Church in the Wild

Evangelicals in Antebellum America

Brett Malcolm Grainger

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674239562
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

A religious studies scholar argues that in antebellum America, evangelicals, not Transcendentalists, connected ordinary Americans with their spiritual roots in the natural world. We have long credited Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists with revolutionizing religious life in America and introducing a new appreciation of nature. Breaking with Protestant orthodoxy, these New Englanders claimed that God could be found not in church but in forest, fields, and streams. Their spiritual nonconformity had thrilling implications but never traveled far beyond their circle. In this essential reconsideration of American faith in the years leading up to the Civil War, Brett Malcolm Grainger argues that it was not the Transcendentalists but the evangelical revivalists who transformed the everyday religious life of Americans and spiritualized the natural environment.Evangelical Christianity won believers from the rural South to the industrial North: this was the true popular religion of the antebellum years. Revivalists went to the woods not to free themselves from the constraints of Christianity but to renew their ties to God. Evangelical Christianity provided a sense of enchantment for those alienated by a rapidly industrializing world. In forested camp meetings and riverside baptisms, in private contemplation and public water cures, in electrotherapy and mesmerism, American evangelicals communed with nature, God, and one another. A distinctive spirituality emerged pairing personal piety with a mystical relation to nature.As Church in the Wild reveals, the revivalist attitude toward nature and the material world, which echoed that of Catholicism, spread like wildfire among Christians of all backgrounds during the years leading up to the Civil War.

CHAPTER ONE

A TOLERABLE IDOLATRY

IN OR AROUND 1840, Joshua Thomas offered some parting words to a group of young Methodist ministers about to embark on overseas missions from a camp on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Thomas, a fisherman-turned-revivalist known locally as the “parson of the islands,” warned the young men about the barbarism they could expect to find in far corners of the globe, where people “in their blindness bow down to wood and stone.” By way of illustration, Thomas told the story of an imaginary native. One day, a man cut down a tree and, not knowing any better, he pragmatically divided the wood for sacred and profane purposes: half to supply the body of a carved idol, half to be used as firewood to cook his meal. Just before he sat down to eat, Thomas said, the idolater “falls down before the image he has just made and set up, thanks it for his food, and asks it to help him and bless him.” No doubt, the joke drew knowing smiles from the young missionaries, some of whom would have grown up on or near Tangier Island, a marshy backwater in the Chesapeake known today mainly for its preservation of a rare English Restoration dialect of American English. Despite such humble origins, Thomas declared that these American Methodists knew well enough what to do with a false god when they found one. “Why,” he said, “ignorant as we are, if such an image were set up here for a god, our island boys would stone it.”¹

Thomas’s imprecation against the ungodly uses of firewood, with its mingling of mockery and violence, fits a long-established trope in early American Protestantism. Reginald Heber’s “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” the most popular missionary hymn of the nineteenth century, opens by depicting non-Christianized nations as blind to the beauty of the natural landscapes they call home:

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;

Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand:

From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,

They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.

For Heber, the natural state of human corruption chained all non-Christians to a fateful error: misattributing reverence to the creation rather than the creator. Missionaries came not as colonizers but as liberators, freeing men and women from the slavery of idolatry through the spread of the gospel.

What though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle;

Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile?

In vain with lavish kindness the gifts of God are strown;

The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.²

Stoning, smashing, and burning other people’s idols to make them free has been a habit of monotheism since the ancient Hebrews emerged from the Fertile Crescent. The first commandment thundered down to Moses on Mount Sinai declared, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” We typically imagine a false god to take the form of a fabricated object, like the famous golden calf. But for the ancient Israelites, common idols included natural creatures and spaces. Trees and rocks seem to have been especially prone to abuse. When the Israelites came into the land of Canaan, God instructed them to cleanse the landscape of idols: “Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree.” Reform-minded kings such as Hezekiah timbered the sacred trees that propped up the cult of the Canaanite goddess Asherah, while the child-king Josiah, at the tender age of eight, proved his faithfulness by purging Judah and Jerusalem of its idols, beating the “graven images into powder” and cutting down the city’s groves. In the Hebrew Bible, felling a tree was shorthand for good religion.³

The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century picked up the scriptural link between idolatry and landscape and put it to work in their assault on the devotional topography of late medieval Christianity. Protestants orchestrated campaigns of violence against “popish” statues, stained-glass windows, holy wells, grottoes, and saints’ shrines by depicting Catholic devotion to sacred localities as a revival of Canaanite polytheism.⁴ Puritans restaged the war on idols during their errand in the wilderness of colonial Massachusetts. In 1628, Puritan soldiers marched into Merrymount after hearing that springtime revelers in the rival English settlement had erected a Maypole, trussing it up with ribbons, flowers, and a “peare of buckshorts.” With little ado, the soldiers chopped down the vexing Catholic idol, which locals at the nearby settlement of Plymouth had dubbed the “Calf of Horeb.”⁵

Unfortunately, not all cases of idolatry were as clear-cut as a Maypole. The Bible itself contributed to the problem. On many pages of the Old Testament, God seems to tolerate or even command the veneration of idols. After the Israelites got impatient with God in the wilderness and were attacked by poisonous snakes as a punishment, God ordered Moses to fashion a serpent from brass, lift it on a pole, and tell the dying to gaze on it reverently. Those who did were miraculously restored to health. When the patriarch Jacob awoke from a powerful dream of a ladder to heaven, he commemorated the hierophany by constructing a stone pillar memorial and consecrating it with oil. He called the place Bethel, “the house of God.” “Surely the Lord is in this place,” Jacob said, still shaking with the vision. “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”⁶

