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  • Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism by Evan Berry
  • J.W. Pritchett (bio)
Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. By Evan Berry. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 272pp. $29.95.

Environmentalism and Christianity have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, conventional environmental history accepts the assertions of Lynn White’s seminal essay “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” characterizing environmentalism as a radical departure from prior Christian anthropocentrism. Alternatively, Christian environmental writers, such as Loren Wilkinson, often argue that environmentalism is the fulfillment of a proper Christian theology and ethic of creation care. Evan Berry steps into the fray of this debate with his Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. His central assertion is that American environmentalism is the product of a “historically demonstrable genealogical affinity with Christian theological tradition” (2). Yet, while Berry maps environmentalism’s development onto a Christian spiritual and soteriological landscape, the theological content of progressive era spirituality is presented as a significant diversion from traditional currents of orthodoxy even as it maintains certain Christian commitments and language. In order to demonstrate the theological underpinnings of early twentieth century environmental groups, Berry focuses his analysis and documentation on the confluence of spiritual practices and recreational practices in environmental groups of the 1920s and 30s.

Berry’s first chapter maps the theological development of recreation as a soteriological practice via the development of romanticism, nominalism, and Muscular Christianity. In his narration, Romanticism names sin as the alienation of civilization from nature, nominalism created a world in which nature could be as theologically instructive as scripture, and Muscular Christianity cultivated an understanding of Christian spiritual practice devoted to masculine vitality, sport, and embodied virtue. Berry uses the practice of walking to illustrate how these intellectual and cultural forces combined to promote recreation in nature as a method of receiving grace whereby “the salvific possibilities opened by the idea that God’s grace was to be actively pursued in the natural world ushered in a new era of outdoor enthusiasm” (59).

Berry’s second chapter looks at specific motivations for the emergence of progressive era organizations, which would come to spearhead political environmentalism. These organizations, such as the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and the Mountaineers were not simply secular political organizations but rather “emerged from a synthesis of religious ideas and scientific knowledge” (61). Realizing that industrialism was destroying spiritually significant natural spaces, these groups organized to protect aesthetic natural amenities as resources for the spiritual well-being of future generations. At the heart of this political motivation is the conviction that natural spaces have spiritual, moral, and soteriological value.

In his third chapter, Berry, details the dependence of outdoor recreation’s popularity on religious nature writing, arguing that rather than being a radical departure from a medieval view of forests and mountains as terrifying, the progressive era environmentalists tapped into longstanding Hebrew and Christian “emphasis on mountains as key sites of spiritual transformation” (112). Berry finds Dante as more characteristic of Christian spiritual emphasis: The Divine Comedy’s “mountains may be fearsome, signifying the impossibility of unaided ascent, yet they are the primary metaphor for a topography of redemption” (112–113). Berry outlines [End Page 126] the emergence of mountain-climbing literature through the nineteenth century as “the primary carriers of what might be called romantic soteriology, the widespread view that direct experiences of the natural world are of moral and spiritual benefit to individuals” (118). This nineteenth-century insight was adopted by twentieth-century conservation organizations as the religious justification for the protection of wild landscapes. Along with mountaineering, backpacking, walking, and birding, romantic soteriology was attached to that particularly American tradition—the road trip—which also drew from the resources of pilgrimage spirituality to establish a practice of travel to sites of natural spiritual significance and personal moral restoration.

In his final chapter, Berry argues that the whole discourse assumed a nominally Christian ethic. With this assertion, he differs with interpreters who find the spiritual content of early environmental writing to be either empty rhetorical flourish or, alternatively, animistic and neo-pagan. Using the evidence of personal narrative essays common to...

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