Looking for the Soul of Environmental Lament: Civil Religion, Political Emotion and the Handling of the Earth in the New Deal Era

Abstract

You can tell a lot about a religious sensibility by the way it deploys scripture. At the height of the New Deal administration, the US Film Service and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) commissioned some of the period’s leading intellectuals and culture-creators to make a film that recruited, among other sources, the biblical book of Job to make a point about the effects of accelerated soil erosion in the United States. In doing so, they used Job’s words to give voice to a distinctly New Deal era form of environmental lament. Robert and Frances Flaherty produced, filmed, and directed the film, with much of the script written by Russell Lord, an influential journalist and New Deal agrarian intellectual who had close ties with then Vice President (formerly Secretary of Agriculture) Henry A. Wallace.¹ Around twelve minutes into the film, during a large survey of the nature and impact of soil erosion, the film brings into view statuesque gullies showing the effects of water-born erosion. Then, as the camera pans across a grassless, dry field, from which wind gently lifts swirling dust, the voiceover intones the following quotation from the King James Version of Job 31:38–40:

In The Land, Job’s anguished words offered a reckoning with the effects of the abuse of the soils of rural America. Immediately preceding the quote from Job, the narrator offered a typical New Deal soil Jeremiad narration as the setting for the quote: “In three hundred years we conquered the continent and became the richest nation in the world. But our soil we squandered.” For the filmmakers, as for other New Deal intellectuals, the degradation of land in the rural United States had come about precisely because settler and capitalist US agriculture had caused the land to “cry against” them. Gullies and dust storms were signs of judgement, an occasion for lament, contrition, and repentance. As Paul Sutter has pointed out:

If there was any singular concern that marked the New Deal era as distinct from those that came before and after, it was a concern with soil, its centrality to human civilizations, the history of its use and abuse, the rapidity with which it seemed to be wasting away, and the tragic human consequences of soil improvidence.²

Flaherty’s The Land—like Pare Lorentz had done previously—dramatized this “singular concern” to potent rhetorical effect, strikingly couching it in the language of biblical lament.³ The environmental mobilizations of the New Deal may seem to be technocratic and modernizing in nature, but as The Land suggests, they were also underscored by a moral and religious account of humanity’s dependence on, and obligations to, the environment.

While The Land had been planned for general release in 1942, the events and aftermath of Pearl Harbor transformed the federal government’s film program. Consequently, although The Land met with some critical acclaim, it did not receive a general release. This thwarted reception notwithstanding, the film constitutes part of a much larger archive that attests to a New Deal environmental sensibility, one that has been largely buried and forgotten since the 1960s and 1970s. This sensibility, we argue, was deeply inflected by a Christian ecological imaginary, which called for fellowship between humans and soil, a fellowship that could only be ignored at the peril of future generations. Soil was holy, and its care a sacred charge. In our own time, when climate change denial seems to go hand in hand with the Christian right, the idea of a New Deal environmental activism fueled by faith might seem surprising. Yet prior to 1980, Christian political actors of various denominations and political stripes arguably had more in common with Flaherty and Lord than with Reagan-era Christian anti-environmentalists such as Secretary of Interior James G. Watt.⁴

Tracking the history of this New Deal environmental lament, locating its soul so to speak, demands sensitivity to the religious context of the interwar years. So far, it has been scholars in religion and theology who have taken the lead in mining the past for cases of religious and ecological thought.⁵ Historians have yet to build the sort of consistent inter-field work (as distinct from interdisciplinary work) that might serve to enrich common methodological topsoil, extrapolate theory between cases studies, and build a textured sense of continuity and change across and between temporal periodizations. In a distinct, but related context, US religious historian Jon Butler famously decried the way that due to a lack of such deep sustained attention to the ongoing root structures of religion in American public life, it emerged in apparent surprise eruptions, “Jack-in-the-Box” moments, as he called them. Butler rightly noted the role of an implicit secularization narrative in shaping the historiography of the American twentieth century, one that had been so naturalized that it often went unrecognized.⁶ Since Butler wrote, scores, and perhaps hundreds, of historians have responded to his call and collectively challenged that implicit secularization metanarrative.⁷ Yet the need remains, notwithstanding a handful of promising starts, for histories of the ecology (if the metaphor may be stretched) of religion and ecological politics.⁸

One place that some scholars have looked for the soul of environmental lament has been in the biographical formation of environmental activists and conservationists. Mark Stoll’s and Donald Worster’s works are exemplary here. Stoll has conducted unparalleled research on recovering the individual spiritual and religious formation of many American environmentalists from John Muir to Rachel Carson. Stoll and Worster have noted the role played by Calvinist traditions in the making of many activists. Calvinism, they argue imbues actors with a motivating sense of the sacred, a drive to morally change the world, and importantly, a pervasive sense of sin and guilt. For example, Worster (in semi-jest) suggests, “the Protestant ascetic tradition” of Calvin and others is almost solely carried forward by “the nation’s environmentalists, who tend to drive older, rusting cars and compulsively turn off the lights.”⁹ Muir and Rachel Carson doubtless gained some of their spiritual and rhetorical power, together with their sense of wonder at nature, from religion in their upbringing. One risk of this biographical approach, however, is that it is all too easy to read a subject’s religious formation as merely individual and private sphere background experiences, as idiosyncratic stages in distinct journeys of maturation. It is hard to garner a composite picture of religion in New Deal era environmental thought (or Progressive Era thought, or postwar thought for that matter) with biography alone. In the task of reconstructing a shared fabric, biography provides many helpful threads that do not, by themselves, weave the collective cloth. As Evan Berry notes, rather than biography, we can gain traction with understanding religion in interwar environmental thought by treating it as a “shared mode of social discourse.” He argues, “American environmentalism is theologically rooted not because some select few individuals successfully evangelized their religious view of nature in the public arena but because such a view of nature was already in wide public demand.”¹⁰

Additionally, the body of biographical work on religion and environmentalists has tended to bypass the New Deal. In one sense, this mirrors the wider issue of the New Deal being overlooked more generally in the history of environmental thought.¹¹ But with religion, the absence is doubly determined. One exception is work on Aldo Leopold, who has, at times, been revered by later environmentalists as a kind of sage ahead of his time.¹² But without a sense of wider context, Leopold scholarship can tend to verge on hagiography, operating as if Leopold generated insights despite his place in the New Deal, or at least in splendid isolation from it. It is almost as if, by definition, the realm of New Deal conservation is understood to be a non-religious zone of technocratic, utilitarian policies. We suspect here the impact of Samuel P. Hays’s classic typology of “preservation” versus “conservation.”¹³ In Hays’s typology, the prophetic-mystical approach of National Parks advocate John Muir is pitted against the allegedly “utilitarian” stripe of US Forestry doyen Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot himself was raised an evangelical and seemingly remained an observant Christian until his death in 1946. At times, he had much in common with Muir. But Pinchot also developed a model of pursuing the “sustained yield” of timber as a resource—a seemingly desacralized approach to trees—in contrast to Muir’s language of sacred “cathedrals.” Thus, he became memorialized as Muir’s foil. The New Deal has long been placed in the Pinchot-utilitarian-“conservationist” column, an outsider and enemy to the preservationism of Muir and the Wilderness movement.

