10 1017@S0017816000024032

HTR 84:3 (1991) 299-323
FROM ARBOR DAY TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL SABBATH:

NATURE, LITURGY, AND AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM
Leigh Eric Schmidt

Drew University
In the past two decades considerable theological energy has been expended
in the construction of various ecological theologies and spiritualities. Pro-
cess theologians, ecofeminists, and theologians of creation, earth, nature,
ecology, and land have been elucidating religious perspectives that they hope
will help transform human attitudes toward nature and the environment. These
writers have sought to reorient Christianity away from anthropocentric views
that claim human dominion over nature, premillennial expectations that
embrace the destruction of this world, soteriological preoccupations that focus
on individual salvation, and otherworldly assumptions that foster alienation
from the earth and nature. Some sanguine observers have seen this recent
ferment as the greening of American theology or even the greening of the
American churches. At the same time, intellectual historians have paid in-
creasing attention to the history of Western ideas about nature and have
debated at length the impact of Christianity's theological heritage on the
environmental crisis. Specifically, a number of historians have constructed
a genealogy of American conservationist and preservationist thought by
tracing out a line that includes, among others, George Catlin, Henry David
Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel
Carson.1
'Despite the reservations of the editors, I have continued to use "American" in this article
as an adjective denoting the United States. The possible alternative of using "North Ameri-
can" would suggest that Canadian Protestantism is included in this article's analysis, which
is not the case.
For a collection of essays that serves as a helpful window on recent ecological theologies,
see Charles Birch, William Eakin, and Jay B. McDaniel, eds., Liberating Life: Contemporary
Approaches to Ecological Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990). For exemplary intellec-
tual histories, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816000024032
300 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
Ritual and liturgy have not been a primary concern of either the theo-
logians or the intellectual historians. This article examines liturgical expres-
sions of ecological theology. How have various ideas about nature been
embodied in worship? How have conservationist and ecological frames of
mind been articulated in ritual? How have various ministers and educators
sought to give new attitudes toward nature concreteness through liturgical
and ceremonial enactments? The article focuses on these issues largely in
terms of Protestantism in the United States and the settings of church,
Sunday School, and public school. It explores the development of Arbor
Day in the late nineteenth century, the widening cultus connected with the
outdoors in the early twentieth century, the liturgical experiments promoted
by the Federal Council of Churches in the 1930s and 1940s (particularly
Nature Sunday and Rural Life Sunday), and the contemporary ecological
rituals of Earth Day and the Environmental Sabbath. To conclude, I con-
sider various factors that have worked against the integration of conserva-
tionist and environmental concerns into American Protestant worship. In
all, this article puts recent environmental theologies in a longer historical
perspective and suggests how abstract intellectual or theological proposi-
tions about nature have found ritual expression in the American calendar
and the Protestant church year. In her recent book Nature Religion in
America, Catherine Albanese stresses the importance of ritual or "action
systems" in her interpretation of the religious dimensions of American
interactions with nature. What interests her about nature religion is how it
has been "embodied and enacted, not simply pondered."2 This article elabo-
rates upon such an emphasis and explores various rites and ceremonies that
have incarnated American Protestant attitudes toward nature over the last
century.
Nature and liturgy in American Protestantism have long been related.
Puritan fast and thanksgiving days were often held in response to the va-
garies and bounties of nature, and the Puritan imagination regularly turned
to nature to provide types and emblems of divine things. Likewise,
evangelicals organized summer revivals around the harvest, performed out-
door baptisms in rivers and streams, and held camp meetings and sacra-
mental occasions under the canopy of forest and stars. Proponents of camp
meetings saw the biblical foundation of their festivals in the agricultural
feasts of the Hebrew scriptures and often remarked upon the beauty and
University Press, 1967); Conrad Cherry, Nature and Religious Imagination: From Edwards
to Bushnell (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980); Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: The Roots of
Ecology (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977).
2
Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America from the Algonkian Indians to the
New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 200.
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LEIGH ERIC SCHMIDT 301
solemnity of the setting for their own meetings in a grove or by the sea.
For those Protestants who continued to keep the traditional Christian year—
Episcopalians, Lutherans, some Reformed denominations, some Method-
ists—the very rhythms of nature and the christological cycle coincided: the
Christmas season, the winter solstice, and evergreens; Easter, the rebirth of
spring, and flowers. The popularity in this century of outdoor Easter sun-
rise services, based particularly on a Moravian example, has only under-
lined such connections among liturgy, nature, and season.
None of these connections between nature and liturgy, of course, was
expressly ecological. Only slowly in the course of the nineteenth century did
a clear preservationist ethic emerge to counterbalance the prevailing vision
of dominion and subjugation. Much of nineteenth-century American rhetoric
about nature and the land celebrated empire, progress, destiny, and inexhaust-
ible resources. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835, "The Americans
see themselves marching through wildernesses, drying up marshes, diverting
rivers, peopling the wilds, and subduing nature." 3 By midcentury, there was
a growing number of dissenting voices, particularly evident in transcenden-
talism, exemplified by Henry David Thoreau's romantic mysticism of nature
and his preservationist views. In the decades after the Civil War, both con-
servationist fears over the mismanagement of resources and preservationist
anxieties over the loss of wilderness steadily grew. Initial apprehension fo-
cused especially on deforestation, on trees, on what the artist Thomas Cole
called "the ravages of the axe." 4 In Man and Nature, published in 1864,
George Perkins Marsh provided the clarion work on conservation, particu-
larly highlighting the baneful effects of deforestation upon climate and soil.5
The destruction of American forests emerged as the central concern of the
nascent conservationist movement and a primary symbol, along with the
devastation of the buffalo and the passenger pigeon, of the desolation of nature
caused by empire building.6 Misgivings over deforestation also occasioned
the first effort to express conservationist concerns in ritual.
Arbor Day, first celebrated in Nebraska in April 1872 at the urging of
statesman J. Sterling Morton, emerged as a national movement in the 1880s.
Embraced by the National Education Association in 1884 and promoted
especially by the Congregationalist minister and Connecticut educator Birdsey
3
Alexis de Tocqueville quoted in Lee Clark Mitchell, Witnesses to a Vanishing America:
The Nineteenth-Century Response (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) 1.
4
On Cole, see Nicolai Cikovsky, "The Ravages of the Axe': The Meaning of the Tree
Stump in Nineteenth-Century American Art," Art Bulletin 61 (1979) 611-26.
'George P. Marsh, Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human
Action (New York: Scribner, 1864).
6
See Mitchell, Witnesses to a Vanishing America; Donald J. Pisani, "Forests and Conser-
vation, 1865-1890," Journal of American History 72 (1985) 340-59.
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G. Northrop, Arbor Day belonged primarily to the public schools. Through

