Evangelicals today may be relatively out of tune with the environment and sanguine about what is happening to it. But as Brett Grainger shows in this timely work, they have not always been insensitive to communications from nature. Prior to the Civil War, evangelical writings overflowed with testimony to manifestations of God's presence in trees, mountains, streams, and thunderstorms. In this beautifully written book, Granger argues that evangelicals in antebellum America were more akin to Transcendentalists than we have been taught to think and that Transcendentalism's popularity paled in comparison with that of evangelical nature mysticism. Bathing their engagement with nature in an abundance of biblical tropes, evangelicals spoke to a broader and less rarified audience than any transparent eyeball ever could. According to Granger, the true predecessors of nature spirituality today are not Emerson and Thoreau but John Wesley and the many other (mostly female) pietists who found Christ in nature.

As Grainger ably demonstrates, Wesley was more responsible than anyone for reviving ancient and medieval philosophies of vitalism and medieval practices of solitary contemplation in nature. And he overcame considerable prejudice against nature in the process. While early protestant reformers did not completely sever ties to medieval mysticism, their severe conceptions of the fallen world inspired strenuous commitment to built environments dedicated to personal rehabilitation and reformed social organization. Through efforts to reach ordinary people in ordinary terms, Grainger explains, puritans and pietists began to recover earlier associations between God and the vital force immanent in nature that early reformers had repressed. Once persuaded of the virtue of preaching outdoors, Wesley led the way in popularizing, democratizing, and modernizing medieval vitalism. Grainger also points to affinities between Christian vitalism and approaches to the environment that slaves had carried with them from Africa and developed in North America. Perhaps because of the complexity involved, or perhaps because greater emphasis on similarities to non-Christian traditions would trouble a genealogy that privileges medieval Christianity, Grainger does not investigate these affinities fully.

The book's organization follows the morphology of nature mysticism that antebellum evangelicals prized. Early chapters show how religious experiences outside of manmade structures served evangelicals as means to new birth and carried them on to sanctification and new life in Christ. Grainger delves into the lived experience of evangelical nature lovers and attends to the many ways evangelicals stretched, managed, and monitored the connections to God they found in nature. And he shows how these efforts often reached breaking points as evangelicals pursued Christian vitalism for health and healing. While other Americans practiced hydrotherapy and electrotherapy outside the parameters of pious devotion to Christ, evangelicals went to great lengths to find Christ in water and electricity. Throughout the book, Grainger calls attention to the balancing act his subjects performed to prevent God from collapsing into nature. He offers many examples to show how frequently evangelicals oscillated between their penchant for mystical feeling and their adherence to strict rules for Christian belief and practice.

This book succeeds wonderfully in conveying the emotional engagement with nature experienced by antebellum evangelicals and the sparkling quality of their religiosity. Grainger populates his narrative with many choice expressions from the pens of early evangelicals. To take just one example, Joshua Thomas's outdoor conversion propelled him to go running and leaping through a cornfield, praising God. Subsequent investigation of the miraculous event found that he had not “trampled down a single hill or broken one stalk” (33). Through colloquialisms and clever analogies of his own, Grainger makes the lively testimonies such as these even more accessible. For example, “given the persistent association between peaks and peak experiences, it was perhaps inevitable that evangelicals would look for deeper meaning in the literal mountains they had to climb” (119).

Partly because of his success in establishing resonance between antebellum evangelicals and nature lovers today, questions about the relationship between then and now hover over the book. Why did this charmed form of evangelicalism disappear? From what dim chambers did Jerry Falwell, James Watt, and Mike Pence emerge to carry evangelicals so far away from their antebellum predecessors? Grainger acknowledges that many factors played into the decline of nature mysticism and its disappearance among evangelicals after the Civil War. He lays much of the blame on fundamentalism:

But fundamentalism may be more symptom than primary cause. There is a very dark side to the story that Grainger does not tell. He does not mention the blood bath of the Civil War or the grief so many suffered. He does not dwell on the loss of nature through industrialization and coal-belching railroads. And he never mentions the displacement of Native Americans or the relationship between that displacement and the new and expansive opportunities evangelicals had to experience God in nature in the first place. Evangelicals may not have been the leading perpetrators of frontier violence, but they certainly benefited from it. And they contributed just as certainly to the despoliation of the natural world that once inspired their predecessors. Fundamentalism provided denial, exoneration, and supernatural justification to cover these traumatic events. There is a tragedy to this history that demands more of a hearing—a tempest as well as a midsummer night's dream.