A case in point is Stephen Fox’s The American Conservation Movement, published in 1986. In that book, Fox offered the biography of preservationist John Muir to explain the complex ideological frameworks that informed conservation in the Progressive Era. Fox wrote of Muir’s mysticism and evangelism that, “Here lay the ultimate meaning of Muir’s life, indeed of conservation itself. Traced back to its ideological root, conservation amounted to a religious protest against modernity.”¹⁴

New Deal environmental policy and practice was informed by a very different set of impulses than those of Muir. It was for “modernity,” explicitly modernizing and technocratic and informed by ideals of expertise and proficiency. But it was not without a soul. It also mounted a religious protest of its own against the exploitation of the soil. In Fox’s book, the New Deal is an awkward middle chapter where discussions of religion are virtually entirely absent, with religion present at the beginning and end of the book. New Dealers (and their narrator) are focused instead on policy innovations, bureaucratic appointments, and party politics. However, the New Deal environmental lament fitted neither side of the Hays typology.

In complementarity to the biographical literature, our approach is to take a synchronic look at many interconnected sites of language and culture at the same time: fabric rather than strands. Here we draw from the earlier work of Sacvan Bercovitch, whose book The American Jeremiad (1978) has had a lasting impact on studies of religion in the United States. As Bercovitch defined it, the Jeremiad “is a ritual to join social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to private identity, the shifting ‘signs of the times’ to certain traditional metaphors, themes, and symbols.” It uses chastisement to inspire revitalization and combines lament with hope for change based on the possibility repentance. Like all prophetic modes of discourse, it offers a locating, orienting narrative: an account of the original errand, descriptions of the sins that have imperiled the errand, and the type of repentance required. The Jeremiad, as Bercovitch notes above, joins “public to private identity.” This point is vitally helpful in overcoming false dichotomies that hold “religion” merely to be private faith, constitutively separate from “politics.” Bercovitch’s approach necessitates a twin focus on language and context. As Bercovitch explained, his approach was a method both “literary” and “historical.” Rather than reading religious rhetoric as instrumentalizing window-dressing, he takes the language of Jeremiad to “reflect and affect a set of particular psychic, social and historical needs.”¹⁵

Where we depart from Bercovitch is in his pursuit of capturing a thing called “The” American Jeremiad as a type of historical transcendent. Yes, Jeremiads have been an endemic feature of colonial and US political life from the Puritans to the present. But the interesting question is what kinds (plural) of Jeremiads emerge and then vanish, and why. Certain sins gain greater attention in Jeremiadic rhetoric at certain times than others, only to disappear: for example, the furor over the public mail and rail cars operating on the Sabbath day in the early republic.¹⁶ We seek to ask about the historical specificity of a given Jeremiad at a given time in order to understand the discursive, political, and material realities that provoke its utterance and enable its effectiveness. After all, it is not enough to simply say it was “Christian.” As Kevin Kruse and Matthew Sutton have pointed out, there was significant opposition on the part of many evangelical Christians to Roosevelt et al.’s characterization of national crisis and promise of state-led redemption.¹⁷ New Deal environmental lament may have invoked a deep-seated Christian imaginary, but it did so in particular ways. We look at four distinctive aspects of the New Deal environmental Jeremiad in particular.

First, in contrast to many twentieth century evangelical Jeremiads, the New Deal environmental Jeremiad was part of a reckoning with scripture that was framed in softly anticapitalist ideas of collective structural justice.¹⁸ The Bible, read in this context, spoke of social ethics, the sacredness of nature, and the sins of greedy capitalist exploitation. New Dealers read and used the Bible in ways then being developed and articulated by the growing ecumenical movement in mainline Protestantism in the United States, United Kingdom, as well as parts of Continental Europe and the British Empire. Rather than seeing these currents in categories like “social gospel,” which do not quite fit, David Hollinger, Gene Zubovich, and others have done much to develop and display the efficacy of the term “ecumenical” to describe this vast, pervasive mass of Protestants. They use the term to apply not only to those explicitly engaged in enterprises of the “ecumenical movement” (such as the International Missionary Council, YM/WCA, or World Council of Churches) but also to refer to the inter-denominational mainline Protestant work that was socially and politically engaged and conspicuously at the leading edge of liberal antiracist movements in American life.¹⁹ The heuristics of “ecumenical” have served to open vistas in US and the world and US historiography previously obscured by old typologies of “modernist”/liberal versus “fundamentalist”/evangelical. For the first time, to our knowledge, this essay examines the environmental dimensions of the ecumenical movement and how it dovetailed with the New Deal Jeremiad.

The second distinctive aspect of this soil Jeremiad was its global scope. Unlike the earlier Progressive Era Jeremiahs who warned of national “timber famine” and who indeed may have used other countries as object lessons in their warnings, New Dealers told a story of a modern world collectively caught in the sin of environmental exploitation, now facing the judgement of imminent collapse. Rather than US exceptionalism, theirs was a story of the solidarity of sin. Their framing placed the US story of decline within a global one; and it was ecumenical missionaries, some of whom worked for and with the New Deal administration, who brought their knowledge of environmental conditions in China, India, Japan, and elsewhere to bear on the US erosion crisis. As Hollinger and others have shown, ecumenical missionaries engaged globally—especially with Asia—in transfers of personnel, power, and ideas. But much of their energy for change was diverted back to the United States.

Third, missionaries, by the nature of their work in the colonized world—often as third-party contractors for imperial powers—blended scientific, religious, and governmental modes of intellectual authority. They positioned themselves as pedagogues of agricultural science, as church leaders, and as official or semi-official agents of the state—at the same time. It was, as it were, a triple establishment status. In the century or so prior to the Cold War, for a Western missionary to be engaged in education about soil and agriculture was to be at once a bringer of science, Christian reformism, and the state’s administrative reach. When they spoke about caring for God’s soil, this blending of offices under the umbrella of the New Deal stayed with them, allowing them to convene certain blended kinds of audiences, and elevating the power and reach of their work. In the cauldron of World War II, their pedagogical missionary practices fused with an increasingly missionary and pedagogical US state in the mid-1940s, foreshadowing many aspects of postwar development and modernization policies, and providing personnel for the same.