elaborate tree-planting ceremonies in the schools, the new holiday was used
to raise the nation's consciousness about deforestation and to instill a con-
servationist sensitivity among children. In Arbor Day, as in the early con-
servation movement as a whole, much of this concern was utilitarian, namely,
to make certain that there would always be enough trees to satisfy fuel,
building, railroad, and paper needs from one generation to another. Arbor
Day was also informed, however, by stronger conservationist and preserva-
tionist ideals that saw in a new national festival of tree planting a way to
reverse "our wicked wastefulness and contempt" toward nature.7 Banding
together and planting trees en masse would help to reorient arrogant, ex-
ploitative attitudes toward nature and would nurture a new ethic of conser-
vation among the young. In addition to these conservationist hopes, the
larger Village Improvement and City Beautiful ideologies undergirded Ar-
bor Day: tree planting was seen as integral to beautifying town, city, farm,
and home with shady parks, tree-lined streets, orchards, and sylvan grounds.
By 1888 thirty states and territories were celebrating Arbor Day; by the
turn of the century, it was a nearly nationwide observance.8
Civil religion was always more prominent than Christianity in Arbor
Day ceremonies. Typical Arbor Day celebrations in the schools involved
speeches, marches, plays, scripture readings, songs and hymns, recitations
of poems, and, of course, tree planting.9 In some cases grander civic cel-
7
Robert W. Furnas, comp., Arbor Day (Lincoln, NB: State Journal Co., 1888) 103.
8
Ibid., 113; Birdsey G. Northrop, "Arbor Day—Progress of the Tree Planting Movement,"
Transactions and Reports of the Nebraska State Historical Society 4 (1892) 106-10. For
basic secondary accounts of Arbor Day's origin and history, see James C. Olson, "Arbor
Day—A Pioneer Expression of Concern for Environment," Nebraska History 53 (1972) 1-
13; Mary Elizabeth Johnson, "Arbor Day," in Richard C. Davis, ed., Encyclopedia of Ameri-
can Forest and Conservation History (2 vols.; New York: Macmillan, 1983) 1. 21-23; Marcia
Pearson, "The Other Founder of Arbor Day," American Forests 78 (1972) 6-7, 58. The
holiday has received passing note in most works on nature and conservation. See, for ex-
ample, Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Ber-
keley: University of California Press, 1957) 171; Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Man and Nature in
America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963) 86; David Lowenthal, George Perkins
Marsh, Versatile Vermonter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958) 268; Samuel P.
Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement,
1890-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) 28.
'For exemplary Arbor Day programs, see Emma E. Chester, Practical Arbor Day Exer-
cises (Lebanon, OH: March Brothers, 1892); Robert Haven Schauffler, ed., Arbor Day: Its
History, Observance, Spirit and Significance; with Practical Selections on Tree-Planting and
Conservation, and a Nature Anthology (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1917); Charles R.
Skinner, ed., Arbor Day Manual (1890; reprinted Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1971);
Annie I. Willis, Exercises for Arbor Day with Notes, Hints, and Suggestions (3d ed.; Boston:
New England Publishing, 1898).
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ebrations emerged. In Cincinnati in the early 1880s, in a state that keenly

felt the effects of rapid deforestation, thousands of school children planted
whole groves of saplings during huge Arbor Day ceremonies. On 27 April
1882 the holiday in Cincinnati was an extravaganza:
The city was in holiday attire. The soldiery and organized companies
of citizens formed an immense procession under command of Col. S.
A. Whitfield and marched to the park. . . . The school children were
under the charge of Superintendent Peaslee. Fifty thousand citizens
covered the grassy slopes and crowning ridges, those assigned to the
work of tree-planting taking their respective places. At the firing of
the signal gun, "Presidents' Grove," "Pioneers' Grove," "Battle Grove,"
"Citizens' Memorial Grove," and "Authors' Grove," were planted and
dedicated with loving hands and appropriate ceremonies. . . . No sight
more beautiful, no ceremonies more touching, had ever been witnessed
in Cincinnati.10
Being a virtuous citizen included planting trees or at least participating in

their planting. Patriotism figured prominently in these civic spectacles, es-
pecially since these arboreal rites often specifically evoked the liberty trees
of the Revolutionary era.11
As at the Fourth of July or Memorial Day, the churches gave their
blessing to such civic ceremonies. Sometimes churches took direct roles by
holding their own tree-planting occasions for the Sunday Schools on church
grounds. Churches, like schools, were encouraged to adorn their land with
trees, and Sunday School students often planted the trees. 12 Arbor Day
even inspired in one Ohio minister in the 1880s an unusual turn in which
conservation, good citizenship, and Christian membership coincided: he
required "each boy and girl, before he would administer the ordinance of
confirmation, to bring a certificate that he or she had planted two trees." 13
A half century later a Methodist pastor, enthusiastic about outdoor youth
activities, said he still held tree-planting events on Arbor Day and at other
times.14 As late as 1942, a Church of the Brethren pastor urged special
10
John B. Peaslee, Trees and Tree-Planting with Exercises and Directions for the Cel-
ebrations of Arbor Day (Cincinnati: Ohio State Forestry Association, 1884) 7.
"For allusions to liberty trees, see ibid., 32-33, 51; Skinner, Arbor Day Manual, 56.
12
Marion Lawrance, Special Days in the Sunday School (New York: Revell, 1916) 191;
Furnas, Arbor Day, 35.
"Peaslee, Trees and Tree-Planting, 12.
14
James Sterling Ayars, Getting Acquainted with the Out of Doors (n.p.: Board of Edu-
cation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1931) 11.
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services of worship for Arbor Day, exhorting the church to continue "the
movement for the conservation of tree life." "The church," he said, "should
be in the lead in the program of conservation, giving it motivation and
impetus through its blessing."15 In recent years concern over tropical for-
ests, acid rain, and the greenhouse effect has focused attention again on
deforestation; forest preservation and tree-planting rituals, such as Arbor
Day, have cropped up anew in theologies of the land and creation.16
Arbor Day deserves greater exposition than it has received from histo-
rians. Hans Huth remarked in his pioneering study Nature and the Ameri-
can that what made tree planting so popular was "very likely. . . not only
the practical and moral aspect of the movement. . . . Back of it perhaps,
was a mystical or sentimental idea which defies precise analysis."17 The
symbolism of trees indeed ran deep. Northrop spoke of his mission as
popularizing and diffusing "the sentiment of trees," and the range of sen-
timents expressed through Arbor Day trees was wide. 18 Elements not only
of conservation but also of community and the continuity of generations
found expression in trees. At Arbor Day, trees became symbols of connect-
edness and rootedness. Trees came to represent not only a love of nature,
but a "love of home." 19 Hopeful educators saw in trees an embodiment of
rural virtues and attachments. In a mobile, rootless, urbanizing world, the
trees planted at schools, homes, and churches suggested rootedness and
stability. One Arbor Day speaker in the 1880s lamented "the hankering for
city diversions and excitements, and so-called more genteel employment"
among the young. Planting and protecting trees would "foster home attach-
ments"; trees would endure and bind, span generations, and evoke commit-
ment to place and community.20
15
Edward Krusen Ziegler, Country Altars: Worship in the Rural Church (New York:
Commission on Worship of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 1942)
24. See also Mark Rich, comp., Rural Life Prayers for Rural Life Sunday, Harvest Home
Services, and Other Occasions (New York: Commission on Worship of the Federal Council
of the Churches of Christ in America, 1941) 3, 28.
''Geoffrey Lilburne in his recent theology of the land has lifted up Arbor Day for reinvention
and emulation. Noting its importance on the campus of United Theological Seminary over the
last half century, Lilburne comments that "from this annual event a new sense of carrying on
the tradition of the care of the earth and the love of this place emerges." "Trees," he says,
"are the single most important element in reviving of ecological health." See Geoffrey R.
Lilburne, A Sense of Place: A Christian Theology of the Land (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989)
125, 128-30. See also Christie L. Jenkins, "Caring for Creation," Liturgy: Journal of the
Liturgical Conference 9 (1990) 63-65.
17
Huth, Nature and the American, 169.
18
Quoted in Willis, Exercises, 64.
"Furnas, Arbor Day, 44.
20
Ibid., 39, 55.
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Trees also represented memories; they were "the silent sentinels about
the old home." 21 In the venerable and sentimental poem "Woodman, Spare
that Tree," which was set to music and became a theme song for Arbor
Day, the motif of remembrance was central:
When but an idle boy

I sought its grateful shade;
In all their gushing joy,
Here, too, my sisters played.
My mother kissed me here;
My father pressed my hand—
Forgive the foolish tear;
But let that old oak stand.22
"That old familiar tree" was emblematic of place and kinship; its preserva-
tion sustained human ties and memories.23 In Arbor Day the focus shifted
from the market value of trees to their sentimental value, from the woodman's
exploitative view of trees as commodities to an experiential understanding
of human interrelationship with trees. In terms of American archetypes, at
Arbor Day Johnny Appleseed supplanted Paul Bunyan.
Arbor Day also evoked various religious elements. Anthropologists and
historians of religion have found trees to be multivalent symbols in many
cultures: trees are good for religious thinking. Dominant in the religious
interpretation of trees in American Arbor Day celebrations was a romantic
mysticism of nature that was apparent in the poems offered for recitations.
William Cullen Bryant's "Forest Hymn" was among the most popular for
the holiday:
The groves were God's first temples. . .

