The Vital Landscape: Evangelical Religious Practice and the Culture of Nature in America, 1790-1870

Abstract

Evangelicalism, historians have long noted, was a movement born in field, forest, and stream. Like most truisms, however, this one has rarely been explored as deeply as it deserves. Using the tools of cultural history, this dissertation explores the variety of ways in which antebellum evangelicals engaged, enlisted, and resisted the spiritual potential of the natural world in order to progress in the religious life. By examining practices as diverse as camp meetings, outdoor baptism, contemplation of the book of nature, water-cure, electrotherapy, and mesmerism, it retrieves and interprets some of the broader contours and tensions within these traditions of evangelical "nature piety." One goal of this project, therefore, is to open up the natural world to scholars as an important site and source for evangelical religious experience in the antebellum period. Another is to contextualize these attitudes. Previous scholarship has assumed evangelical disinterest in nature or else read rising interest in the natural world as inherently corrosive to orthodoxy. However, while evangelical interest in the spiritual potential of nature paralleled that of Romantics and Transcendentalists, it had different origins and aims. Situating forms of evangelical nature piety within late medieval and early modern debates concerning primitivism, the spiritual senses, and mysticism, including notions of divine ascent and union with Christ, the project demonstrates how "vital piety," the end of all evangelical effort, fed and flowed from a special sense of nature as enlivened by the presence of Christ. Proceeding thematically and chronologically, it tracks practices associated with progressive stages in the spiritual life, moving from the new birth (conversion) to the new life (sanctification), culminating in speculative investigations into the nature of the new earth (eschatology). Such a structure underscores the limitations of secularization narratives, which have long presented the nineteenth-century turn to nature as a Trojan horse of heresy. The dissertation reveals a more complicated story. While antebellum evangelicals rhetorically distanced themselves from "superstitious" and "idolatrous" forms of nature worship, in daily life they actively engaged a vitalist view of nature as part of larger efforts to reform and renew orthodox patterns of belief and behavior.