Fourth, Jeremiads differ not only in their ascription of sin and failure; they also offer hope. In the New Deal soil Jeremiad, hope came through the redemption offered by planning and science-led modernization. Earlier settler pioneer generations had sinned i) by being unplanned, and ii) in seeking private gains over public interest. Repentance in this Jeremiad meant turning from the unplanned to the planned, from mere private interest toward state intervention for the public good. Environmentally it meant turning away from planting crops on marginal and submarginal lands, and from letting water run uncontrolled to using dam systems to control it. For New Deal politicians and intellectuals, the damming and planning system of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) embodied this promise in what they saw as one daring, dazzling triumph of public planning. This is why many conservation texts in the New Deal offered a lament of the sins of the settler fathers and then made a case that the way toward renewal was through modernist TVA-style development.²⁰ And this is what the missionary state then took to the world, as Sarah T. Phillips, David Ekbladh, and others have narrated.²¹

Because this article traces such a far-reaching arc from soil conservationist contrition to dam-building triumphalism, it is appropriate here to acknowledge the limits of our scope. We focus on soil and water conservation because of their salience both in the New Deal policy suite and in the environmental Jeremiads of the era. However, this is only one line of inquiry. While we deal primarily with what Paul Sutter and Adam Rome have termed the “environmental management state” and its allied intellectuals, much more could be done in future work to explore whether the ideas enunciated by New Deal leaders took hold among everyday members of rural communities. Furthermore, much remains to be done to explore the intersection of interracial civil rights and tenant farmer activism in the South (associated with Howard Kester and the Southern Tenants Farmers Union) and the environmental Jeremiads around soil.²² Even given a focus on the policies of state agencies, there are many other agencies to explore. For example, the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) arguably operated on a logic of declension and redemption. The CCC claimed to (and did to a degree) transform under-nourished urban young men into warriors for conservation, bodies and minds alike regenerated by their labor for the earth, which they in turn were helping to nurture and manage.²³ One might also ask about the Forest Service and Wilderness Society, and whether the socialism of Bob Marshall and others intersected with religious thought in the 1930s.²⁴ For this essay, however, it is more than enough to stay close to those involved in the US Department of Agriculture and its Soil Conservation Service, the White House, and the TVA, not to mention the myriad missionary and ecumenical Protestant agencies we discuss below.²⁵

There can be no missing the pervasiveness of biblical allusions and images of moral crisis in the Dust Bowl Era of the United States. In well-known texts ranging from the work of novelist John Steinbeck to the films of Pare Lorentz and Richard Flaherty and the photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, environmental catastrophe was framed as a profound moral scar on the national soul, one that not only jeopardized social, political, and economic stability—especially in the rural South and West—but imperiled the nation’s spiritual integrity more broadly.²⁶ These artists often resorted to biblical allusions and images—whether sin, exodus, apocalypse, crucifixion, or wrath—as a form of aesthetic and moral shorthand rather than as a theology. Grapes of Wrath did not seek to exegete the apocalyptic passages from whence the image came (in Revelation 14, as redacted by Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic), but the apocalyptic mood of the phrase framed his Dust Bowl epic aptly. Similarly, Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion appealed to the Exodus to evoke a sense of scale and epochal crisis, but it, too, did not offer exegesis or theology.²⁷

The fact that artists and intellectuals reached for biblical allusion is not worth nothing. But our concern here is with the ways the New Deal was awash in more than a sea of such allusions. New Dealers from the top-down used allusions, deploying biblical language in new ways that drew out connections between the original context and the present day. They especially looked to the ethical critiques of later Old Testament prophets to raise concerns about modern capitalist exploitation, as well as to texts that reinforced the dependence and solidarity between humans and non-human nature and the human duty to care for it and for future generations. They did not see the Bible as licensing dreams of unlimited growth but as offering warnings against greed. Here we look at examples from President Roosevelt, Secretary of Agriculture (and later Vice President) Henry A. Wallace, as well as soil conservation bureaucrats and closely allied “semi-official” intellectuals and ecumenical missionary leaders Russell Lord and Walter C. Lowdermilk.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, to be sure, loved a biblical allusion as much as the next politician. At his first inauguration, he famously invoked the New Testament gospels’ image of Jesus turning over the tables of the “moneychangers” in the temple to speak of the New Deal’s anticapitalist tilt. His foreign policy rhetoric ranged from images with echoes of biblical provenance—such as the Good Neighbor policy and the “Freedom from Want” war aim—to the downright explicitly crusading—singing Onward Christian Soldiers alongside Winston Churchill aboard the HMS Prince of Wales. As presidential historian Ronald Isetti argues, few “presidents have employed biblical symbols, religious language, and moral injunctions in their public addresses more often than Roosevelt did and arguably no more effectively and eloquently.” Isetti cites James McGregor Burns’s earlier remark that “no American politician has given so many speeches that were essentially sermons rather than statements of policy.”²⁸

But with Roosevelt’s account of nature and conservation, we find something more than mere superficial allusion, that is, some attempt at reckoning and reflection. Take, for example, Roosevelt’s re-election campaign of 1936, in which he made “Green Pastures”—with an explicit appeal to the 23rd Psalm—a keystone for campaigns and rallies in the South and West. In Charlotte, North Carolina in September 1936, Roosevelt explained that this Psalm was one that—“no matter which church we happen to belong”—was “in all probability better known to men, women and children than any other poem in the English language.” The image of green pastures, which conveyed idealized security and peace, had concrete environmental dimensions. It was a scene, Roosevelt argued, that contrasted to the environment of “millions of our fellow Americans … on the Great Plains of America,” where dust storms were lifting desiccated soils once protected by native grasses. American plains farmers would “live with prayers and hopes for the fulfilment of what those words [green pastures] imply.” Roosevelt also appealed to Psalm 23 in his discussion of flood mitigation in that same speech, evoking a biblical allusion to “still waters.” Only months earlier, Roosevelt had signed into law the Flood Control Act of 1936, which through a series of watershed management programs and dams sought to tame the mercurial river systems flooding American towns. “Millions of other Americans … live with prayers and hopes either that the flood may be stilled—floods that bring them disaster and destruction to fields and floks [sic], to homesteads and cities—or else look for the heaven-sent rains that will fill their wells, their ponds and their peaceful streams.”²⁹

