Mark Stoll is Professor of History at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America; Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism; and Profit: An Environmental History. Each book explores the relationship between three formative influences in American life.

ECM: Your books focus on the interplay between Protestantism, capitalism, and environmentalism. Did an interest in any one of these prompt your interest in the others?

MS: I grew up in a religious household in the pre-evangelical days. I was interested in environmentalism as a kid in the 1960s, and later, when I began to take an interest in that history, I noticed that a lot of the nation’s great environmentalist figures were lapsed Presbyterians, as I was by then as well. I spent most of the 70s living in San Francisco and going hiking in the Sierras. This was a decade when the nation made great strides in environmental protection. But then, of course, Ronald Reagan became president and appointed the notorious James Watt to the Department of the Interior, and we began rolling back so much of that progress in favor of mining and ranching and timber interests and an otherwise “pro-business” agenda. I was attentive to all this, so when I went back to graduate school in the late 80s, I had these issues on my mind.

At that time, I had been reading about John Muir—who was religious—and also thinking about the Lynn White thesis, that Christianity is to blame for much of the world’s environmental degradation. You know, the idea that God has granted humans dominion over the world with a mandate to subdue it and that this has justified deforestation and extinction and pollution and all the rest. A lot of people accepted that argument at the time, but to me Muir seemed to challenge it. It was his experience, and my own, that growing up in a religious environment influences you deeply, and you retain that imprint throughout your life, even if you leave the faith. You can’t just abandon it. You may change your beliefs, but that inner Baptist or Catholic or whatever it may be lives on in your perspective. I was looking for a research paper topic at the time, and started to work in this direction.

ECM: Can your work be read as an extended response to Lynn White?

MS: Well it’s worth noting that Lynn White was religious as well—he was a Presbyterian, and the son of a prominent Presbyterian minister. But I guess I have been calling for a degree of respect for these religions, and observing that “secular” things are often not as secular as they seem.

ECM: Your second book is a history of American environmentalism by way of Christianity and capitalism and detailed discussions of landscape painting. How did you decide to write history through art criticism?

MS: I’m interested in a lot of things! I take a sort of polymath approach to the world. It’s American history, but it exists in this cultural constellation. Environmentalism can be political and activist, of course, but it is also expressed in poetry, literature, art, and so on. In my first book, I just wanted to write about the stuff that I like to read and then show how it’s all related. In the second, I was thinking about how to show, in a creative fashion, the variety of ways that these attitudes find expression. It was a joy to consider all of these beautiful paintings and learn a bit about the artists who created them and to identify their connections to each other and to their subject matter and to my subject matter as a historian.

ECM: Presbyterianism comes up frequently in your books, and you note that it has been particularly important to American environmentalism. Why?

MS: When writing the first book, I tried to focus on Protestantism as a whole. But as I was revising it, I realized that you could identify particular attitudes and trace them to figures aligned with particular denominations. I began to think about that, and pursued it much more directly in the second book. I had a very hard time coming up with a way to present my argument. At first I was just going to say here are some environmentalists who were Methodists, then here are some Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Catholics and so on. And also some Jews, who have been extremely important to American environmentalism. But that seemed like a very dry way to present the information, so I tried to organize it chronologically. This allowed me to see that there was a sequence, and they actually segue one into each other.

Ultimately I began to look at the religious upbringing of various figures in the environmental movement, and one after another turned out to be Presbyterian, which is striking because it’s not that large of a denomination. It’s mainly an immigrant church, so it’s not like it started out at the top, like the Episcopalians, or that it was blessed with a lot of natural leaders. Rather, they tended to come from hardscrabble circumstances, with an imbued commitment to hard work, a deep respect for education, and a close connection to the land. For these reasons and others, it’s hard to overstate just how important Presbyterianism has been to American environmentalism.  

ECM: Your third book, Profit, strikes me as the least optimistic of the three. Does it mark any sort of a shift in your thinking about these matters?

MS: I don’t think there’s really a shift underway. I never planned to write an environmental history of capitalism. An editor came to me from Polity Press and asked if I would consider it. The more I thought about the proposal the more excited I got, because I realized that I had been thinking about this for years without attempting to put it all together in one book. So it turned out to be a great opportunity for me to address some issues that I felt had been neglected in past treatments. So many people talk about capitalism as a very bad thing that we should get rid of, and okay, but as John Lennon once put it, “We’d all love to see the plan.”

There are far more critiques of capitalism than plausible strategies for its replacement. So I remain very skeptical that we’re ever going to find a way. The best we can do is probably to nudge things in the right direction whenever we find opportunity. We did this well in the early 70s with the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Toxic Substances Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, etc. These victories were possible without a revolution.

ECM: Do you see a future in which Protestantism plays a role in healing the world from the ravages of capitalism?

MS: Not to the same degree that it did formerly. Most of the Protestant denominations that underwrote environmental activity in the past two centuries are on life support now. When you look at the current leaders of environmental movements, and of liberalism in general, you see a lot of Black Protestants, Jews, and Catholics. Perhaps the most vibrant strain of American Protestantism today may be evangelicalism, but it does not seem to be productive of the kind of environmentalism that we’ve seen in the past. In fact, it doesn’t look to me that the evangelical tradition is going to be very helpful at all. It’s too individualistic, too desirous of influence, too beholden to rightwing money and power. As Darren Dochuk has shown, it’s a movement that traces its rise very largely to funding from oil barons. Without some large and unexpected change, it would appear that the period of great Protestant environmental achievement has now passed.