Fit shrine for humble worshiper to hold
Communion with his Maker.24
Trees also held biblical associations—the tree of knowledge, the tree of

life, the symbolic measures of righteousness and unrighteousness, the em-
blem of both the Fall and the cross. Scriptural texts suggested for Arbor
Day programs evinced the full range of such associations. More specifi-
21
Skinner, Arbor Day Manual, v.
22
Ibid., 28-29, 425.
"Ibid., 28.
24
William Cullen Bryant, "Forest Hymn," quoted in Schauffler, Arbor Day, 199-204.
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cally, trees and their planting could become a kind of atonement for defor-
estation, a form of repentance for the destructive swath of empire and
progress. This may be seen in an Arbor Day poem of 1887 by the popular
poet of the West, Joaquin Miller:
God gave us mother earth, full blest

With robes of green in healthful fold;
We tore the green robes from her breast!
We sold our mother's robes for gold!. . .
In penitence we plant a tree;
We plant the cross and count it meet.25
Arbor Day could enact a ritual of repentance; the tree, like the cross,
became the atonement.
Arbor Day was part of a widening cultus of the outdoors in the United
States during the first decades of this century. In the face of a closed
frontier and growing urbanization and industrialization, the outdoors was
increasingly romanticized and spiritualized. "Back to Nature! That is one of
the thrilling slogans of our generation," Charles E. Jefferson, pastor of
Broadway Tabernacle in New York City, concluded in 1925 in a published
series of Nature Sermons.26 To Jefferson, city preachers, like other city
people, needed "the healing influences of the woods and fields."27 For
these sermons, he had turned his back on his study and taken "a stroll
through God's Out-of-Doors."28 Hallowing the outdoors and longing for the
verities of country life affected many religious formulations. Malcolm Dana's
Christ of the Countryside (1937) presented Jesus as "a prophet of God's
great out-of-doors,"29 and in Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows (1925)
Jesus appeared as both a modern businessman and a committed
outdoorsman.30 Perhaps the fullest expression of this gospel of the outdoors
was found in the writings of the Methodist bishop William A. Quayle, who
wrote several books on nature. In addition to such offerings as With Earth
25
Joaquin Miller, "Arbor Day," quoted in Furnas, Arbor Day, 181-82.
26
Charles E. Jefferson, Nature Sermons (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1925) 16. For an
excellent survey of this outdoors movement, see Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian
Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) esp. 141-45 on "The
Church in the Wildwood."
27
Jefferson, Nature Sermons, 13.
28
Ibid., 7.
29
Malcolm Dana, Christ of the Countryside (Nashville: Cokesbury, 1937) 128.
30
Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1925).
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and Sky, In God's Out-of-Doors, The Prairie and the Sea, and Beside Lake
Beautiful, Quayle also interpreted Jesus as the great lover of rural scenes
and natural beauty in Out-of-Doors with Jesus (1924). In company with
Jesus—"the most out-of-doors man that ever lived"31—Quayle "felt a lure,
[an] immeasurable invitation which haunts me like the calling of the sea or
purple morning breaking. 'Whither going, my Poet, Jesus?' I inquire; and
the answer is, 'Out of doors. Come with me.' And I go." 32 In this literature,
sentimental and wistful as it was, a feeling and sympathy for nature, a
restorative immersion in the countryside, and a preservationist love of for-
ests and wildlife became crucial attributes of the modern Christian.
Arbor Day shows that it was considered especially important for chil-
dren to be connected with nature in order to grow into virtuous citizens;
indeed, the cult of the outdoors focused, above all, on children and youth.
According to the Cornell educator and horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey,
Of late years there has been a rapidly growing feeling that we must
live closer to nature and make our nature-sentiment vital; and we must
of course begin with the child. We attempt to teach this nature-love in
the schools, and we call the effort nature-study. It would be better if
it were called nature-sympathy.33
In response to this growing movement for nature study, the public schools
and Sunday Schools offered, along with Arbor Day, a variety of other days
oriented toward nature. Bird Days were especially common, but there were
others as well. Marion Lawrance's Special Days in the Sunday Schools
(1916) listed May Day pageants, plays, poles, and picnics; Flower Days;
Bird Days; City Beautiful Days; and even Fresh-Air Days (in which urban
children were taken out to the country). All of these days would connect
Sunday School pupils with God's great outdoors or God's gifts in nature.34
Whole church school curricula were devoted to Getting Acquainted with the
Out of Doors (1931) in which students hiked off to observe birds, flowers,
and trees35 or to God's Wonder World (1918) in which pupils worked their
3l
William A. Quayle, Out-of-Doors with Jesus (New York: Abingdon, 1924) 9.
32
Ibid., 13. On Quayle, see M. S. Rice, William Alfred Quayle: The Skylark of Methodism
(New York: Abingdon, 1928) esp. 226-42.
"Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Nature-Study Idea: An Interpretation of the New School-
Movement to Put the Young into Relation and Sympathy with Nature (4th ed.; New York:
Macmillan, 1920) 28.
34
Lawrance, Special Days, 134, 190-92.
35
Ayars, Getting Acquainted.
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way through forty weeks of Sunday School lessons on nature.36 Others

offered complete liturgies for the outdoors and camp settings—such as Laura
Mattoon and Helen Bragdon's Services for the Open (1924)—giving further
ritual expression to this extensive cultus of the outdoors.37
The rapid ascendancy of the Boy Scouts of America, founded in 1910,
underscores the popularity of the cult of the outdoors in this period as well
as American Protestantism's extensive participation in that cultus. From the
beginning, Protestant churches outstripped all other institutions as sponsors
of troops: over half of all troops in the 1910s and 1920s were directly
connected with Protestant congregations and Sunday Schools, with Method-
ist, Presbyterian, Northern Baptist, Congregationalist, and Episcopal churches
leading the way. Protestant ministers and laity also dominated the ranks of
scoutmaster (27.7% of scoutmasters in 1917 were Methodist; another 15%
were Presbyterian).38 Seeing in the Boy Scouts a way of holding the alle-
giance of adolescent boys, the churches widely integrated scouting into the
Sunday School and church programs. Protestant churches expressed their
extensive support for scouting ritually in Boy Scout Sunday, held in early
February on the Sunday nearest the anniversary of the founding of the
Scouts, when troops appeared in church in full regalia and pastors offered
anniversary sermons on some aspect of scouting. The twelfth scout law
enjoining reverence toward God was emphasized, and a Norman Rockwell
print of a Boy Scout kneeling in prayer in church came to be a favorite
picture for the occasion. Eventually, parallel events honoring Girl Scouts
and Campfire Girls were sometimes held, but these groups never reached
the level of importance that the Boy Scouts held for establishment Protestants.39
36
Cora Stanwood Cobb, God's Wonder World: A Manual for Religious Instruction in
Junior Grades (Boston: Beacon, 1918).
37
Laura I. Mattoon and Helen D. Bragdon, Services for the Open (New York: Century, 1924).
38
See David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA,
and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) 190-99.
Protestants perceived their support as even greater, estimating that eighty percent or more of
troops had at least some connection with their churches or Sunday Schools. See Norman E.
Richardson and Ormond E. Loomis, The Boy Scout Movement Applied by the Church (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1919) 57.
39
See The Scout Program in Protestant Churches: A Manual of Practical Procedures
Related to the Program of the Church and the Boy Scouts of America (New York: The
Protestant Committee on Scouting, n.d.) 63-66, 82; "Boy Scouts and the Church," Federal
Council Bulletin 23 (1940) 12; Scouting under Protestant Leadership (New York: Boy Scouts
of America, n.d.) 8, 23, 31; The Scoutmaster Speaks: A Booklet of Testimony by Church
Leaders Who Are Also Leaders in the Boy Scout Movement (New York: Federal Council of
the Churches of Christ in America, n.d.). The Boy Scouts of America also produced a pam-
phlet, "Source Materials for Scout Sunday," specifically to aid churches in their celebrations.
For mention of this pamphlet see Scout Program, 82.
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The Boy Scouts of America were devoted to building character, defined