Roosevelt also argued that the social justice questions the prophets of ancient Israel had grappled with had both resemblance and relevance to the ethical-political problems facing Depression-era America. The “social economic” problems faced by Israel, Roosevelt told listeners in his “Green Pastures” speech, were “as potent in their effect and as difficult in their solution as the extraordinarily similar problems that face us in this century.” ³⁰ Here, he was directly aligned with Secretary Wallace, and both echoed contemporary Christian socialists and ecumenical theologians.³¹ For example, in the earliest years of the New Deal, Wallace published an extended discussion of the way the New Deal project related to the biblical prophets. Earlier, as editor of the influential Iowa-based serial Wallace’s Farmer, Wallace (like his father, Henry C., and grandfather Henry before him) had routinely blended agricultural news with Bible lessons and remarks on international affairs. Now in 1934, as secretary of agriculture, he argued that the ethical challenges of social and economic justice in a rural context made attention to the prophetic Old Testament texts more important than ever. In what were lectures initially delivered to audiences at a theological seminary, Wallace suggested that the morality of the New Deal needed to depart from the “rugged individualism” of the pioneer era. Wallace refused the idea that economics could be separated from piety. For Wallace, a division between the fiscal and faith was itself part of the problem, leading to the issues the New Deal sought to ameliorate. For example, when pioneer-settlers read the Bible focusing on their individual spiritual experience as mirrored in the Psalms, they failed the ethical challenges of agriculture laid out in the books of the prophets. Now, Wallace argued, the time was right for a biblical-political reorientation away from individualist-pietistic readings of scripture in the pioneer mode to one that saw in the Israelite prophets—Micah, Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah especially—a social, agricultural, and economic message relevant for an age of collective economic catastrophe and systemic injustice. Such prophets were the first to have “denounced the way in which a commercial civilization so often enables the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor.”³²

The Bible was present not only in politicians’ analyses of conservation issues but also in the work of intellectuals and artists closely allied with the New Deal. Russell Lord, who wrote the script to The Land as well as many semi-official New Deal era agricultural texts, offers a case in point. Lord was intellectually and spiritually close to Wallace. He helped write Wallace’s conservation speeches and, as well as serving as chief information officer of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (a centerpiece of the early New Deal), was sought out as a writer for New Deal agencies across the rural and forestry sector: the Department of Agriculture, TVA, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Forest Service, and Commodity Credit Corporation.³³ And he was the founder of a new agrarian conservation association called Friends of the Land. He and Kate Lord, his wife, published the group’s periodical The Land. Friends of the Land brought together writers such as Louis Bromfield, New Deal public servants such as Walter C. Lowdermilk, and many others from the intersections of church, state, and agriculture. It was a hub for a new, spiritually conscious agrarianism of the 1940s. Lord wrote that “We want to attract pagans along with church people.” The blending of churchly and non-churchly was essential. What members had in common was a commitment to an ethic of land care as both a spiritual and a science-informed priority, and as a local, personal as much as a state and global one.³⁴

Lord’s 1938 book To Hold The Soil, published by the Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service, called for humans to embrace their oneness with all living things, especially their relationship with the soil. According to historian Margaret Eppig, who wrote an environmental biography of Russell Lord, the “interdependence” of all things was the core religious thread that both Lord and Wallace emphasized. Lord wrote in 1941: “a soil and all its products, including the people, and all the thoughts and spirit of the people, are completely interrelated parts of a live going concern. And when you look at it that way, it seems to me, this thing that we call a coordinated approach to agriculture, and to conservation [in effect, New Deal policy] becomes a living principle of conduct and a live subject.”³⁵ In the text of To Hold The Soil, he dubbed soil a “film of life”—a vulnerable membrane of vital nourishment.³⁶ And tellingly, Lord cited the eighth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans to make the point that this was an ancient truth ignored to our detriment. “Long before there were spectroscopes men felt it in their bones, and proclaimed it—the chemical and physical oneness of star, clod, cloud, leaf, and man. ‘… the whole creation groaneth and travaileth … together.’ St. Paul to the Romans 8:22.”

In that passage, Apostle Paul writes of an eschatological hope for the planet: all creation will be liberated as an integral part of the future hope of humankind. Lord observed in the text the premise that humanity and creation are bound together, joined in the same “groaning.”³⁷ And this concept was axiomatic to his entire work on soil conservation. His reading formed a strong contrast to the emerging end times emphasis on “rapture” as a sudden escape from this world—becoming widely popular in the fundamentalist Bible prophecy movements at the time.³⁸ But it was not less concerned with the Bible for being different from self-styled “Bible prophecy.”

Roosevelt’s, Wallace’s, and Lord’s discussions of the Bible’s relevance to agriculture were not theologically isolated or mere political speechcraft. Their approach found resonance with, and arguably drew from, currents from both the Christian agrarian “Rural Reconstruction” movement and contemporary social and Christian socialist ecumenism that pitted “the religion of Jesus” against capitalism.³⁹ The former had been initiated in the early 1900s by Theodore Roosevelt’s Republican administration in concert with Protestant intellectuals and reformers. As historian Kevin Lowe shows, Christian agrarians of the 1900s to 1910s were deeply influenced by texts such as Liberty Hyde Bailey’s The Holy Earth, which argued that the earth had a sacred God-given quality that demanded good stewardship. And as Ian Tyrrell has shown, many clergy were linked to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909 “Commissions” on conservation.⁴⁰ This matrix meant that by the time of the New Deal, the combination of soil-science, federal conservation policy, and biblical-sermonic language was not unexpected.

