Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America by Brett Malcolm Grainger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America by Brett Malcolm Grainger Michael J. Altman (bio) Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America. By Brett Malcolm Grainger. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 280. Cloth, $45.00.) In her groundbreaking book A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (2007), Catherine Albanese contends that three major forms of religiosity worked their way through American religious history: evangelical religion, liturgical religion, and metaphysical religion. She dedicates her book to this third stream, arguing that it had hitherto been underappreciated by historians. She spends the rest of the book defining and outlining the history of metaphysical religion. Had Brett Grainger pushed Albanese’s argument further in his book, he would have collapsed the distinction she made between evangelical and metaphysical religion in a pathbreaking new way. In Church in the Wild, Grainger argues convincingly that antebellum evangelicals, as he defines them, participated in a “nature spirituality” that has yet to be fully appreciated by historians. He also argues that historians have missed this participation by anachronistically applying twentieth-century distinctions between “liberal” and “conservative” Protestants back onto the antebellum period. [End Page 409] Across the book’s five chapters, Grainger describes how evangelicals sacralized local places and landscapes, engaged in contemplative practice in nature, practiced and promoted hydrotherapy, and reinterpreted metaphysical notions of electricity and ether. Grainger structures the book according to “the spiritual life as evangelicals understood it, a path wending from conversion or justification by faith (the new birth) to the pursuit of holiness or sanctification (the new life), and finally to the coming kingdom of heaven and the world to come (the new earth)” (14). In chapter 1, Grainger argues that antebellum evangelical new births happened in the woods. He describes outdoor worship, riverbank baptisms, the hush arbors of slave Christianity, and sacred memorialization of the landscape as evidence for the importance of nature in evangelical revivalism. While he could have spent more time and space considering it, the political aspect of the outdoors in revivalist practice is of particular interest throughout the chapter. Grainger reveals how real dissenters had church outside: “Identifying their often-unruly gatherings with auspicious biblical models, evangelicals turned on its head the traditional Protestant preference for built worship space. Vital piety was more likely to be found in God’s own temple than in a house made with human hands” (26–27). The claims that “vital piety” happened in the woods functioned as authorizing claims for revivalist religion. Similarly, African-descended slaves worshiped in the outdoor hush arbors to escape white surveillance and practice an alternative to the slaveholding religion of white-led churches. In both cases, evangelicals claimed that vital religion happened outside church buildings. The middle chapters of the book describe how nature functioned in evangelical practice. In chapters 2 and 3, Grainger convincingly argues that contemplation on nature was central to antebellum evangelical devotional practice. Evangelicals brought an analogical method to the contemplation of nature. “Every creature was a letter encoded with multiple meanings,” he writes, “from the literal to the moral and finally to the spiritual, which always revealed some aspect of God’s plan of salvation” (68). Contemplation progressed from external perception to internal insights about the nature of Christ. Here, again, the politics of natural contemplation are of interest. Grainger points out that women, children, and African Americans engaged in the extension of nature contemplation. Evangelicals considered women less logical and thus less able to interpret and teach the Bible, but they described women “as more naturally gifted interpreters of God’s first book” (92). Using spirituals and memoirs from black preachers, Grainger shows how African Americans built their own forms of nature contemplation as they adapted Christianity for their own purposes. [End Page 410] Along with contemplation, antebellum evangelicals also turned to nature for its healing powers. Grainger shows in chapter 4 how evangelicals found a powerful, vital, and providential source of curative power in natural springs and hydrotherapy. At this point, the line between metaphysical and evangelical begins to show serious cracks. The best example is Grainger’s description of Catharine Beecher, a Congregationalist who extolled the...