especially in terms of good citizenship and patriotism. The organization,
moreover, epitomized the early twentieth-century cult of the outdoors, evi-
dent in the considerable emphasis on camping. Led by naturalist Ernest
Thompson Seton, the author of its first handbook, from 1910 to 1915, the
Boy Scouts of America sought to instill a respect for nature, although
despite Seton's objections the organization increasingly throve on military
and pioneer imagery. The honoring of Boy Scouts in the Sunday Schools
and in the church services of middle-class Protestants had several layers of
significance: family values, patriotism, good citizenship, moral discipline,
resourceful self-reliance, and community service clearly figured prominently
in the cultic place of the Boy Scouts within Protestantism. Boy Scout Sunday,
however, was also an occasion to affirm the regenerative quality of the
outdoors, to connect with a rural and frontier past through children who
had been sent into the woods, and to reaffirm the importance of inculcating
a loving respect for nature among the young. In one devotional message for
Boy Scout Sunday a minister held up as an example an eagle scout who
had helped to secure "a preserve of 3,300 acres for birds and wild life" in
Illinois. "A scout," he concluded, "learns to recognize, to protect, and to
enjoy birds and other wild creatures." 40 The Boy Scouts, their rituals of
camping, their interest in the outdoors and wildlife, their charmed evening
campfires, and the yearly recognition of the organization in Boy Scout
Sunday were all part of the larger American ambivalence toward nature.
The wilderness was an object of pioneering conquest and control, but it
also required conservation and preservation and occasioned feelings of
communion and religious enchantment.41
In the 1930s and 1940s as the Dust Bowl spread and public concern
over soil conservation grew, the churches took more active stands that
often overcame this fundamental ambivalence. The social gospel vision of
the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America and allied groups
increasingly complemented the wistful, outdoors-with-Jesus piety. Founded
in 1908 as a unifying ecumenical agency with the support of more than
thirty Protestant denominations, the Federal Council of Churches repeatedly
grappled with social issues, especially those of labor and race. In 1932 the
Council formally extended its concerns to the liturgical life of American
40
P. Henry Lotz, Worship Services for the Church Year (St. Louis: Bethany Press, 1944)
37^*0.
41
On Boy Scouts and "the wilderness cult," see Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind,
147-48; Schmitt, Back to Nature, 108-14, 143-44; John Henry Wadland, Ernest Thompson
Seton: Man in Nature and the Progressive Era, 1880-1916 (New York: Arno, 1978) esp.
chap. 4; Richardson and Loomis, Boy Scout Movement, 125-32, 331-32.
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Protestantism, constituting a Committee on Worship under the leadership of

the Methodist bishop Wilbur P. Thirkield. With broad denominational rep-
resentation, including Northern and Southern Methodist, Congregationalism
Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal, Colored (Christian) Methodist Epis-
copal, Presbyterian, Christian, Lutheran, Moravian, and Protestant Episco-
pal churches, the Committee on Worship was charged with commissioning
and publishing liturgical materials as well as with searching for common
ground in worship for the sake of church unity. The Federal Council of
Churches had long shown a strong interest in institutionalizing a progres-
sive social vision in ritual, for example, in its steady support for Labor Day
and in its invention in 1922 of Race Relations Sunday (held on the second
Sunday in February). With the founding of the Committee on Worship, the
Council's attempts to shape Protestant worship became more expansive and
systematic.42
Its most encompassing proposal for liturgical reform was to urge the
reappropriation of the Christian year by nonliturgical or free churches. Fred
Winslow Adams, a Methodist minister and a professor at Boston University
School of Theology, first outlined the proposal in 1935, and the Committee
formally adopted and published it in 1937 under the title The Christian
Year, reissuing it in 1940 in revised form.43 Though primarily concerned
with restoring to low church Protestants the christological cycle stretching
from Advent to Pentecost, the document also contained social gospel prin-
ciples. These were evident in its incorporation of Labor Sunday, World
Peace Sunday, Christian Unity Sunday, and Race Relations Sunday into the
Christian year and in its creation of a new season known as Kingdomtide
that was dedicated to "the systematic teaching of Christian ethics"44 and
"the Church in action."45 The Committee envisioned activist, forward-look-
42
For a fine recent overview of the Federal Council and its role within ecumenical Prot-
estantism, see Robert A. Schneider, "Voice of Many Waters: Church Federation in the Twen-
tieth Century," in William R. Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protes-
tant Establishment in America, 1900-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
95-121.
43
These booklets on the Christian year received in themselves wide distribution, but to
disseminate further their version of the church year, the Committee also published wall and
desk versions of their calendar. See Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America,
Committee on Worship, Minutes, 7 Feb. 1939, Record Group 18, Box 78, Office of History,
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Philadelphia.
•"Federal Council of Churches, Committee on Worship, Minutes, 12 Nov. 1935.
45
77ie Christian Year: A Suggestive Guide for the Worship of the Church (New York:
Committee on Worship of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, [1937])

