Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America

Grainger, assistant professor of theology at Villanova, demonstrates in his trenchant debut that the American spiritualist origin story of Transcendentalists seeking the divine in the woods and fields doesn’t hold up. Antebellum evangelical Protestants, he argues, were not “immune to nature’s charms” (as Transcendentalists professed); they drew on Puritan, Pietist, Quietist, Enlightenment, and even Catholic ideas to fashion a robust nature spirituality. For Protestants during the 19th century, “looking through nature to nature’s God” was not a way to escape orthodox practice, but was instead used to renew it and themselves. Moving beyond texts, Grainger examines hymns, lithographs, and popular stories, along with the physical spaces, devotional practices, medical treatments, and scientific theories through which evangelicals engaged with nature. Evangelical nature spirituality was not without tension, however, as what was enchantment to some was idolatry to others, Grainger writes, and enslaved and free evangelicals often read very different things in the “book of nature.” Readers of American history and Christian theology will enjoy Grainger’s history, and fans of Emerson and Thoreau will find much to intrigue and challenge them. (May)