Gleam of the infinite majesty: The interplay of manifest destiny and ecotheology in Thomas Starr King's Construction of Yosemite as sacred text

In the mid-nineteenth century, American liberal theologians and religious thinkers turned toward nature as a religious text. This was especially true for the liberal Christians inspired by developments in religion, philosophy, and science that came together in new ways of viewing the world eventually known as Transcendentalism. They rejected the empiricism of John Locke and Scottish Common-Sense philosophy in favor of an organic, intuitive idealism in which an immanent God and a unity of the Spirit allowed for elements of the natural world to serve as symbols that corresponded to the spiritual realm. They emphasized the divine quality of the human soul and the capacity of each person to apprehend religious truths through the intuitive faculty of their reason. The mid-nineteenth century was also a time of geographic expansion and nation-building in the early United States.;On the Pacific Coast, the Yosemite Valley emerged as a particularly significant religious text, one which Unitarian and Universalist minister Rev. Thomas Starr King popularized in the mid-nineteenth century to large numbers of Americans regardless of whether they had actually visited the Valley. By showing the complicity of King's theological assertions with manifest destiny and white-world-making as well as the liberative, life-giving aspects of his theology of nature, this dissertation seeks to enable theologians of the liberal religious traditions descended from King to more fully understand the theological heritage informing their contemporary ecotheologies. and to become aware of aspects of his theology requiring correctives when it is employed as theological grounding for contemporary liberatory ecotheologies. I conclude King's theology of nature is of value to contemporary ecotheologians, particularly in his understanding of the presence of God infused in all of nature and experienced acutely in places of awe-inspiring, magnificent beauty; his attitude of receptive and, at times, ecstatic love toward nature; his affirmation of experiences of the natural sublime; and his valuing of the role of nation in protecting particular places in nature.