“Timely and immensely important. Sacred Wonderland reads like a clear-eyed love letter to national parks—written by a person who has contemplated all the complexities, violences, and concessions made in the formation of the U.S. national park system.”—Brandi Denison, author of Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009
“Thomas Bremer knows intimately the attractions of Yellowstone and the spiritual allures of the landscape, and he offers a religious history of this American wonderland that takes with utmost seriousness the multiform reverence the park has inspired. At the same time Bremer brings the politics of this spirituality into sharp focus, including the civilizing, colonizing, and racial logics that underpinned so much of this appropriation of wild lands for the romanticized quests of seekers and tourists. It is a richly varied story of grand sweep—from Jesuit missionaries to Protestant financiers, from landscape painters convinced of the nation’s providential destiny to Emersonian wayfarers and naturalists. That variety comes to its peak in Bremer’s masterful account of how the Church Universal and Triumphant, a new religious movement that sought refuge in the region, incorporated Yellowstone into its esoteric cosmology. A work of historical subtlety and honest ambivalence, Sacred Wonderland makes for great reading.”—Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism
“Sacred Wonderland’s argument regarding the history of religion in Yellowstone and its imbrication in settler colonialism, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, and genocide is important because the enduring legacy of these four factors continues to shape the current social and political landscape. With its concern for the exercise of (soft) power, Sacred Wonderland stands at the leading edge of historical scholarship on nature, preservation and conservation, and religion as a social and political force.”—Kerry Mitchell, author of Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America’s National Parks
