Catherine Albanese is a kind of activist-scholar in American religious history, known for her creative, recombinatory, and even controversial ways of re-slicing the field’s familiar archive into new categories. The most eminent of her attempts at this kind of project is her 2006 A Republic of Mind and Spirit, in which she argues for the centrality of “metaphysical religion” in American religious history. A capacious term, metaphysical religion describes an array of religious practices predicated on the symmetry and interpenetration between God and nature. Beliefs and practices such as clairvoyance, New Thought, Transcendentalism, spiritualism, mysticism, and magic fall under this label. According to Albanese, metaphysical religion may be as important, or even more important to American religious history than the evangelicalism that commands the lion’s share of historians’ attentions.

Nature Religion in America employs a similar tactic. Albanese identifies “nature religion” to be a vital strain or “symbolic center” in American religious history, though never before treated in consolidated form (7). Martin Marty, in his foreword, notes that while “other scholars would do it differently, would cover other subjects and other meanings,” Albanese “deserves a patent for disclosure of this protean, enduring, viscous form of spirituality and religion” (xiii). Over the course of the book, Albanese moves briskly through various forms of nature religion, as the subtitle promises, from precolonial Native Americans to the New Age. Algonkians, Puritans, republicans, Transcendentalists, mesmerists, homeopaths, hydropaths, and the Green Party, represent just a small selection of the groups Albanese enlists to her category. Conspicuously absent, however, are evangelicals, aside from a short excursus on millennialism.

Albanese’s reshuffling of ostensibly different forms of religion and quasi-religion as instantiations of nature religion is interesting and instructive. She reveals the continuities between different cultural and religious forms in ways seldom considered by others in her guild. Hers is a welcome fresh perspective. Yet I also wonder if she runs the risk of overstating her case. In Albanese’s last chapter on the New Age, for example, might “therapeutic religion” or “capitalist religion” serve as better categorizations for the phenomena she describes? Within the confines of this book, however, discussions beyond the confines of “nature” fall off the table.

Perhaps Albanese’s resistance to discussing the consumer capitalism or therapeutic culture of the New Age stems from a lack of sufficient critical distance. Nearly one-fourth of her text is dedicated to the activities of Sun Bear, Starhawk, Ann Dillard, Reiki practitioners, and so on, in a tone more generous and gentle than I could muster. Further, that all of her examples of twentieth-century nature religion are drawn from the New Age seems biased. Maybe it is simply a case of my bias against hers; perhaps I just have an epistemic resistance to the idea that a central event in American religious history occurred at my alma mater, Macalester College, in 1984—the founding of the Green Party, which, according to Albanese, was inspired by an “essentially religious” vision (172). But it seems to me that the attention Albanese lavishes on this particular iteration of nature religion is disproportionate. I suspect her interests betray her own religious persuasions.

Albanese returned to nature religion twelve years later in a series of lectures published as the slim Reconsidering Nature Religion. In this book, she reiterates the central themes of her earlier work, in a more lyrical style and with the addition of quasi-theological conclusions. Nature, she says, functions as an “absolute” that orients all life. Religion refers to the ways in which people engage this absolute to cultivate meaning. As a historian, such claims tend to be beyond my purview, though I’d recommend the book to others interested in those kinds of issues.