The Wild Ones?

Abstract

The Wild Ones? Christine Leigh Heyrman (bio) Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019. 271 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $45.00 John Taylor dreaded that Satan would soon claim his prize. The young Virginian acknowledged the "justice in my condemnation," believing, as he did, that "God hated me before I was born." To hurry his drop into hell, Taylor started walking toward "a lonesome mountain" where he "intended to roam" for what remained of his "wretched life." There, on that "fatal mountain," he would meet his end either by suicide "or by other means best known to him who thus decreed." But during the climb, as he passed "under a high, overhanging rock," Taylor fell to his knees, overcome by the certainty that he deserved "this awful sentence." At that instant the thought flashed into his mind that "the great grace of Jesus Christ, had extended to cases desperate as mine." Glimpsing this mere possibility of redemption was enough: it "changed my resolution as to dying in the mountain." Taylor returned to his family's home on the far side of the Blue Ridge, and, after a long struggle "between hope and despair," he at last gained a fuller assurance of salvation. Taylor described that spiritual crisis, one which unfolded in the 1770s, in a memoir he composed toward the end of his long career as a Baptist minister in 1820s. "I believe I shall never forget the hanging rock while I live," he wrote, "nor even in heaven."1 The natural world loomed large in the memories of many other American evangelicals who strove for faith during the first half of the nineteenth century. They recalled signal events of their spiritual pilgrimages—the searing conviction of sinfulness, the wrenching recognition of God's justice in their damnation, and then the ecstatic release of conversion—in natural settings never to be forgotten. Those fields and forests, riverbanks and rocks became sacred spots to many believers, and the discovery of their fervid engagement with nature has inspired Brett Malcolm Grainger's Church in the Wild. So intense was the veneration of natural spaces, creatures, and objects among so many evangelicals, he finds, that some critics accused them of indulging in superstitions typically attributed to pagans, Native people, or Roman Catholics. [End Page 390] But for most believers—folks like John Taylor, who once wrestled with the temptation to pocket a piece of the tree stump used as a preaching stand by a beloved minister—the veneration of nature was "a tolerable idolatry"(p. 21). As Grainger persuasively demonstrates, early national and antebellum evangelicals, white and black, developed "a popular tradition of nature spirituality"(p. 62). Drawing on a richly diverse range of sources—sermons and journals, letters and poetry, African American spirituals and the shape-note hymnals popular at revival gatherings—he establishes that early nineteenth-century evangelicals of both races enjoyed a profound sense of the natural world as a site of spiritual power and presence. Theirs was "a shared culture of nature," and one that differed radically from the outlook of their contemporaries among deists and liberal Christians (p. 11). Steeped in enlightened learning, those rationalists looked to natural laws and intelligent design to know the mind of God. Evangelicals instead embraced an eclectic set of beliefs and practices unified by a commitment to what they called vital piety, a felt sense of a natural world shot through with the intuited presence of Jesus Christ. Spiritual landscapes such as field preaching, camp meetings, and river baptisms shaped their experiences of conversion. Some enslaved African Americans also took part in these rituals, but more met together in swamps, hollows, and woods, secluded hush harbors for secret praise meetings that syncretized elements from Protestant and West African religious systems. The practice of natural contemplation—meditation on the beauties of the world as a means of prayerful communication with Christ—also found favor among evangelicals, black and white. For some, spiritual awakening could transform the very appearance of the natural world, as their regenerate senses enabled new converts to perceive the immanent Christ in visible creation. Women won a reputation...