God’s Garden: Nature, Order, and the Presbyterian Conception of the British North American “Wilderness”

Evocations of the natural world featured prominently within British North American Presbyterianism between the late eighteenth century, which witnessed an influx of Presbyterians into what became the Dominion of Canada, and the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and technological sophistication through which human beings attained unprecedented control over vast swathes of territory. Influenced by an ancient tradition deeply ingrained in Western culture, Presbyterians saw the undomesticated environment, or wilderness, as a formidable physical reality that needed to be wrestled into submission. They also saw it, however, as a metaphorical wasteland whose abject sinfulness mirrored humanity’s fallen state. For all their concerns about the iniquity that purportedly pervaded untamed nature, Presbyterians felt that the forbidding wilderness could be transformed into a benign garden through the vigorous promotion of Christianity among both settlers and Indigenous peoples alike. Their fondness for natural environments that had supposedly been imbued with holiness demonstrates that the Presbyterians’ hostility toward what they perceived as the wilderness did not render them averse to nature, per se. Members of the denomination used stereotypically feminine language in referring to natural environments that had seemingly been redeemed and were no longer regarded as ominous. Moreover, they interpreted patterns of material improvement—as exhibited, for instance, in the emergence of fruitful farms and bustling towns—as the inevitable corollary to the propagation of unalloyed piety in backwoods settings. Presbyterian efforts to Christianize undomesticated environments found expression in a thoroughgoing Calvinism and an emphasis on distinctive ecclesiastical traditions known as communion festivals, which served to differentiate the denomination from other Protestant groups. Ultimately, an investigation of Presbyterian attitudes toward the wilderness reveals that religious impulses contributed to human efforts to subjugate nature while environmental phenomena galvanized Christian evangelism.

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