But what distinguished New Deal thought from the earlier Progressive generation was its orientation to ecumenical theology and missions in the 1920s to 1940s, movements that were more suspicious of private interest and capitalism, stronger on the necessity of the planning state to intervene, more avowedly antinationalist and antimilitarist and global in their outlook, and shared a reticence toward American exceptionalism.⁴¹ In the ecumenical networks of the 1920s and 1930s, there was a conscious widening and leftward tilt toward what the “social” expression of Protestant structural ethics entailed. The earlier social gospel had focused on the welfare of the urban industrial worker, but 1920s and 1930s ecumenists engaged increasingly with antiracist and anti-imperialist discourse, theologizing each in the light of the horror of the Great War and the Jim Crow South. Within this framework, “agricultural missions” emerged as a newly professionalized subset alongside other spheres of concern in the social Protestantism of the period, such as industrial relations, “imperialism,” and international and “inter-racial” relations. Its language was similar to Walter Rauschenbusch’s idea that the entire “social order” needed to be “Christianized.”⁴² The through-line of its work was the realization of the implications of Christian ethics and preaching in “collective,” structural justice terms, not just in terms of individual morality.⁴³ But what they meant by social order was, in fact, far wider than Rauschenbusch and other predecessors had envisaged. As Thomas Jesse Jones, a Christian sociologist and agricultural missions organizer argued to the Student Volunteer Movement Quadrennial of 1920: “The Kingdom of God is advanced through the teaching of agriculture itself.” Missionaries would go forth to teach young and old how “to cooperate with God so successfully in the handling of God’s soil as to increase the productivity of the region in which they live.”⁴⁴

For ecumenists, agriculture and soil were among the spheres to be “Christianized” in this structural-justice manner. Concern with the sustainability of agriculture and with soil conservation emerged organically within missions—at first as a means of improving food security, and later as an integral part of the vision of a social order based on an educated, self-sufficient yeomanry in decolonizing lands. One figure bridging the older Christian Agrarian Progressives and the newer theologians of the ecumenical movement was Kenyon L. Butterfield, the onetime president of Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (now Michigan State University). In the early years of the twentieth century, Butterfield became well known in rural reformist and university circles as a leading figure in the building of the domestic “rural extension service,” which had brought the USDA and land-grant universities into cooperation under federal legislation. They collaborated particularly on the provision of pedagogy: adult education on rural and farming matters.

At the same time Butterfield held roles in university administration, he simultaneously served on the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), historically the largest and most influential interdenominational missionary body in North America. He and rural sociologist Edmund DeS. Brunner served as high profile consulting experts on agriculture to the ecumenical movement, especially in the context of the International Missionary Council (IMC). Publishing the results of his extensive tours of rural conditions in Japan, India, China, Burma, and other locales, Butterfield’s byline read “Counsellor on Rural Work” for the International Missionary Council.⁴⁵ We can see in his work evidence of the way soil conservation itself became part of his vision for missionary pedagogical outreach well before the storms of the Dust Bowl befell the Great Plains. At the landmark 1928 Jerusalem meeting of the IMC—a major conference covered in real time by major newspapers in the United States and internationally—Butterfield argued, “A programme that attempts to Christianize the work of men cannot neglect the soil and the tiller.” Soil, being of more “value to the sons of men than all gold and silver and precious stones” was in need of “perpetual conservation.”⁴⁶

Roosevelt’s, Wallace’s, and Lords’ appeal to the Bible for structural reform and conservation in rural areas need to be heard and understood against this backdrop of the nascent convergence of conservation and ecumenism in missionary circles.

Textual deployment was only one facet of New Deal environmental thought. For the Jeremiad to be a Jeremiad there had to be an articulation of sins committed, warnings heeded, and, most importantly, public emotions of lament and contrition. The text that most famously articulated failures of environmental care as sin was Walter C. Lowdermilk’s “Eleventh Commandment.” Lowdermilk’s short invocation was, in fact, first written and delivered for Jewish settler audiences in Jerusalem in 1939, during an extensive research tour he undertook for the USDA around the Mediterranean. He returned to the United States and began to share the “Eleventh Commandment” in publications and itinerant lantern slide lectures. In 1940–1941, these in-person lectures were in high demand. At times, he was on the road for sixty-five to seventy days in a row, visiting rural churches, missionary conferences, soil conservation districts, and Country Life Associations, and addressing audiences blended from each. When he published the lecture in booklet form through the USDA, it sold a reported one million copies—at that time, the highest circulating USDA publication in the department’s history.⁴⁷

Soon the text took on a religious aura and gravity of its own, and it was widely circulated across the United States—especially in rural areas during the 1940s. Church publications endorsed and reprinted it; it was quoted in liturgies alongside scripture such that congregations recited it in a way that was reflective and prayerful. Rural schools hung copies on walls, and an unknown artist even carved it into a wooden plaque near the Grand Canyon. USDA radio programs employed it as a closing civil-religious cadence to their stories: the story would change, but the same “Eleventh Commandment” was repeated at the close of the story.

Lowdermilk was neither the first nor the last to use the “Eleventh Commandment” phrase, but he was the first to do so in a way that linked religion to conservation. The commandment read:

XI Thou shall inherit the holy earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation. Thou shalt safeguard thy fields from soil erosion, thy living waters from drying up, thy forests from desolation, and protect thy hills from over-grazing by thy herds, so that thy descendants may have abundance forever. If any shall fail in this stewardship of the land thy fruitful fields shall become sterile stony ground and wasting gullies, and thy descendants shall decrease and live in poverty or be destroyed from off the face of the earth.⁴⁸

In the sense that the “Eleventh Commandment” was propagated, it was to preach a “law” before which contrition was to be mustered. Given the situation prevailing in the rural United States and worldwide at the time, Lowdermilk suggested that the “sins” of previous generations had resulted in “curses” felt by the land. He wrote in an accompanying essay published in American Forests: “Today literally billions of acres of originally productive lands throughout the world bear the curse of unfaithful stewards through the centuries, and their sins of land misuse are visited upon their descendants not only unto the third and fourth generations, but unto the tillers of exploited lands today.” Exploitation of the land warranted repentance and reform. “The hope for the future lies in a realization that man has an obligation born of a higher economics, a moral obligation to bountiful Mother Earth which must nourish all present and future human beings as long as it lasts.”⁴⁹

It is notable that Lowdermilk wrote and spoke on this theme countless times while also serving as the associate chief of the Soil Conservation Service. He held official technically oriented positions but spoke in a way that linked his technical expertise to his capacities as a lay preacher and former missionary. Churches received him as churchly. This fact distinguished him from his superior, the chief of the Soil Conservation Service Hugh Hammond Bennett (who successfully styled himself as the “father” of soil conservation in America). It is true that Bennett also spoke with religious-like zeal and called for national repentance for the “menace” that was soil erosion. Bennett was an extraordinarily effective popularizer of conservationism on the radio waves and in print, a man with an instinct for political spectacle. Then, and since, he was likened to an evangelist for his earnest, conversionist zeal and Jeremiadic mood. But where Bennett was a preacher of conservation itself, Lowdermilk was a missionary not only for the environment but for the redemption of the souls of the humans who owed their planet care.

