In Baptized with the Soil, Kevin M. Lowe has tackled one of the least studied parts of the agrarian reform that developed in the first years of the twentieth century. While most scholars in agricultural history are familiar with the members of the Country Life movement and their emphasis on such reforms as school consolidation, few have more than a passing familiarity with the religious aspects of this reform movement. Lowe's book corrects this inattention.

Lowe focusses his discussion on Christian agrarianism, or the attempt to promote a Christian countryside, focussed on small to middle-sized family farms, rooted in a loving and conservation-minded approach to the land. This movement had rather surprising help from the state in the form of public colleges and universities that specifically trained ministers and missionaries for work in rural communities. This movement developed in several different directions, but was focussed first and foremost on creating strong rural communities. Proponents noted that rural communities were often both over- and under-churched, meaning that there were too many churches for the size of their communities, which meant that churches were too low on resources to really fulfill their missions. As a result, reformers encouraged the creation of multi-church, multi-denomination parishes, the sharing of pastors between churches and denominations, and programs such as the Lord's Acre, which allowed farm families to support their churches through the donation of the proceeds of an acre of land. While some of these measures, especially if they were mandated from above, received little support, others, like the Lord's Acre, were very successful, particularly in keeping churches afloat in the troubled 1930s. Lowe also draws a strong relationship between Christian agrarianism and the development of a religiously based conservation ethic in the countryside.

Since Lowe is making the first pass at such a large and varied movement, it is perhaps a bit much to ask him for more, but I am going to do so. First, a great deal more remains to be done on the issue of gender, which gets a passing mention in this book. Rural women in this era faced a great deal of pressure from reformers to adopt a more urban version of domesticity. Reformers often assumed that if rural women could just live like their city sisters, they would have no need to leave the countryside. Were these reformers different? Did they, perhaps, recognize that if there were to be successful family farms remaining in the countryside, they would require women's active, producing participation? The celebration of women's contributions to the Lord's Acre program would seem to indicate this, but no direct discussion of the reformers’ attitudes about women's roles within Christian family farms appears in this book.

Another area that requires further discussion is the problem of the Dust Bowl. The author's understanding of current literature on this topic is somewhat flat and one-dimensional, and it is unclear if the reformers’ understandings were also as one-dimensional. The author lays the entire burden of the Dust Bowl on Great Plains farmers, ignoring the fact that there was abnormally low rainfall for a decade, something outside farmers’ control. Ministers within the Dust Bowl were as likely, or perhaps more likely, to lead prayer services in the hopes of rain than to castigate their congregants for their mistreatment of God's earth. A more nuanced treatment of this particular issue is certainly warranted.

One last critical note, directed not toward the content of the book, but toward the publisher. A $74.00 hardback book should not be falling apart on the first reading. The binding on this book is so poor that pages are coming loose. Oxford should be capable of doing better by its authors and readers.

Criticism aside, Baptized with the Soil is a useful and interesting book, even surprising in some places, when it discusses the degree to which the land grants and other nonreligiously affiliated universities participated in the project of evangelizing the countryside. The Christian agrarian movement was large and varied, and is largely undiscussed as historians look back toward the Country Lifers and their ideas. Kevin Lowe has gone a great distance toward correcting this significant omission. He does a good job of laying out the movement's scope, defining its central concerns, and helping us to understand their importance. This is a book worth reading.