Church in the wild : evangelicals in antebellum America /

Church in the wild : evangelicals in antebellum America /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Grainger, Brett, author.
Imprint:	Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2019. ©2019
Description:	271 pages ; 25 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	Evangelicalism -- United States -- History. Nature -- Religious aspects. Natural theology. Evangelicalism. Natural theology. Nature -- Religious aspects. United States -- Religious life and customs. United States. History.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11864671

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ISBN:	9780674919372 0674919378
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	Since Perry Miller's 1940 essay on the connection between Puritan theology and Transcendentalism, "From Edwards to Emerson," there has been a dominant model for thinking about the relationship between American religion and nature. According to Miller, Emerson and his fellow New England elites were the only ones during the antebellum period to turn to nature for a direct, unmediated access to spirituality; this was part of their protest against the orthodoxy of Protestantism. We would, however, misunderstand the past if we forgot that New England Transcendentalists, as important as they are to American intellectual history, were an elite minority. There were other religious groups who also turned to the field and stream, the stone and the tree, in their everyday religious practice and their theology. Evangelical Christianity was the popular religion of antebellum America. During this period, evangelical relationships to the material world, and to nature at large, were closer to Catholicism than one might expect. Brett Malcolm Grainger makes two important arguments in this book: (1) early republic Evangelicals represent an important, non-derivative, and popular strand of American religious engagement with nature, a story often ignored while focusing on Emerson and Thoreau; and (2) the everyday religion of antebellum American Evangelicals shows us that the Catholic-Protestant divide over real presence needs to be reconsidered. Evangelical enchantment can be seen in field sermons, camp meetings, water cures, outdoor baptisms, and mesmerism. Grainger sheds light on a major religious movement that swept across antebellum America from Virginia, Kentucky, and Appalachia to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and upstate New York.--

Description
Summary:	A religious studies scholar argues that in antebellum America, evangelicals, not Transcendentalists, connected ordinary Americans with their spiritual roots in the natural world. <br> <br> We have long credited Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists with revolutionizing religious life in America and introducing a new appreciation of nature. Breaking with Protestant orthodoxy, these New Englanders claimed that God could be found not in church but in forest, fields, and streams. Their spiritual nonconformity had thrilling implications but never traveled far beyond their circle. In this essential reconsideration of American faith in the years leading up to the Civil War, Brett Malcolm Grainger argues that it was not the Transcendentalists but the evangelical revivalists who transformed the everyday religious life of Americans and spiritualized the natural environment.<br> <br> Evangelical Christianity won believers from the rural South to the industrial North: this was the true popular religion of the antebellum years. Revivalists went to the woods not to free themselves from the constraints of Christianity but to renew their ties to God. Evangelical Christianity provided a sense of enchantment for those alienated by a rapidly industrializing world. In forested camp meetings and riverside baptisms, in private contemplation and public water cures, in electrotherapy and mesmerism, American evangelicals communed with nature, God, and one another. A distinctive spirituality emerged pairing personal piety with a mystical relation to nature.<br> <br> As Church in the Wild reveals, the revivalist attitude toward nature and the material world, which echoed that of Catholicism, spread like wildfire among Christians of all backgrounds during the years leading up to the Civil War.
Physical Description:	271 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:	9780674919372 0674919378