Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism by Mark R. Stoll (review)

The connection between religions and environmental attitudes and behaviors has been a subject of increasing scholarly interest since the mid-twentieth century, inspiring a multitude of interdisciplinary publications, conferences, and even a new field of religion and ecology. With Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Mark R. Stoll has made a substantial contribution to this field by charting the influence of Calvinist theology on the development of environmentalism and conservationist policies in the United States. Shifting focus away from commonly cited innovators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Stoll describes how the worldviews and motivations of North American environmentalists emerged within relatively mainstream and conventional Protestant communities. The result is a thorough and engaging work that should inspire discussion and debate among scholars and students of environmental history, religious history, and the environmental humanities.

Stoll’s central argument is that Calvinism, “from its moralism to its suspicion of humans in the landscape to its urgent evangelism,” directly shaped the development of North American environmentalism, imbuing the movement with “tremendous social, cultural, and political power” (p. 53). The environmental movement originated among elite New England Puritans and Congregationalists who established an “enduring intellectual and moral framework” through their efforts to preserve the aesthetic and moral well-being of their communities (p. 61). Calvinist influence on environmental policy reached its zenith in the early twentieth century when the Presbyterian denomination was at its strongest and its members held a number of influential political offices. Stoll charts this thread of religious influence through the lived motivations and perspectives of artistic, literary, and scientific leaders. Puritan concerns for the aesthetic and moral common good, for example, are manifested through the works of popular nineteenth-century landscape painters, and the Presbyterian “determination to conquer avarice and save society” was evident in the popular writings of John Muir and other environ-mentalist leaders (p. 151). Many of the central figures of Stoll’s text are thus authors and writers rather than religious leaders, and as the author acknowledges, “A big segment of my argument is art-historical” (p. 4).

Following the end of the Progressive era, the influence of Presbyterians on politics and conservation policies began to wane, and the environmental movement likewise changed course. Growing in influence through the twentieth century, Baptists and evangelicals tended to eschew the nature-revering spirituality of figures like Muir and emphasize individual salvation over the preservation of a common good. In the final chapter, “A New Era,” Stoll describes how African Americans, Catholics, and Jews brought new perspectives into the environmental movement in the twentieth century. These groups focused on issues of environmental justice rather than on preserving pristine tracts of wilderness from human development. While Stoll celebrates the increased scope and inclusivism of North American environmentalism, he also suggests that the contemporary environmental movement seems to have lost influence due to these shifts in underlying religious motivation, failing to sufficiently critique the rampant individualism of the current age. Stoll concludes, “If it is not dead yet, environmentalism is certainly weak, divided, and wandering in the wilderness” (p. 275).

It becomes clear through Inherit the Holy Mountain that specific religious values and environmental attitudes have mutually influenced each other in some complex way through North American history. Stoll’s evidence shows that many early environmentalist leaders in the United States shared similar Calvinist personal histories and frequently spoke a common Calvinist-toned language of conservation for the public good. However, Stoll’s own data suggests some qualifications to his central thesis. Along with Calvinist connections, for example, elite social connections seem prevalent among many of the figures Stoll describes. Does this suggest that social and economic conditions played a more significant role in the development of environmentalism, particularly the movement for wilderness preservation, with religious identity merely being epiphenomenal?

Stoll’s volume is a...