American spirituality is built on an impulse to flee the world. It teaches that purity lies in distance; the divine can only exist beyond human reach. Nowhere is this clearer than in our desire for wilderness, imagined as the last realm of untouched sanctity. We have turned these landscapes into the measure of what counts as holy, defining spiritual truth through separation rather than relation. The result is an ideology that disguises abandonment as reverence: to save nature, we must first leave it.
Why does American spirituality only feel close to the divine when it’s far from human touch? In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” historian William Cronon reframes this question by insisting that “wilderness” is not a description of a landscape, but rather a cultural idea.
Far from untouched, many of the places we call wilderness have been shaped by people for centuries, our national parks for example. Still, the myth of pristine landscape survives because it answers a psychological need – it allows us to imagine a world free of human mess. We travel to the mountains, deserts, and forests searching for an escape. This yearning is often framed as reverence, but it actually reveals our deeper dependency on escape as the foundation of our spirituality.
Cronon argues that the modern idea of wilderness emerged not from nature itself, but from an ideological movement at the height of industrialization. In the 19th century, as the construction of factories demolished the landscape and cities filled with smog, the natural world was co-opted as a moral opposite. The wilderness became a fantasy of purity, a space imagined to exist outside the reach of industry. Romantic thinkers claimed God was not in the city but in the mountains, not in community but in solitude. The frontier myth reinforced this belief, promising that moral renewal could be found only by escaping civilization.
Though rooted in religion, this idea has been kept throughout secularization. Modern environmentalism still carries its traces, treating nature as a place for personal transcendence rather than shared responsibility. In this way, capitalism helped transform wilderness into something holy, a sacred counter-image to the world it was actively exploiting.
The ideal wilderness carries a hidden cost. By defining value through what remains untouched, we learn to see the inhabited world as less worthy of care. If beauty and meaning exist only in distant landscapes, then everything affected by human hands becomes a kind of spiritual waste. This way of thinking seeps into environmentalism as a movement. We rally to protect what appears pure – the national park, the coral reef, the untouched forest – but turn away from what has already been damaged. Ordinary harm, such as a contaminated river or an abandoned parking lot, rarely fits our image of what “nature” is. They are too entangled with human life, too compromised to feel redemptive. Yet, these are the places that reveal who we are as a species, and where restoration must be done. The challenge of our time is not to worship what remains untouched, but to learn to see value in what has already been altered – to find meaning in the landscapes we’ve tried hardest to ignore.
What if the sacred isn’t somewhere we visit, but something we practice? A spirituality of immanence begins with the belief that meaning doesn’t vanish when the landscape is changed. This kind of attention refuses purity as the measure of worth. It asks us to see the wild not as a faraway refuge, but as a quality that still emanates through the places we interact with day to day.
Replacing escape with participation is key – to care not because a place is pristine, but because it persists. As Cronon suggests, if wilderness can stop only being “out there” and start being “in here,” we might finally learn how to live rightly with the world we already have.