intra- and interdenominational tensions, and Rohrer examines these in considerable detail. But he finds the common themes most striking.

While Rohrer's taxonomies of migration types and motives enhance our understanding of these migrations, readers of this journal are unlikely to be surprised by his basic argument. His stories of people relocating to lead the religious lives they desired have an all-too-familiar ring, a problem especially evident in the closing chapter on Mormons' “American Exodus.” His more significant contributions lie in suggestions he makes that call for further investigation. One is that “religious migrations differed fundamentally from secular movements” (8). It is to Rohrer's credit that he acknowledges “secular” motives and applies “secular” migration theories, but the resulting impression is that he simply adds religious motives to the mix, complicating arguments for their primacy and leaving unclear exactly what made the two kinds of migrations “fundamentally” different. Further inquiry into that distinction may not only clarify our understanding of American migratory impulses but also generate new contributions to ongoing discussions that challenge such easy distinctions between “sacred” and “secular.”

Rohrer's most important suggestion is that historians “focus on geography” (6), and Wandering Souls is one of several recent indications that they are beginning to do that. But his study misses important opportunities because it remains tied to Mead's conceptual framework. Like Mead, he views space as an objective container for human movement, and his geographic awareness therefore remains limited. This is particularly apparent in his conclusion, where he broaches several issues familiar to cultural geographers, but only vaguely, briefly, and without engaging for historians' benefit the relevant literature in cultural geography. He notes, for example, that migration “influenced acculturation” (249), sometimes breaking down and sometimes promoting ethnic distinctions, but does little to develop the point despite geographers' many explorations of the relation between migration and cultural identity. Likewise, their discussions might have nourished his underdeveloped proposal that migration “influenced regional development” (248–49). It is probably true that, as he says, migration provided important wellsprings for the familiar regional features of Puritan New England and the Mormon Great Basin. But he does not follow his broad picture of a people in motion to the more complex understanding of American religious regions recently elaborated in the Religion by Region Series: that regional cultures are dynamic systems rather than static sets of characteristics. Finally, historians seeking new insights and approaches to the religious meanings of migration will need to follow the cultural geographers beyond Mead to the newer, more theoretically sophisticated understandings of space that have emerged over the past two decades. Insofar as Rohrer prompts us in these directions, he has done religious history an important service.