It was dark and muggy out, and five-year-old Harrell Spruill had to poop. He dared not run all the way to the outhouse, deep enough into the woods that even the adults avoided it at night for fear of “the snakes in the bushes.” An older Spruill remembered dashing instead from his house to the edge of a cotton field, “keeping my eyes wide open, trying to look every which way at once for spooks.”Footnote ¹ Spruill’s world, at least at night, was populated by snakes and spirits, the latter as real as the former.Footnote ²

Snakes and spirits—taken here to mean nonhuman beings both natural and supernatural—twine through colonial and early American narratives, not only in nighttime fears but as real presences. From early American environmental and agricultural historians, we know that what appeared to the first Europeans on American shores to be a wilderness was also a landscape cultivated by generations of indigenous people.Footnote ³ Snakes thrived there, sacred beings but also material ones, coiled unseen behind fallen trees, partially submerged in murky coastal swamplands, sunning on warm stone. Spirits thrived too. Jon Butler is among a generation of historians who brought to life the world of spirits that humans—indigenous, European, African, each in distinct ways—saw and felt and knew all around them.Footnote ⁴ It was an enchanted world, teeming with more-than-human beings who lived in webs of relationship with one another and with the humans they outnumbered.

But Harrell Spruill was born in 1924, and his desperate midnight dash to the cotton field’s edge happened in a world no longer enchanted, one in which snakes were only animals to fear and spirits more superstition than substance. At least, so goes the dominant narrative of the twentieth century United States. The webs of relationship in historical scholarship on the early United States give way in modern American historiography to narratives of separation and disconnection, of humans from one another, and of humans from both nature and spirit.Footnote ⁵

Jon Butler identified some of the religious dimensions of this problem in his field-shaping 2004 essay “Jack-in-the-Box Faith.” A shortage of historical scholarship on modern American religion meant that when religion did appear in modern histories, it seemed to come from nowhere—as if from a jack-in-the-box. The field of modern American religious history has since flourished. Neither current events nor historical scholarship now supports “the widespread conviction and assumption that the post-Civil War United States has been a society where religion receded, especially in public life.”Footnote ⁶ Historians have worked to elucidate theologies and religious practices that undergird modern politics across the political spectrum; to understand both the Protestant shape of secular institutions and the broad array of traditions and practices that challenge simple frameworks of Christian pluralism and inclusion; to describe and define the limits of the co-constitution of religion, race, gender, and capitalism in the modern world. Historians across subfields have a much clearer sense in 2025 than in 2004 of the reality that religion suffuses modern life, both in private and in public.Footnote ⁷

Yet, it remains singularly difficult for historians to tease out of our sources the relationships between human beings and more-than-human beings. This is an interpretive conundrum for historians of religion and environment alike: While religious historians try to understand how modern Americans experience what Robert Orsi calls the “real presence” of sacred beings, environmental and agricultural historians work to understand how modern Americans experience our place in the natural and built worlds around us, as well as our relationships to the planet’s nonhuman beings.Footnote ⁸ For both groups, textual archives—church records, government documents, memoirs like Spruill’s, scientific research records—are essential. Physical archives—archaeological discoveries, tree rings, holy sites, ghost forests, and living swamps—also offer important evidence of the more-than-human relationships that shape human histories.

Is the story of a ghost forest—a striking name for a stand of dead trees—environmental history, or is it religious history? For the most part, these two fields have developed on separate tracks. Yet it is difficult to describe human relationships to more-than-human beings if we draw neat lines between those of matter and those of spirit, if environmental historians trouble themselves primarily with Spruill’s snakes and religious historians primarily with his spirits.

Neither snakes nor spirits much concerned the historians who wrote about religion and environment following the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. An influential 1967 essay in Science by historian of technology Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” set the terms for a conversation among scholars about the effects of Christian theologies on humans’ relationship to nature. White dated human separation from nature to medieval farming methods in northern Europe and tied those to Christian concepts of creation. He argued that “in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” Christian scripture and theologies undergirded its destruction of “pagan animism” and thus “made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”Footnote ⁹

Since then, historians have worked to clarify the place of Christian thought both in ecological destruction and in the environmental movements of the twentieth century. Roderick Nash’s 1965 Wilderness and the American Mind traced the concept of wilderness and its conquest to early Jewish and then Christian thought. Nash also identified a pro-wilderness turning point in American life, embodied in the conservation movement at the turn of the twentieth century and the environmental movement of his own era.Footnote ¹⁰ Mark Stoll followed in the Nash tradition by arguing that Calvinist natural theology undergirded the conservation movement and formed the activists who “transmuted conservation into mid-twentieth century environmentalism in the white-hot fires of moral urgency.”Footnote ¹¹ While Stoll laments the decline of Calvinist thought, religious studies scholar Evan Berry expresses more concern about its durability. In Devoted to Nature, Berry shows how “the internal logic of American environmental thought is wrapped up with the cultural hegemony of mainline Protestantism,” and is thus limited in its response to ecological crisis by an emphasis on human depravity and redemption through nature.Footnote ¹²

Historians have also traced a trajectory in Protestant environmental thought toward capital over conservation. Neall Pogue offers a vivid illustration of the limits of a Christian environmental ethic, tracing conservative Protestants’ shift from a mid-century commitment to ecological stewardship to a flamboyant politics of anti-environmentalism.Footnote ¹³ Darren Dochuk’s Anointed with Oil shows how “the dual authority of oil and religion rests at the heart of America’s modern moment” by describing a century-long showdown between conservative Protestant elites and upstart evangelicals not over the preservation of the nation’s natural resources but over the power that they offer.Footnote ¹⁴