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816000024032
ing worship that would be part of the process of bringing the kingdom of
God closer to fruition and furthering the "uncompleted task of building a
Christian world."46 This activist view of church worship and the calendar
would be among the abiding legacies of the Federal Council of Churches;
presuppositions about activist worship, if now more modest and realistic,
continue to exercise a formative influence on ecumenical Protestant calendars.
This activism extended to concerns about nature and conservation. In-
cluded in the Federal Council of Churches' calendar were a handful of
special days and events that addressed the relationship of nature and hu-
manity. For example, Nature Sunday, slated for the last Sunday in June at
the beginning of summer programs and dedicated to the theme of "God's
majesty and beauty in nature," was envisioned in part as an occasion to
promote activities such as camping, nature study, scouting, and outdoor
worship.47 More than that, at least in Adams's initial conception, it was to
be a "Summer Festival of Joyousness," inaugurating a new, distinctly Prot-
estant season of "Summertide."48 Sermons were to be given on "Nature,
Man, and God," and the proposed lectionary suggested appropriate scrip-
tural texts on the goodness of creation.49 A prayer for Nature Sunday in the
1944 Book of Worship for Church and Home of the Methodist Church
captured the spiritual tone that Adams and his Committee were seeking to
evoke:
God of all beauty, who dost make the sun to rise in splendor, and in
glory set, and the stars to march in quiet radiance across the sky; open
our eyes until we see thy beauty on the face of the earth, that we may
more fully know thee and may love all beauty because it speaks to us
of thee. 50
46
Ibid. See also Fred Winslow Adams, "For a Modern Church Year," Christian Century,
25 May 1938, 651-53.
41
The Christian Year (1st ed.) 15-16, 22, 25.
48
Fred Winslow Adams, "A Church Calendar Year Modelled on the Historic Christian
Year," in Federal Council of Churches, Committee on Worship, Minutes, 9 May 1935, Ap-
pendix A. Adams had a keen sense of nature, liturgy, and seasonal rhythms evident in his
draft proposal calling for a Summertide and a Harvesttide, both of which were rejected by
members of the larger Committee who encouraged "the lessening of emphasis upon the
seasons of Nature's year." See Federal Council of Churches, Committee on Worship, Min-
utes, 12 Nov. 1935.
*9The Christian Year: A Suggestive Guide for the Worship of the Church (2d ed.; New
York: Committee on Worship of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America,
[1940]) 13, 28, 33.
i0
The Book of Worship for Church and Home (Nashville: The Methodist Publishing House,
1944) 120.
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Nature Sunday did not develop much beyond the endorsements in the
Council's calendar in 1937 and 1940 and simple liturgical suggestions about
sermon topics, prayers, and scriptural texts. It proved a brief but suggestive
experiment of the late 1930s and 1940s.51
Other ideas of the Federal Council of Churches were more substantially
supported, endured longer, and broached conservationist concerns more
directly. This was true particularly of Rural Life Sunday or Rogation Day.
The International Association of Agricultural Missions first proposed Rural
Life Sunday in 1929, and the Federal Council of Churches and the Home
Missions Council together quickly embraced it as their own. Held on the
fifth Sunday after Easter and recalling the ancient Rogation Days that had
long sought blessings for planting and harvest, Rural Life Sunday appealed
particularly in the 1930s in the face of agricultural depression, the Dust
Bowl, and soil depletion. Calling for economic justice for the nation's farm-
ers, litanies for Rural Life Sunday enumerated the travails of "sharecrop-
pers caught in a vicious economic system, subsistence families on marginal
lands,. . . destitute farmers amidst famine, dust-bowls, and drought-ridden
deserts." 52 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the promotional efforts of the
Federal Council of Churches and the Home Missions Council were exten-
sive: by 1941 twenty-five thousand leaflets with liturgical suggestions for
Rural Life Sunday were distributed annually;53 a special supplemental hym-
nal, Hymns of the Rural Spirit (1947), sold fifteen thousand copies in its
first year;54 and there was wide publicity for the day as well as broad
denominational support. In the 1940s and 1950s Rural Life Sunday was
established on ecumenical Protestant calendars—a sabbath of solidarity for
farming communities and for all Christians concerned about the conditions
of rural life.55
As the churches had adopted conservationist concerns over deforestation
through Arbor Day, so too were they able to address issues of soil conser-
vation through Rural Life Sunday. Clarence Seidenspinner, who included a
51
In the 1935 draft of The Christian Year Adams slated Nature Sunday for the first
Sunday in July; in the official 1937 and 1940 publications, the date was set as the last Sunday
in June. For a full liturgy for Nature Sunday, see Lotz, Worship Services, 137-40.
"Committee on Town and Country of the Home Missions Council and the Federal Coun-
cil of the Churches of Christ in America, "Suggestions for the Observance of Rural Life
Sunday Fifth Sunday after Easter May 2, 1937," Record Group 26, Box 17, Office of History,
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Philadelphia.
"Rich, Rural Life Prayers, 3.
54
Federal Council of Churches, Committee on Worship, Minutes, 5 Oct. 1948.
55
In Record Group 26, Box 17, Office of History, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Philadel-
phia, there are sample liturgies or "Suggestions for the Observance of Rural Life Sunday"
from 1930 to 1950.
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substantial entry on the new feast in his account of Great Protestant Fes-
tivals (1952) in the United States, noted that the occasion helped to under-
score the nation's dependence on "the conservation and careful use of its
land resources."
You cannot waste the land, allow the rich top soil to be carried away
by the forces of erosion. . . and have any sense of partnership with
God. The Church believes that God is the Providence who has given
us the good earth, appointed us as stewards in its care and use and
holds us accountable for its conservation.56
Others saw in Rural Life Sunday more than the utilitarian conservation of
the soil, the wise husbanding of resources for ongoing use, although this in
itself was clearly a significant concern. The "Suggestions for the Obser-
vance of Rural Life Sunday" for 1940 included this enjoinder: "If the Church
has any power in the world today it will speak out against the exploitation
of soil resources. It will do so, not on the basis of what will pay nor of
appeal to posterity, but on the basis of a religious motivation. It will teach
men to have a reverence for the Creator of the land." The suggested ser-
mon topics regularly made clear that, at times at least, this was a conser-
vation based on a deeper Christian appreciation of creation. Titles included
not only "Soil Conservation" and "Conservation of Forests," but also "The
Spiritual Interpretation of Creation," "The Holy Earth," and "God and the
Good Earth."57
The themes of Rural Life Sunday often extended to a broader Christian
adoration of nature and the earth, suggested in a favorite prayer for Rural
Life Sunday, one of Walter Rauschenbusch's luminous invocations from his
Prayers of the Social Awakening:
O God, we thank thee for this universe, our great home; for its vast-
ness and its riches, and for the manifoldness of the life which teems
upon it and of which we are part. We praise thee for the arching sky
and the blessed winds, for the driving clouds and the constellations on
high. We praise thee for the salt sea and the running water, for the
everlasting hills, for the trees, and for the grass under our feet. . . .
Grant us, we pray thee, a heart wide open to all this joy and beauty,
and save our souls from being so steeped in care or so darkened by
"Clarence Seidenspinner, Great Protestant Festivals (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952)
117-19.
""Suggestions for the Observance of Rural Life Sunday" for 1937, 1940, and 1944.
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passion that we pass heedless and unseeing when even the thornbush
by the wayside is aflame with the glory of God.58
Hymns often chosen for the occasion—"Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,"

"For the Beauty of the Earth," "All Creatures of Our God And King," and
"This Is My Father's World"—further suggested a reverence toward nature
and creation. In its fullest expression, Rural Life Sunday pointed to a pro-
found spiritual engagement with nature, the earth, and the land.
The work of horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey, perhaps the patron saint
of this new Rogation Day, gave inspiration for this engagement. His pro-
phetic volume The Holy Earth (1915) was among the chief texts for those
in the church concerned with rural life issues.59 The published "Suggestions
for the Observance of Rural Life Sunday" regularly carried direct quota-
tions from Bailey's book, frequently recommended his work for further
study, and at times incorporated his words into litanies. Likewise, the
Christian Rural Fellowship, organized in 1935 and an ecumenical Protes-
tant ally of the Federal Council of Churches in its promotion of Rural Life
Sunday, adopted Bailey as its principal mentor and devoted its first Bulletin
to selections from The Holy Earth. In 1943 the Fellowship reprinted the
whole book. The Fellowship offered in 1942 its own "Ceremony of the
Soil" or "Liturgy of the Holy Earth" for use on Rural Life Sunday and
other occasions—a liturgy that took its inspiration directly from Bailey's
work. In powerful tones the liturgy called for repentance: "We. . . have
become the great destroyers. . . . We have mutilated the earth, and de-
stroyed her balances." Following Bailey, it enjoined all to be "keepers of
the Holy Earth" and to pray for "the grace to recognize our dependence
upon the good earth, upon Thy blessed soil, Thy sunshine, air, and water.
Enable us to relate ourselves reverently, intelligently, and creatively to the
task of binding in love the wounds we have made in ignorance and con-
ceit." 60 In this liturgy, as at Arbor Day, repentance for ecological wasteful-
ness and devastation found expression in ritual.
58
Walter Rauschenbusch, Prayers of the Social Awakening (Boston: Pilgrim, 1925) 47-
48. See also Rich, Rural Life Prayers, 23; Hymns of the Rural Spirit, 115; and the "Sugges-
tions for the Observance of Rural Life Sunday" for 1930 and 1947.
''Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth (1915; 1943; reprinted, Columbia, OH: National
United Methodist Rural Fellowship, 1988).
^Ho ward Kester and Alice Kester, "Ceremony of the Soil—A Service of Worship," Christian
Rural Fellowship Bulletin, 69 (1942) 1-4. The Kesters' liturgy was regularly endorsed for use
on Rural Life Sunday. See Ziegler, Country Altars, 22, and the "Suggestions for the Obser-
vance of Rural Life Sunday" for the years following 1942.
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In Liberty Hyde Bailey's work, liberal Protestants concerned with nature,