Indeed, Lowdermilk’s career trajectory and intellectual formation highlights how scientific and religious registers were combined in the movement in ways that ran deeper than Bennett’s relatively superficial adoption of preacherly styling and rhetoric. Lowdermilk’s New Deal Jeremiad was, in effect, made in China, where he served as an agricultural missionary in the 1920s. His insights into watersheds, agricultural hillside expansion, and water-born soil erosion began there.⁵⁰ Forced out of China by communist incursions into Nanking in 1927, Lowdermilk completed his research with a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. After completing his doctorate, Lowdermilk joined the Soil Conservation Service. There, and beyond, he combined his churchly-missional and state-scientist modes of authority, using similar language whether addressing religious or civic audiences. After World War II, he worked for the United Nations, the state of Israel, and Truman’s river commission and served as a consultant to both the British and French colonial services. His consultancies were organized by John Reisner, his colleague from agricultural missions in Nanking who was now head of Agricultural Missions Inc. As David Hollinger and others have shown, Lowdermilk was far from alone in moving seamlessly between the spheres of religion and government. As Hollinger argues, “the cultural significance of missionaries was much greater than their numbers”; upon their return to the United States, many missionaries were easily able to take their place among the overwhelmingly mainline Protestant elites who dominated government and civic institutions well into the 1960s.⁵¹ For example, during the “Point IV” era of aid and technical assistance as foreign policy in 1949, agricultural missionaries were strongly represented among regional advisers and semi-official intellectuals advocating and lobbying for policy outcomes.⁵²

Lowdermilk’s interweaving of the worlds of state, science, and church reflected the social location and intellectual impulse of mainline and ecumenical Protestants. For decades, they had not only accommodated scientific authority but deployed the social sciences to further the mission of the church. In the history of the professionalization of disciplines, they were there at the creation of early twentieth century sociology, social work, and international relations, for example. In social scientific research, they pioneered the “survey” method in the United States—largely through the Institute for Social and Religious Research, which commissioned the Lynds’ famous Middletown study. A significant subset of these studies was devoted to rural sociology, agricultural extension work, and agricultural economics. In turn, many of these fields’ early leaders, such as Kenyon Butterfield, Warren H. Wilson, Henry C. Taylor, and John Lossing Buck, and institutions like Cornell University and Michigan State College of Agriculture were geared toward an interface with agricultural missions. Mission “fields” provided empirical data sets for the new rural social science, as well as places for attempted implementation, albeit in a “pidgin” mode, as Harald Fischer Tine shows.⁵³

The porousness between church and state seen in Lowdermilk’s career cut both ways. It was not simply a case of church receptivity to science and state but also state receptivity to religion. On WLW Cincinnati in April 1941, a USDA radio play entitled “Fortunes Washed Away” sought to “dramatize” better land use, using the subtitle “saving soil to save souls.” In the drama, a new circuit preacher by the name of Paul Doran arrives in a rural district of Tennessee. In the script, Doran says he, “came here to save souls.” Twenty-eight pastors had failed in the tough rural district in the prior twenty-five years because of small membership, tiny offerings, and dilapidated schools with “children walking to school over muddy roads.” One night, Doran has an epiphany: the fundamental problem is the exhaustion of land due to soil erosion caused by clearing. Doran then bought a farm to demonstrate soil conservation to his flock and also set aside two plots on the church grounds for the same. The locals learn effective soil management from Doran. The story climaxes with Doran offering soil analyses for each congregation member. The result is a bountiful harvest for the parish and an exponential boost in church membership. Following the dramatization, USDA specialists took to the air and explained the need for a new breed of “preacher-farmers” like Doran who could, like him, spread the good news of soil conservation. Finally, in closing, the USDA narrator read aloud the Eleventh Commandment. It served as a kind of liturgy to be recited while the organ played in the background the melody of the African American spiritual “Deep River.”⁵⁴

In the other direction, rural churches absorbed Lowdermilk’s commandment into their liturgy too. This practice, “often given along with the sermon,” lasted for decades on Conservation Sundays, an annual observance.⁵⁵ Reading the commandment in services, some churches also developed their own prayers of contrition. During a service for rural churches at “seed time” prepared by the Reverends Philip N. Pitcher and Philip Humason Steinmetz in Springville, Pennsylvania in June 1942, the minister read a text that included these remarks:

And so it is that man is learning that it is sinful to turn furrows downhill to run rows up and down, to borrow fertility from the soil without paying it back, and to leave bare fields exposed to the erosion of weather.⁵⁶

“Turning furrows downhill” would only assist the process of rapid run-off that led to the self-compounding eroding effects of gullying. At the end of another service led by James William Sells, congregants were instructed to stand in an Act of Commitment and say:

We are the sowers of the seed and the tillers of the soil. We herewith recognize the holiness of the seed and the sacredness of the soil. We herewith acknowledge our responsibility to plant this seed with reverence and to cultivate this soil with care. We will not waste the seed in wanton scattering; we will not destroy the soil by allowing erosion to wash it off nor weeds to stay its vitality.⁵⁷

In Tennessee, Howard Kester of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and Fellowship of Southern Churchmen led a liturgy of soil and published it for wider use. The text of the service spanned several pages and culminated in a ceremonial act of dedication in which each congregant took a small portion of soil in their hand upon saying a prayer and response:

Reader (placing his hand upon the soil): This is but a portion of the earth: her soil. It is our responsibility as faithful Christians to build on this earth the Kingdom of God … How can we say that we believe in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man when we plunder the soil and rob our children of their earthright? …

People: By the help of the Eternal God, our Father, we pledge ourselves this day to become the keepers of this earth, our home and dwelling-place in all ages.

Reader: And now as a token of our dedication to the responsibilities of a keeper of the Eternal’s earth, let us each take a portion of this soil and keep it as a reminder of our solemn obligations to our God, the earth and man.

(The people shall now proceed to the table to receive a portion of soil.)⁵⁸

The New Deal soil Jeremiad’s story of decline was also inextricably tied to its environmental-historical narrative of global environmental decline—that is, of the past destruction of civilizations worldwide due to environmental overreach. The Jeremiad had a global scope and scale in two senses. First, it was produced transnationally. This was not a case of US Americans producing a Jeremiad in response to the US Dust Bowl but of the emergence of a transnational body of discourse addressing what appeared to be a global phenomenon in which the United States was one example among others. Like the United States, Australia, Rhodesia, South Africa, Canada, Russia and other settler-colonial locales experienced and articulated crises of soil erosion in the “dirty thirties.” Among Anglophone Christian settler colonial communities, the Bible came to the fore. In Ontario, Canada, one church discussion group that cited Lowdermilk’s “Eleventh Commandment” explained that “When we destroy or rob the soil, we are robbing God. Our careless and ruthless use of the earth’s resources is the most vulgar sort of atheism, because [quoting Psalm 24:1] ‘the earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof.’”⁵⁹ Following the motif of condemning “ruthless” land use, the Anglican Bishop of Adelaide, South Australia, the Right Rev. R. P. Robin, made headlines in 1944 by “slating early settlers for their ruthless exploitation of Australia,” declaring that “soil erosion is [a] moral challenge to government.”⁶⁰ As the late Janette Bailey documented, the parallels between the Australian dust storms that coated east coast cities and those in the United States led to self-consciously parallel discourses, policies, and even filmic tropes in which planned irrigation and damming were cast as the way to retain vegetation and ground cover and avoid future dust bowls.⁶¹ Elsewhere, agricultural missionaries in Rhodesia lamented the problems of agricultural exploitation of land leading to soil erosion in the 1930s.⁶²

