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

In Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America, Brett Malcolm Grainger makes a strong case that nineteenth-century American evangelicals were just as interested in nature and mysticism as the Transcendentalists. Using a broad definition of nature, and drawing from hymns, poetry, lithographs, published journals, and short stories, Grainger argues that many evangelicals living before the Civil War were far more attuned to the spirituality offered by nature than most scholars give them credit for. Grainger states that what differentiated the various antebellum evangelicals from the Transcendentalists and others outside their faith was their “commitment to ‘vital piety,’ a dynamic, living faith infused by a felt sense of the Holy Spirit” (p. 3).

Grainger elaborates on this thesis in five chapters. In the first chapter, he examines how outdoor revivals and camp meetings led to sentimental feelings toward sacred spaces. Appealing to biblical precedents, evangelicals romanticized groves, fields, hills, and rivers because of the role that they played in their conversion experiences and baptisms. Grainger writes, “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” (p. 21). In the second chapter, Grainger focuses on the use of natural contemplation by antebellum evangelicals to connect with God.

Such natural contemplation, Grainger suggests, was marked by distinct characteristics, namely, how it “connected empiricism and mysticism, yoking reason and intuition, the outer senses and the inner sense of the heart”; how “[i]t was Christocentric and vitalist” in perceiving Jesus in nature; and how such contemplation transcended race, gender, class, and age (pp. 62, 63). Using poetry, hymnody, lithographs, and devotional material (especially Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest [1649]), evangelicals were awakened to Christ’s immediate presence in creation. In the third chapter, Grainger studies contemplation as a lived practice, describing how “Believers analogized experiences of feeling engulfed or swallowed up in dark and ‘solemn’ swamps, caves, and groves to a spiritual descent into the abyss of God’s love” (p. 106). Such experiences were marked by periods of rapture and sorrow, as the believer vacillated between feelings of divine presence and absence when he or she became aware of their sin and moved toward a personal relationship with God. In the fourth chapter, Grainger shows the value that hydrotherapy had for evangelicals like Henry Foster. The natural springs in Fauquier County, Virginia, and upstate New York in particular became popular destinations for evangelicals, who sometimes witnessed miraculous healing properties. In the final chapter, Grainger turns readers’ attention to the bizarre use of electrotherapy and animal magnetism by evangelicals. Promoted by T. Gale, Edward Hitchcock, Theophilus Packard, and others, experimenting with magnetic sleep and “‘imponderable fluids’” like electricity, evangelicals learned, was biblically and theologically sound, could heal their bodies, would lead to clairvoyance, and might even raise someone from the dead (p. 169). Throughout the book, Grainger dates the demise of evangelical mystical practices to shortly after the Civil War, attributable to a number of factors, including the urbanization of America, the decline of revivalism and camp meetings, the rise of Darwinism, and the advent of modern Pentecostalism.

Grainger’s style of writing is just as artistic and creative as his thesis. He takes what historians already know about evangelicals (their conversion experiences, views on sanctification, and much more) and reconfigures their history so that we look at their view on nature in new ways. Building on the work of the eighteenth-century religion historians W. R. Ward and D. Bruce Hindmarsh, Grainger justifiably prods scholars to look with fresh eyes at the perhaps surprising and significant involvement of antebellum evangelicals in nature mysticism.