conservation, and rural life found congenial company. Bailey was frankly
impatient with the old-time religion, its apocalypticism, otherworldliness,
asceticism, and excessive emphasis on personal salvation. He rejected no-
tions that Christians should see themselves as "mere sojourners and wander-
ers," pilgrims longing for deliverance from a strange land. "Waiting for this
rescue, with posture and formula and phrase," he said, "we have overlooked
the essential goodness and quickness of the earth and the immanence of
God."61 In rich, biblical language Bailey set out his central proposition that
"the earth is holy"62 and that "our relation with the planet must be raised
into the realm of spirit":63
If God created the earth, so is the earth hallowed; and if it is hal-

lowed, so must we deal with it devotedly and with care that we do not
despoil it, and mindful of our relations to all beings that live on it. We
are to consider it religiously: Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for
the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. . . . To live in sincere
relations with the company of created things and with conscious re-
gard for the support of all men now and yet to come, must be of the
essence of righteousness.64
Bailey's theology of the earth emphasized not simply the wise stewardship
of resources, but also their just and caring distribution. "More iniquity
follows the improper and greedy division of the resources and privileges of
the earth," he observed, "than any other form of sinfulness."65 Bailey made
preservation of the holy earth part of the social gospel.
Rural Life Sunday was the occasion to give Bailey's theology of the
holy earth liturgical form and to evoke the sacredness of the soil and the
land through ceremony and song. It was not the only occasion for this. The
Federal Council of Churches and the Home Missions Council articulated
similar perspectives in a variety of services in the 1940s for Thanksgiving
and Harvest Home. With churches decorated with fruits and sheaves, those
feasts celebrated "the mystery of the harvest," "the sower and the soil," and
"the holy earth." In autumn, as in spring, the litanies rang out for "life-
61
Bailey, The Holy Earth, 9.
"Ibid., 11.
"Ibid., 2.
M
Ibid., 11.
65
Ibid.
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filled seed and sacred earth." 66 Occasions such as Rural Life Sunday and
Harvest Home involved the churches in an affirmation of nature, conserva-
tion, the soil, and the holy earth. Long before the formation in 1979 of the
Eleventh Commandment Fellowship, a now prominent Christian environ-
mental group, the backers of Rural Life Sunday offered an eleventh com-
mandment of their own through the writings of Walter C. Lowdermilk in
1940: "Thou shalt inherit the holy earth as a faithful steward, conserving
its resources and productivity from generation to generation."67 Although
they were not the full expressions of environmentalism that would be found
later in Earth Day or the Environmental Sabbath, at midcentury ecumenical
Protestant versions of Nature Sunday, Rogation Day, and Harvest Home
were small, incremental steps along the way to what Liberty Hyde Bailey
called "earth righteousness."68
The legacies of conservationist activism over issues of deforestation and
soil erosion emerged with far greater force and expansiveness in the envi-
ronmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Air and water pollution,
dwindling energy resources, the continued destruction of wilderness areas,
the damming of wild rivers, chemical pesticides, the dangers of nuclear
power—the whole of the ecosystem—gained sustained attention. Religious
issues quickly emerged as an important substratum within the environmen-
tal movement. In 1964, two years after the publication of Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring,69 the Faith-Man-Nature group, a consortium of theologians
and conservationists, was formed to explore the religious dimensions of
environmental issues and articulate a theology of nature or a theology of
ecology. To those ends the group published Christians and the Good Earth
in 1968. The collection underscored the connection between the conserva-
tionist concerns of the churches in the 1930s and 1940s and those crowding
onto the scene in the 1960s: it opened with a section on "Christian Stew-
ardship of the Soil" that specifically harkened back to Rural Life Sunday
and pointed to the continued need for "soil stewardship" and "stewardship
observances." 70 From there the volume moved to broader issues of ecologi-
66
Committee on Town and Country of the Home Missions Council and the Federal Coun-
cil of the Churches of Christ in America, "An Order of Service for a Harvest Festival 1946,"
Record Group 26, Box 17, Office of History, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Philadelphia.
Special harvest festival liturgies are available in this collection for the years 1942 to 1950.
See also Ziegler, Country Altars, 24-25.
""Suggestions for the Observance of Rural Life Sunday" for 1940; Walter C. Lowdermilk,
"The Eleventh Commandment," Christian Rural Fellowship Bulletin 74 (1942) 1-4.
68
Bailey, Holy Earth, 18.
69
Rachel L. Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
70
Donald A. Williams, "Christian Stewardship of the Soil," in Christians and the Good
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cal ethics, political action, and the philosophical foundations for a theology
of nature.
The first Earth Day on 22 April 1970 marked the flowering of ecological
ritual. Teach-ins and speeches gave this festival of the earth a hortatory
character. The carnival atmosphere of costumes often took a macabre turn
with gas and face masks. Many of the rituals of revulsion, such as burying
or bashing gas-guzzling cars and "dump-ins" at city halls, were sardonic.
Earth Day echoed, enlarged, and in some sense displaced Arbor Day. (April
22 had been the day set for Arbor Day in Nebraska, based on J. Sterling
Morton's birthday. It was also Lenin's birthday, which caused some right-
wing critics of Earth Day to complain.) The new holiday, moreover, bor-
rowed familiar strategies of protest and demonstration for the environmental
movement. The festival provided energy and exposure to the great new
ritual of conservation: recycling (especially of aluminum cans, newspapers,
and soda bottles). It also gave new scope to rituals of nonconsumption (the
spurning of plastics and nonreturnable bottles)—rituals that could be end-
lessly extended and replicated as needed (the rejection of aerosol cans,
certain detergents, styrofoam cups, disposable diapers, and so forth).71 With
its annual reenactment and with especially large celebrations on the tenth
anniversary in 1980 and the twentieth in 1990, Earth Day has come to be
a ritual embodiment of the environmental movement.
The first Earth Day in 1970 provided an occasion within the churches
for expressing concerns over the environmental crisis. Religious involve-
ment in this ecological awakening was substantial. Both the president and
the general secretary of the National Council of Churches endorsed Earth
Day in mailings to church leaders in March 1970; they also encouraged the
observance of an Environmental Sabbath the weekend before to "highlight
the religious dimensions of the ecological problem and enable the churches
Earth: Addresses and Discussions at the Third National Conference of the Faith-Man-Nature
Group (Alexandria, VA: The Faith-Man-Nature Group, [1968]) 17-20. Williams highlighted
an attempt, beginning in 1950, to rename and continue Rural Life Sunday as Soil Stewardship
Sunday. He noted that six hundred thousand church bulletins and 1.7 million program inserts
were being distributed annually for the occasion, especially to churches in the South and
Southwest, by an interdenominational Soil Stewardship Advisory Committee for the National
Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts. This observance, now called Soil and
Water Stewardship Week, has survived and is still being promoted.
71
For good descriptive accounts, see "A Giant Step—Or a Springtime Skip," Newsweek,
4 May 1970, 26-28; "A Memento Mori to the Earth," Time, 4 May 1970, 16-18. On recy-
cling, see Garrett De Bell, The Environmental Handbook Prepared for the First National
Environmental Teach-in (New York: Ballantine, 1970) 214-18.
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to demonstrate their relevance to this critical concern."72 Episcopal bishop