Scholars who look beyond white Protestant theologies and politics offer a different set of frameworks for thinking about human relationships to more-than-human beings. Catherine Albanese has argued throughout her half-century-long career that multiple and interweaving religious traditions shape American life. With an abiding interest in nature religion, metaphysical religion, and religious diversity, Albanese traces the trajectories of American thought about nature but also emphasizes the place of emotion and the body in religion, which she describes as an “action system” shaped by creed, code (norms), cultus (ritual), and community.Footnote ¹⁵

In this world, spirits—supernatural or more-than-human presences—come into focus. A host of ways of relating to the natural world likewise flourish, from a powerful tradition of Black environmental thought to the diverse religions that have moved for centuries along the Mississippi River.Footnote ¹⁶ Ethnographer Amanda Baugh’s Falling in Love with Nature builds on this model, describing Spanish-speaking American Catholics not merely as victims of environmental injustice but also as environmental agents rooted in “a sense of relationality with family, the earth, and one’s home.”Footnote ¹⁷

That web of relationship shaped the way settlers lay claim to indigenous land and myths, as well as the way that indigenous people made counterclaims. Jared Farmer’s instant classic On Zion’s Mount describes “how nonnatives became neonatives” as nineteenth-century Latter-Day Saints claimed Ute land in the nineteenth century and then in the twentieth bestowed on it sacred meaning through a reappropriation of Ute myths.Footnote ¹⁸ Alicia Puglionesi, Brandi Denison, and Erica Bsumek similarly show how white settlers—Protestant, Mormon, and even spiritualist—claimed native land and retold native histories for themselves. These scholars also emphasize the way that native people have continually contested those claims, reinforcing their own sacred connections to colonized lands and shaping white ideas about religion in the process.Footnote ¹⁹ Human action remains the focus here, yet we can begin to recognize in this kind of scholarship some of the ways that snakes and spirits wove through the landscape and the human relationships to it.

It is in the scholarship at the nexus of religious and agricultural history that Albanese’s claims about the importance of emotion and the body emerge most clearly. Joseph Creech and Jarod Roll traced the emotional resonance of radical religion in multiracial agrarian protest movements, demonstrating the longstanding connection of religion to land in the South.Footnote ²⁰ More recently, Lloyd Barba and Jonathan H. Ebel, in studies of mid-twentieth-century California farmworkers—Mexican Pentecostals and white Dust Bowl migrants, respectively—describe the embodied environmental knowledge that farmworkers carried with them. Barba brings to life irrigation ditch baptisms; Ebel narrates reformers’ and migrants’ moral warfare over the meaning of bodily filth and the proper use of modern toilets. Religion, here, is in the ditches and the sewers as much as it is in the minds of the nation’s leading thinkers. In these books, finally, Harrell Spruill’s midnight run—poop and all—begins to seem like something more than a child’s nighttime adventure.

The nonhuman turn, a late-twentieth-century interpretive shift in the social sciences and humanities, offers tools for approaching the more-than-human presences in Spruill’s life.

Environmental historians, religion scholars, and anthropologists have embraced this shift, which recognizes that “making worlds is not limited to humans,” as ethnographer Anna Tsing puts it.Footnote ²¹ Nor is religion “a strictly human phenomenon,” as Aaron S. Gross shows in his influential study of kosher slaughterhouse practices in the United States.Footnote ²² Animal studies now shapes the field of religion more broadly: In her ethnographic study of immigrant religions, labor, and meatpacking in Iowa, for instance, Kristy Nabhan-Warren spent a day on the killing floor to learn about “the entangled relationships between nonhuman animals and the humans who kill them.”Footnote ²³ Katherine Mershon’s pathbreaking dissertation on dogs as both religious symbol and religious subject demonstrates that the relationships humans form with companion animals, particularly rescue dogs, reflect our modern understanding of redemption—and its limits.Footnote ²⁴

The field of indigenous studies required no nonhuman turn to recognize the web of relationships in which humans are enmeshed with other beings.Footnote ²⁵ Vine Deloria’s (Standing Rock Sioux) God Is Red voiced a longstanding critique among native thinkers of Christian anthropocentrism.Footnote ²⁶ George “Tink” Tinker (Osage Nation) comes at the question of nonhuman consciousness—and thus ability to participate in and make community—from the perspective of Indigenous ecological knowledge. For the Osage, Tinker explains, rock is “the oldest and wisest of all life forms”: one with seniority to younger beings like humans; one who inhabits a longer, slower time scale than that of animate life forms; and one of the most durable.Footnote ²⁷

Drawing on both Indigenous studies and the nonhuman turn, environmental historian Marsha Weisiger showed the consequences of officials’ failure to understand Indigenous relationships with more-than-human beings well into the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agents concerned about overgrazing forced the reduction of sheep populations among Navajo (Diné) people. Yet they lacked the cultural tools to recognize the sheep as participants in Diné religion, essential to Diné origin stories, to their matrilineal social structures, and to their economy. The Diné still hold the BIA responsible not only for the loss of their sheep but for the resulting destruction of their wealth and way of life.Footnote ²⁸

Reading these works together reveals a different problem from the one Butler described two decades ago. Scholars in these fields understand the importance of religion to the way that humans understand and interact with the environment. Yet just as BIA officials had to learn to recognize the relationship between Diné women and their sheep as a religious one, historians must learn to see religion not only in the beliefs and practices that structure our relationship to the natural world but also in that relationship itself, and in the more-than-human beings who are part of it. Those relationships shaped the lives not only of Indigenous people who could name them but also of Protestants and others who often could not. Our textual and physical archives are full of stories like Harrell Spruill’s, stories of worlds at once human and more than human. Our collective survival depends on recognizing the more-than-human relationships that animate those worlds.