For all his boastful talk of stoning idols with his “island boys,” Thomas’s devotional practice on Tangier Island was shot through with contradictions. During the War of 1812, the British navy commandeered the island and soldiers began to timber the wild cherry, pine, and cedar for fortifications. When their axes encroached on the grove that sheltered the island’s camp meeting, Thomas begged the British admiral to spare it. “In this place,” he told the admiral, “we have felt ‘it was the very gate of heaven.’ ”⁷ He toured the admiral around the camp, stopping at the ground in front of the preaching stand, known as the altar, reserved for penitents who had begun to experience a work of saving grace. As Thomas recalled, the admiral was so moved, he gave the order that his men “should not cut so much as a limb off that grove.”⁸

Stranger things ensued. That night, the British reported hearing odd noises emanating from the grove, followed by “the sweetest and most melodious singing.” The soldiers tracked the sounds to the altar, the patch of earth sanctified by the seasonal descents of the Holy Spirit. For half an hour, a phantom chorus hovered “about the tops of the trees,” holding the soldiers spellbound. Feeling themselves unworthy to sleep in “a spot so near heaven,” they moved their tents to a respectful distance. As Thomas’s biographer writes, from then on, the soldiers “never polluted the place” but rather “reverenced that ground, and would not desecrate it in any way, or pitch a tent in it, but on the outside of the sacred grove.”⁹

The enchanted woods of the Chesapeake offer good sightlines on the spiritual landscape of antebellum evangelicalism. For Thomas and other revivalists, the earth was full of the glory of God. But some spots of earth were fuller than others. Through practices of conversion and commemoration, evangelicals venerated local landscapes—a clutch of trees; a prominent cliff or minor hill; a pleasing patch of grass along a riverbank; a wide, open clearing—as saturated with a special portion of presence. As far as Thomas was concerned, what good believers did in Tangier’s sacred grove was a direct imitation of biblical precedent: Jacob at Bethel, Moses at the burning bush, Jesus on the Mount of Olives. These biblical primitivists carefully distinguished their practices from all varieties of modern idolatry, the blind worship of “wood and stone” by Catholics, Hindus, Native Americans, and other heathens.

Other contemporary observers viewed revivalists quite differently. For Protestant opponents of the camp meeting, comparison of the worship styles of ancient Canaanites and modern revivalists was irresistible. Camp meetings were idolatrous innovations that corrupted rather than restored the primitive simplicity of worship described in the Bible. For such critics, evangelicals spread dangerous heterodoxy of a localized sacred, rejecting the Reformation doctrine of God’s universal presence in creation. Even within the camp, there was unease. Preachers and laypeople hallowed natural sites suffused by a palpable sense of the Holy Ghost, only to fear that their acts had abused rather than honored God’s creation. In the end, most were prepared to accept their peculiar practices of nature worship as a “tolerable idolatry,” a practical accommodation to the human condition and the awareness that, in special places, heaven and earth could come together, if only for a moment.

In this chapter I explore how evangelical rituals of conversion—the moment of spiritual regeneration highly prized by proponents of heart religion—were shaped by experience of natural space. Through participation in field preaching, camp meetings, and outdoor baptism, countless men and women sought salvation in the open, what John Calvin called the “theater of God’s glory.”¹⁰ But nature’s theater was more than a scenic backdrop.¹¹ By layering fields, forests, and streams with allusions to biblical sites and by erecting memorials to supernatural events, antebellum evangelicals constructed spiritual landscapes that enhanced their distinctive quest for “vital piety,” a felt sense of abundant presence in the here and now. Witnessing to the living spirit in nature, while authorized by scripture, also produced ambivalence. When evangelicals bowed down to wood and stone, they justified their practices as a response to the immanent Christ, a presence perceived through the regenerate senses of the “new man.” This sensus spiritualis, awakened in the moment of conversion, enabled believers to worship the living spirit in nature without fear of idolatry.¹²

1

Ever since Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, Christians seeking the radical renewal of religious institutions have taken their message outside the physical walls of the church. For centuries, the medieval church tolerated field preaching but rarely sanctioned it. In the twelfth century, Francis of Assisi was given a special dispensation to preach in the piazzas and pastures. An exemplar of the rising vita evangelica, which called on the church to return to the simplicity and poverty of Jesus, Francis’s willingness to preach the gospel in ordinary spaces of everyday life inspired a range of mendicant movements that continued the practice. Even so, one man’s prophet is another’s heretic, and suspicion always trailed field preachers. When the Lollards and Wycliffites took to the fields to call for ecclesial reform, they were condemned.

Even the most radical of medieval reformers never challenged the priority linking corporate liturgical worship and built space. Outdoor preachers invoked the authority of the biblical prophets, who came from the wilderness to denounce corruption and hypocrisy in the priesthood, but the prophets called for the purification of temple worship, not its abolition, and the strong cultural associations between nature worship and worship in nature, especially among the “pagan” religions that Christianity had supplanted, reinforced assumptions that proper worship should be confined to the built space of the basilica. The medieval church building was more than a place of prayer: designed to evoke continuity with the ancient Jewish temple, it was the architectural axis of divine mediation, hosting an array of sacramental practices, the most important being the ritual feast of the Mass, in which the priest magically transformed ordinary bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The church was the house of God and the gate of heaven.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestants revolutionized worship space. They stripped the church of stained glass, sculptures, and other images; moved or removed the altar; pumped up the size of the pulpit; and experimented with the situation of pews. Though the Eucharistic feast was retained (although often stripped of pomp and clothed in a new theological rationale), the focus of collective worship shifted to the proclamation of the w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. A Tolerable Idolatry
• 2. The Book of Nature
• 3. Through Nature to Nature’s God
• 4. Healing Springs
• 5. The Theology of Electricity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index