Paul Moore, Jr., preaching in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on the
first Earth Day, insisted that "the Church must begin talking a theology of
ecology." 73 And the churches increasingly did: Earth Day provided a ritual
focus and festal impetus for an outpouring of theological reflection on
nature and ecology. Issues of theological journals were devoted to these
themes; books on the topic proliferated, including the 1970 publication of
H. Paul Santmire's Brother Earth74 and Frederick Elder's Crisis in Eden.15
Typically, Henlee H. Barnette's The Church and the Ecological Crisis (1972)
opened with a paean to Earth Day's importance as a catalyst for ecological
theology and church action.76
Liturgies for the new theologies of ecology, earth, and nature were slower
in appearing and crystallizing, but have picked up growing momentum since
the mid-1980s. Despite the call in 1970 for an Environmental Sabbath, the
idea did not develop until the United Nations Environment Programme
appropriated it in 1986, linking it with World Environment Day (an event
sponsored by the United Nations, inaugurated in 1972, and held annually
on June 5). Interreligious in its construction, the Environmental Sabbath is
intended to be a time "to contemplate our bond with nature" and to culti-
vate "a more caring, knowing and responsible attitude toward our use of
Earth's gifts." With an estimated "25,000 groups of celebrants" in 1990—
in churches, synagogues, colleges, and youth organizations—the Environ-
mental Sabbath is explicitly liturgical and religious in its inspiration (in
contrast to the more politically oriented activities of Earth Day). 77 The
United Nations even publishes a liturgical handbook for the celebration of
the day, Only One Earth, replete with interfaith prayers, hymns, and medi-
tations.78 Denominational representatives from the United Methodist Church,
the American Baptist Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the
72
National Council of the Churches of Christ in America, "Environmental Stewardship,"
Record Group 6, Box 60, Office of History, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Philadelphia. The
National Council had organized an Environmental Stewardship Action Team in advance of
Earth Day.
"Quoted in "Earth Day," New Yorker, 2 May 1970, 30.
74
H. Paul Santmire, Brother Earth: Nature, God, and Ecology in Time of Crisis (New
York: Nelson, 1970).
"Frederick Elder, Crisis in Eden: A Religious Study of Man and Environment (Nashville:
Abingdon, 1970).
76
Henlee H. Barnette, The Church and the Ecological Crisis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1972) 7.
77
Zehra Aydan, "Doubling and Redoubling: A History of the Environmental Sabbath,"
Environmental Sabbath Newsletter 2 (1990) 1, 4-5.
78
United Nations Environment Programme, Only One Earth (New York: United Nations,
1990).
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United Church of Christ are included on the interreligious planning and

advisory boards for the Environmental Sabbath. Still in its formative stages,
the Environmental Sabbath is constantly recreated by each group that cel-
ebrates it.
The Environmental Sabbath is the most prominent recent experiment in
ecological liturgies, but it is one of a number of new worship proposals for
congregations addressing nature and the earth. There are Sunday School
materials for all ages as well as films, litanies, hymns, poems, sermons, and
prayers of confession. The Puritan ritual of covenant renewal is often ap-
propriated for congregational action on the environment in the form of new
covenants, for example, the Alverna Covenant, the Earth Covenant, and the
Wellspring Covenant. There is even a complement to the Environmental
Sabbath in the Eco-Justice Sabbath supported by the National Council of
Churches and the Network for Environmental and Economic Responsibility
of the United Church of Christ, with a full range of worship resources
available for this April event.79 The intention of linking ecology and con-
servation to festival and celebration, liturgy and ritual, first evident in Arbor
Day over a century ago, continues to attract many concerned with earth
stewardship. Instituting a "Feast of Creation" or an "Earth Liturgy"—a
celebration that would do no less than "integrate a new vision of the cos-
mos into our religious life"—is one of the prophetic visions of contempo-
rary creation-centered spiritualities.80
Have such ecological rituals really been popular celebrations? Has there
been more official prescription than popular practice in these environmental
feast days? With the exception of Earth Day and Arbor Day at its height,
none of these special days has attracted broad support; neither Earth Day
nor Arbor Day has established an enduring place in Protestant churches and
79
See the Newsletter of the Network for Environmental and Economic Responsibility of
the United Church of Christ (NEER) based in Nutley, New Jersey and Pasadena, California.
NEER also distributes various flyers and worship resources for the Eco-Justice Sabbath. See
also issues of Firmament published by the North American Conference on Christianity and
Ecology; the recent pamphlet produced by the Eco-Justice Working Group of the National
Council of Churches, 101 Ways to Help Save the Earth, with Fifty-two Weeks of Congrega-
tional Activities to Save the Earth (n.p.: The Greenhouse Crisis Foundation and the National
Council of Churches of Christ, 1990); Joseph E. Bush, Jr., ed., Environmental Sabbath Worship
and Educational Resources (n.p.: The Board of Church and Society, Northern New Jersey
Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, 1990). On the covenants, see "Cov-
enant," Environmental Sabbath Newsletter 2 (1990) 6.
80
Sean McDonagh, To Care for the Earth: A Call to a New Theology (London: Chapman,
1986) 155, 158, 161. See also Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing
of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988)
211-28; Peter Reinhart, "Eternal Festival: Folk Culture, Celebrations, and Earth Steward-
ship," Epiphany: A Journal of Faith and Insight 6 (1985) 46—50.
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Sunday Schools. Although with some, such as World Environment Day, the
Eco-Justice Sabbath, and the Environmental Sabbath, it is too early to judge,
it is clear that many of these occasions—for example, Bird and Flower
Days, Nature Sunday, Rural Life Sunday, the Liturgy of the Holy Earth—
have not endured. Fred Winslow Adams remarked in 1937 that such "newly
added days" to the calendar would "naturally have to stand the test of
time." 81 Most of these nature days have not. Various factors have impeded
the assimilation of ecology and conservation into American Protestant wor-
ship, and these warrant examination.
There are, of course, the crucial impediments of theology and piety that
environmental theologians have extensively highlighted and analyzed. Lib-
erty Hyde Bailey and others long recognized that Christian otherworldliness
and themes of pilgrimage potentially alienated Christians from the earth.
The Protestant absorption with soteriology, reaching a height in American
revivalism, made questions of redemption and salvation all-consuming: What
shall I do to be saved? The impact of Gen 1:28, the command for humans
to subdue the earth and to have dominion over all living things, was also
formidable in providing a foundation for the subjugation of nature inherent
in empire building. To the extent that such commonplace assumptions shaped
American Protestant mentalities, ecological rituals had to struggle for a
place in the calendar. Other less commonly analyzed factors have also
worked against Protestant festivals of nature and conservation.
First, romantic views of nature permeated American preservationist
thought: transcendentalist nature quests, suffused with romantic individual-
ism, were not the stuff of which festival and communal liturgy were made.
The transcendentalists and their descendants sought their sanctuary in soli-
tude: Henry David Thoreau as the lone seeker among woods, huckleberries,
ponds, and swamps; John Muir as the sequestered supplicant before King
Sequoia; Joe Knowles as the self-promoting Maine woodsman whose church,
he said, was the forest;82 Bishop William Quayle as the "Skylark of Method-
ism" soaring in solitary gyre over prairies and meadows; 83 Annie Dillard as
the observant, troubled wayfarer at Tinker Creek. In his poem "Holidays,"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured the romantic vision of a liturgical
cycle of the individual's own devising, to be made up of red-letter days of
personal retreat and private memories:
81
77ie Christian Year (1st ed.) 9.
82
On Knowles, see Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 141—43, 157.
83
This appellation is from the subtitle of M. S. Rice's biography of Quayle. See Rice,
William Alfred Quayle.
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The holiest of all holidays are those

Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart.84
Bishop Quayle expressed this sense of a private liturgy and a private cal-
endar in his With Earth and Sky (1922). While he was out collecting mistle-
toe for Christmas, the green of the mistletoe against the barren winter
landscape—the epiphanal power of nature—captured Quayle's imagination
more than the great feast day of the church. "Any day when a lover of
outdoor things finds a new outdoor thing is a holiday to the soul," he
observed, "and if it were reverently called a Holy Day there would be no
flippancy of speech or spirit. I could make a rosary of such golden days,
the beads whereof should be more than dandelions on an April field."85
Communion with nature was a private feast, outdoors and alone; its high
days were those observed in the souls of rambling, solitary pilgrims. Cor-
porate liturgy in the enclosed space of a church appeared antithetical to this
romantic sacramentalism of nature and the individual.
The invention of festivals dedicated to conservation and creation faced
strong competition, moreover, from festivals dedicated to consumption and
commerce. Celebrations for a conserver society such as Arbor Day, Earth
Day, and the Environmental Sabbath exist in clear tension with what may
be the dominant mode of celebration in the United States—consumer-ori-
ented, store-centered holidays. From the late nineteenth century on, the
calendar was gradually drawn into an alliance with the commercial culture;
various businesses and retailers—department stores, confectioners, florists,
stationers, among other merchants—turned to the holidays to provide a festal
cycle for sales events and displays. Festivals, always times of excess, be-
came in American culture times for the superabundant display of gifts and
goods. This was obviously preeminently so for Christmas, but in the 1880s
and 1890s Easter also became synonymous with fashion parades and elabo-
rate decorations. With the major festivals of the churches transformed into
consumer feasts, it was far from clear whether festivals of conservation also
had a place in religious life. Arbor Day was, in many ways, a misfit in the
expanding consumer culture of the late nineteenth century, and all subse-
quent conservationist occasions have faced similar problems. 86
84
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Poetical Works of Longfellow (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1975) 322.
"William A. Quayle, With Earth and Sky (New York: Abingdon, 1922) 170.
86
See Leigh Eric Schmidt, "The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays
and the Culture of Consumption, 1870-1930," Journal of American History 78 (1991) 887-
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816000024032
In addition, such ecological feast days confronted a crowded and com-

petitive church calendar at both popular and official levels. At a popular
level the Protestant year was (and is) crowded with all kinds of events:
church anniversaries, revivals, homecomings, Mother's Day, Rally Day,
Stewardship Sunday, Bible Sunday, World Day of Prayer, and various days
for missions, benevolences, and the Sunday Schools. As William Dunkle
commented in his Values in the Church Year for Evangelical Protestantism
in 1959, "Evangelical Protestantism has been as busy making special occa-
sions—Rally Day, Temperance Sunday, Mother's Day, to name a few—as
ever was the most medieval hagiographer."87 Carving out a place in this
already crowded popular calendar, with its emphasis on evangelism, mis-
sions, family, church school, and local community, was and is a difficult
task for supporters of days like Nature Sunday or the Environmental Sab-
bath.
At an official level such occasions of environmental activism encountered
a different set of difficulties. Ecumenical Protestant church leaders were
increasingly torn between a christocentric year and a calendar that addressed
contemporary social issues. Fred Winslow Adams exemplified these growing
liturgical tensions. On the one hand, he was a strong advocate of the social
gospel, hoping even to embody this emphasis on "social action, social gospel,
and rediscovery of the social consciousness of Jesus" in the new season of
Kingdomtide.88 On the other hand, he found the "hit-or-miss ordering" of
the church year in American Protestantism scandalous. He mocked the
bungling disorder of the popular Protestant calendar, its unabashed embrace
of myriad causes, and its "littering up the Church year with all sorts of days
and appeals":
A minister opens his Thursday morning mail and is asked to observe

next Sunday as "Anti-Dirt Week.". . . Or again: Will he observe "Milk
Week" and preach on "The Sincere Milk of the Word." And so the
requests come tumbling in, "one woe treading upon another's heels, so
fast they follow." Will he set apart Sunday as Community Chest Drive,
916; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random
House, 1973) 157-64.
87
William Frederick Dunkle, Jr., Values in the Church Year for Evangelical Protestantism
(New York: Abingdon, 1959) 120.
88
Fred Winslow Adams, "The Value of the Christian Year for Worship: Extracts from the
Address Given at the Biennial Meeting of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in
America at Buffalo, N.Y., Thursday, Dec. 8, 1938," in Federal Council of the Churches of
Christ in America, Record Group 18, Box 78, Office of History, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.),
Philadelphia.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816000024032
Red Cross Day, Golden Rule Day, Hospital Sunday, Boy Scout, Girl
Scout, YMCA, YWCA, Clean-Up Week,. . . And on they come the
whole tatterdemalion procession of special Sundays from anywhere to
nowhere and everywhere.89
Adams, like many other ecumenical Protestants of his generation, looked to

the historic Christian year to bring order and focus to Protestant worship.
"The Christian Year is a compass whose needle always points to Christ,"
Adams proclaimed in his booklet for the Federal Council of Churches.90
The christocentrism of the liturgical year from Advent to Pentecost became
the new criterion that was used increasingly to reduce the number of popu-
lar, contemporary, and activist days.
Despite such obstacles to American Protestant attempts at ecological li-
turgies over the last century, the efforts were extensive. In recent environ-
mental theologies there has been a tendency to look for a usable past in the
far distance, to hold up Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, or Hildegard
of Bingen as patron saints of a Christian ecology, and to dismiss American
church history as revealing an unbroken chain of dominion, anthropocentrism,
and conquest. Protestantism in the United States, however, produced its own
versions of nature religion, its own conservationist and environmentalist
perspectives, its own ecological rituals and liturgies. From prayers for the
dedication of trees at Arbor Day through an ebullient love of the outdoors
to concern for the soil and the holy earth, ecumenical Protestant efforts often
foreshadowed the full-orbed environmental theologies and liturgies that
emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Although there were tremendous impedi-
ments to the effectiveness of the earlier experiments—just as there are for
today's—the attempts of the past were vital, sometimes prophetic precursors
of contemporary celebrations.
89
lbid.
90
The Christian Year (2d ed.) 5.
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HTR 84:3 (1991) 299-323

FROM ARBOR DAY TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL SABBATH:

Leigh Eric Schmidt

G. Northrop, Arbor Day belonged primarily to the public schools. Through

ebrations emerged. In Cincinnati in the early 1880s, in a state that keenly

Being a virtuous citizen included planting trees or at least participating in

When but an idle boy

The groves were God's first temples. . .

Trees also held biblical associations—the tree of knowledge, the tree of

God gave us mother earth, full blest

way through forty weeks of Sunday School lessons on nature.36 Others

The Boy Scouts of America were devoted to building character, defined

Protestantism, constituting a Committee on Worship under the leadership of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universitaetsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, on

Hymns often chosen for the occasion—"Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,"

In Liberty Hyde Bailey's work, liberal Protestants concerned with nature,

If God created the earth, so is the earth hallowed; and if it is hal-

to demonstrate their relevance to this critical concern."72 Episcopal bishop

United Church of Christ are included on the interreligious planning and

The holiest of all holidays are those

In addition, such ecological feast days confronted a crowded and com-

A minister opens his Thursday morning mail and is asked to observe

Adams, like many other ecumenical Protestants of his generation, looked to

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