The second sense in which the soil Jeremiad was global was in its scope and scale. Its leading authors constituted the problem as one that threatened the whole planet, but which was the fault of imperial powers. One of its leading texts was produced by British authors Graham Jacks and Robert Whyte. Their book Rape of the Earth, as the title vividly suggested, described global exploitation related to imperial and capitalist expansion. Drawing on their work and others, sociologist Hannah Holleman has recovered a wider discourse in which imperialism and soil erosion were seen to be inextricably connected.⁶³ Yet even the American-produced Jeremiad was globalist in a strikingly anti-exceptionalist sense, identifying the United States as one guilty party (perhaps even guiltier than others) among a global story of catastrophic soil erosion. Far from imagining the United States as existing in a space of limitless expansion, free from the laws that governed “Old World” history, New Dealers looked to learn lessons from the “Old World,” weighing the factors that had enabled civilizational longevity and those that had led to civilizational decline. It was incumbent upon the US to learn from these lessons for it faced the same uncertain future. Hence, Lowdermilk’s “Eleventh Commandment” was written in a purportedly universalist register: the structure of warning, promise, and command was transportable. Any people who forsook land care would be subject to the laws of judgement. Lowdermilk’s lantern slide images—later included in his best-selling USDA booklet, Conquest of the Land through 7000 years—made this anti-exceptionalist globalism plain in visual as well as textual terms. His slides moved from photos of erosion in China, North Africa, and Lebanon, and back to Georgian farmyards in the United States without distinction; they were part of one and the same global issue. The feature binding the global experience was the gully, the negative impression in landscape made by self-compounding water-born soil erosion. In the Jeremiad, gullies were not merely geographical facts but symbols of judgement and decline, evidenced by their vertical plunge a gauge of soil lost to the rivers and the sea. And gullies in the United States, North Africa, Palestine, Australia, and New Zealand bound the world together in the Jeremiadic vision.⁶⁴

The soil Jeremiad served to orient environmental lamenters to their place in history—a time after the earlier generation of settlers and before future generations who needed the present generation to heed the call for sustainability in the name of intergenerational equity. But they also located agency in the story: agency of sin (a story in which all were equally guilty, across geography, race, and culture) and redemption (where equality was less pronounced, and modern white leadership was implied). Crucially, the way to the redemptive future was not simply to withdraw, to let natural ecosystems return to balance, still less to re-wild. Rather, for New Dealers, the way forward was in better planning and science-led modernization. Notwithstanding preservationist voices in the National Parks and the wildlife protection arms of the New Deal administration, and not to overlook critics of the New Deal’s conservationist approach, the characteristic view of most New Deal Jeremiahs was that modernization was conservation. Repentance and redemption lay in turning from the unplanned to the planned, from uncontrolled water flow to controlled water flow, from sheet erosion to check dams, from downhill plowing to contour plowing, from land clearing to crop rotation, reforestation, and retention of forest litter. New Deal Jeremiahs such as Lowdermilk conceived of the exceeding of the natural “carrying capacity” of the land as sin; redemption would come from not only respecting the limits but boosting them. As he put it in an “Eleventh Commandment” article, “intelligent land use,” “reclamation,” and the husbanding of the land in “advanced knowledge of full conservation” was the way forward. “If the vast energies of the human race could be directed toward a goal of conservation instead of destruction and despoliation, the good earth would respond with abundance of food for all.”⁶⁵

In seeing redemption in modernization and planning, one enterprise in particular became a symbol of hope: the watershed-wide operations of the Tennessee Valley Authority.⁶⁶ The TVA brought together intensified state-led regional planning, damming, and water management, and modernized conservation. As well as producing the hydroelectric electricity for which it became famous, it entailed vast attempts at soil conservation and environmental renovation through reforestation, erosion mitigation, and planned land control. Soil Jeremiad texts in the New Deal—from Roosevelt down—cast the TVA as a redemptive agent, a way out of the sinful bind. Stuart Chase’s 1936 book Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America lamented soil erosion across the US South and turned readers’ hope to watershed planning as the way forward, especially through the TVA.⁶⁷ In Pare Lorentz’s film The River, the narrative moves from the story of fifty years of environmental exploitation to place its hope for the future in the early work of dam builders in the regions covered by the TVA. Dam building appears in the film not as part of the problem (as a 1960s environmentalist would understandably place it) but as part of the solution. And while the TVA system seems to most present-day onlookers as an environmental disaster, an example of bare, brutalist, and secular technocracy that starves fish of oxygen, in New Deal and ecumenical discourse, it garnered religious plaudits. Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, one of the ecumenical church leaders President Roosevelt trusted most, and one who was central to the ecumenical internationalist politics of the 1940s, argued that the TVA was nothing less than a conduit for the redemptive work of Christ. “With full respect for the Scriptures, when the purpose that underlies this great effort is known, the river, had indeed become a highway for our God … and there is a new soul in the Valley.”⁶⁸

Such a narrative of redemption fed the newly expansive impulses in the new postwar missionary state. With demand from abroad and salesmanship from home, American development experts and foreign policymakers exported the TVA model to the Jordan Valley, northwestern China, eastern Australia, and the Nile and Mekong valleys, to name a few river basins.⁶⁹ To adapt Willie James Jennings’ work, it was as if the world became one giant classroom awaiting instruction.⁷⁰ For New Dealers, the “sin” side of the Jeremiad was fairly universal, encompassing US settlers, Australian farmers, Palestinian Arabs, and Chinese agriculturalists. By contrast, membership in the group bringing about repentance and redemption—of putting things right—was not automatic or equal and seemed to be implicitly but unmistakably white-led, focused on the United States, its imperial Great Power allies, and the experts from those polities working through international agencies such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In short, the redemptive vanguard consisted in those who could and would implement watershed programs such as the TVA. Membership was open to all who would learn. Such pedagogical and evaluative postures had long characterized Christian missions, including into the 1930s. Relevant here, however, is the renewed adoption by the US state of that pedagogical-missionary role, increasingly rendered in a professionalized, scientific, modernizing register of “technical assistance”—the language of Henry Luce’s “American Century” essay and President Truman’s “Point IV” speech alike.⁷¹ Here, the universalistic impulses of science, Western Christian missions, and the new American globalism converged and overlapped in mutually reinforcing ways.

Such an evolution of the New Deal environmental Jeremiad from anti-exceptionalist lament to missionary outreach was accompanied by several fortifying shifts, all of which combined to make it easy to forget that the environmental lament existed, much less had a soul. Those shifts included the political recalibration of the New Deal toward the liberal anticommunist center after 1945, including the move away from the holistic conservationism of Roosevelt and Wallace to the more technical emphasis on “resource” management under Truman and Secretary of State Edward Stettinius.⁷² The 1943 Morgenthau plan that had proposed demilitarizing and deindustrializing postwar Germany soon famously gave way to the fossil-fueled rapid economic stimulus of the Marshall plan in 1948.⁷³ Reticence about technology’s role in agriculture was replaced with the triumphalism of the green revolution, with DDT spraying to rid the world of pests and the synthesizing of phosphates to promote pasture regrowth and increased yields.⁷⁴ From penicillin to nuclear weapons, scientism and modernization garnered for itself a cult following that eclipsed the religious tenor of the late New Deal.⁷⁵ The imperatives of Cold War anticommunism and the re-elevation of consumer capitalism’s place in the “American way of life” made the anticapitalist hermeneutics and Bible deployments of Roosevelt, Lowdermilk, Wallace, and Lord that much harder to promote or imagine.

That the New Deal environmental Jeremiad of the FDR years was eclipsed somewhat by the Truman administration’s shift to policies of “resource” management rather than a wider vision of conservation as central to world peace might tempt us to relegate its moment as a flash in the pan, or a “Jack-in-the-Box.” Perhaps the moment of the soil Jeremiad was a surprising spiritual aberration made possible by the confluence of Franklin Roosevelt’s political ambitions and the religious backgrounds of those who served under him, a rhetorical convenience apposite to its time. Another historiographical temptation offered by the sacred claims of New Deal environmentalism is to see it as just another example of the ubiquity of the Bible in American political discourse. Seen in this frame, the typological imaginary of the soil Jeremiad, which suggests America’s status in Christian history, reflects the same political theology as John Winthrop’s invocation of the Sermon on the Mount in his cry that the new colony could be a “city upon a hill.”⁷⁶ Both accounts of New Deal environmentalism would not be entirely wrong. The moment of New Deal environmentalism employed a novel use of the Bible in relation to land management, one that was powerful in its time but receded quickly. All the same, the recourse to the Bible as a means of making an American present was by no means new; the Bible was baked into American political culture from its beginnings.⁷⁷

We have tried in this essay, however, to resist each of these interpretations in order to think about New Deal environmentalism as an example of the confluence of exigency, faith, and strategy that so often inspires and mobilizes political actors and their subjects. In the words and deeds of Roosevelt, Lowdermilk, and others, we see a theological language that is certainly rhetorical but not merely so. Their words attach to the reality of environmental degradation, their discourse is made in response to the urgent demands of matter and the life that is sustained by it. Alexandre Hogue’s painting Erosion no. 3—The Crucified Land of 1939 reflects the same meeting of the material and the spiritual in visual form.⁷⁸ In the work, a lush green landscape is devastated by erosion. A worn scarecrow resembles nothing so much as a crucifix, but without Christ on it; the putative cross is bedecked only in forlorn rags. In the background sits a tractor, which is presumably responsible for the attack on the fertile soil that has rendered it despoiled; the tell-tale evidence of vertical plowing in straight lines, ignoring the earth’s contours, gives way to blood-red scars in the soil. The gullies are no longer good for holding either soil or water; instead, they are like wounds in the body of the land (Christ). Hogue’s painting addresses a particular time and place, the tractor is modern, and the location is the Texas of his youth. The crucifix, however, invokes the temporalities of biblical history. Christ’s martyrdom in the past reminds the viewer of humanity’s repeated failures to their God. And implicit, then, is the possibility of resurrection and salvation. In New Deal environmentalism, an American history of the scriptural imaginary met the particularity of the environmental situation the time demanded. New Deal actors interpreted their relation to the natural world partly through the Bible, but this is not to say that they did not comprehend it as it was.⁷⁹

Figure 1.

Alexandre Hogue, Crucified Land, (1939). Gift of the Thomas Gilcrease Foundation, 1955. Courtesy Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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This is an environmental-religious history and a religious-environmental history. We can only access the history of this Jeremiad and understand how it was able to do its work by intertwining the story of the earth and its management with an account of the theological frame within which that earth was encountered and managed. As such, New Deal environmentalism, as we have explored it, defies categorization within many of the normative frames we bring to environmental politics today and offers a set of alignments that would be unthinkable in this moment, and which would make many of us profoundly uncomfortable in our racialized and settler-colonial assumptions. But this squeamishness should not preclude recognition of the possibilities that the past offers as a resource. It is not a template to be followed in our negotiations of climate quagmires in the present but a reminder of the diversity of beliefs, affects, and actions that have mobilized environmental activism in its long and somewhat faith-filled history.

Author Biographies

Clare Monagle is a professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. She has published very broadly in the fields of intellectual history and gender studies, having expertise in both medieval studies and twentieth-century gender. All of her work considers questions of the relationship between theology and ideology.

Michael G. Thompson is an independent scholar based in Brisbane, Australia. He is a historian of American intellectual history and Christianity. Mike’s publications have focused on the role played by Christian belief and believers in the making of American internationalism between the Great War and the Cold War.

The authors would like to convey their sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their thoughtful and rigorous responses. The article is vastly improved by the incorporation of their suggestions and the meeting of their criticisms. Mike would like to offer particular gratitude to Ricardo Alvarez-Pimentel, Lauren Impey, Paul A. Kramer, and Ian Tyrrell for their support and ideas for the execution of this article. Clare would like to dedicate this article to the memory of Dorothy Ross, acknowledging in particular her seminar in American Intellectual History in 2001–2002 at Johns Hopkins University. Clare could not have co-authored this article with Mike without the foundations Dorothy provided. Finally, thank you to the editorial team at the American Historical Review for overseeing such a meaningful review process, one that has been genuinely generative for us as authors.