Just about 5 million vacationers come to Wyoming to seek advice from Yellowstone Nationwide Park each and every yr, maximum in the summertime months. They arrive for the geysers, flora and fauna, surroundings and leisure actions equivalent to climbing, fishing and pictures.
Alternatively, few understand that faith has been a part of Yellowstone’s enchantment all the way through the park’s historical past. My 2025 ebook “Sacred Wonderland” paperwork how folks have lengthy discovered holiness in Yellowstone: how a panorama as soon as sacred to Local American citizens later impressed Christians and New Age communities alike.
Local reverence – and elimination
Lengthy sooner than Ecu American citizens “discovered” the Yellowstone area within the nineteenth century, a lot of Indigenous peoples had been acutely aware of its distinctive panorama – specifically geysers, scorching springs and different hydrothermal wonders. A number of tribal teams engaged in devotional practices lengthy sooner than it turned into a park. Those integrated the Tukudika, or Sheep Eaters, a band of mountain Shoshone. They lived year-round inside the barriers of what would transform the nationwide park.
Anthropologists know slightly little in regards to the explicit ideals that Local American citizens held about Yellowstone all over this period. Alternatively, it’s transparent many of the Indigenous teams who frequented Yellowstone regarded as it, as historian Paul Schullery concludes, “a place of spiritual power, of communion with natural forces, a place that inspired reverence.”
Decrease Falls of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone Nationwide Park.
Thomas S. Bremer
After the Civil Conflict, extra Euro-American citizens entered the area. In 1872, the U.S. executive created Yellowstone as the primary nationwide park, environment a precedent for others in the USA and world wide.
Yellowstone and different U.S. nationwide parks established within the nineteenth century had been merchandise of manifest future: the Christian concept that American citizens had a divinely ordained proper to enlarge their nation around the continent. The country’s westward enlargement integrated turning supposedly wild, “uncivilized” spaces into parks.
The park gadget’s introduction, although, got here at the price of Indigenous communities. In Yellowstone, the Tukudika had been forcibly got rid of within the 1870s to 2 reservations in Idaho and Wyoming, as anthropologists Peter Nabokov and Lawrence Loendorf talk about of their ebook “Restoring a Presence.”
Christian ministry
Along with the concept that of manifest future, Christians introduced their very own spiritual practices to Yellowstone Nationwide Park.
The U.S. Military was once answerable for protective and managing the park from 1886 to 1918. It operated from Castle Yellowstone at Mammoth Sizzling Springs within the northern a part of the park. The ultimate development it erected on the citadel was once a chapel, which has been in steady use as a worship house – most commonly for Christian teams – since its crowning glory in 1913.
The Yellowstone Nationwide Park Chapel at Mammoth Sizzling Springs, completed in 1913, was once the ultimate development built by way of the U.S. Military at Castle Yellowstone.
Thomas S. Bremer
One workforce that has used the chapel persistently because the Nineteen Fifties is ACMNP, A Christian Ministry within the Nationwide Parks, an evangelical Protestant parachurch ministry based in Yellowstone. Its volunteers behavior worship products and services and proselytize amongst staff and guests.
ACMNP started because the brainchild of Presbyterian minister Warren Ost, who had labored as a bellhop on the Outdated Devoted Inn all over summer time breaks in seminary. Upon commencement, he shaped the ministry, hoping to capitalize at the awe folks revel in within the parks to confirm believers’ religion and produce new souls to Christ.
ACMNP’s venture comes to hanging seminarians and different scholars in nationwide parks as “worker-witnesses.” They paintings as paid staff in secular jobs and behavior spiritual actions after their common running hours. Moreover, they’re inspired to discuss faith with their fellow staff at the activity.
ACMNP skilled speedy enlargement within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties, boosted by way of make stronger from Nationwide Park Carrier management. Cooperation integrated reduced-cost housing for his or her volunteers, and in some parks the superintendents or different high-level officers served on native ACMNP committees.
At its top within the Seventies, ACMNP had just about 300 volunteers running in over 50 places. Alternatively, a federal lawsuit within the Nineties challenged its dating with the federal government at the grounds of church-state separation and ended probably the most privileges ACMNP had loved. No longer lengthy after the criminal motion, Ost introduced his retirement.
Even though the group has scaled again operations, the ministry in Yellowstone has skilled few adjustments. ACMNP volunteers proceed to provide spiritual products and services to park staff and guests all the way through the summer time.
Non secular castle
Any other spiritual workforce has an excessively other interpretation of Yellowstone. The Church Common and Triumphant, which had a number of thousand individuals at its top, was once based by way of Elizabeth Clare Prophet within the Seventies, in accordance with the lessons of her overdue husband, Mark Prophet.
The Church Common and Triumphant is an inheritor to the “I AM” motion, which flourished within the U.S. all over the Nineteen Thirties. Maximum distinguished amongst I AM’s influences had been theosophy, which promotes esoteric wisdom gleaned from Asian spiritual traditions as a common knowledge underlying all religions; new idea, which advocates a mind-over-matter spirituality; and spiritualism, which comes to speaking with spirits.
Within the Eighties, Prophet’s fans relocated from California to Montana, the place they bought a big ranch adjoining to Yellowstone Nationwide Park’s northwest boundary. With them, they introduced an eclectic New Age theology that mixes parts of Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism with trust in “ascended masters,” non secular beings who information the church. The gang’s custom teaches that underneath Yellowstone are two underground caverns, hidden from human view, that include a cache of sacred stones with non secular powers.
The Church Common and Triumphant received consideration within the ‘90s when its believers in Montana constructed underground bunkers. Participants believed that their ascended masters had predicted a nuclear struggle and had recommended the group to arrange to live to tell the tale underground. When the prophecy of a nuclear assault didn’t materialize, many individuals turned into disenchanted.
The gang struggled to rebuild its recognition and determine goodwill with Montana neighbors, together with the Nationwide Park Carrier. Elizabeth Clare Prophet retired in 1999, and because then the church has concentrated extra on its publishing and academic enterprises. Alternatively, a core group of the devoted nonetheless are living and worship on their Royal Teton Ranch adjoining to Yellowstone.
The principle church sanctuary at Church Common and Triumphant headquarters, simply out of doors Yellowstone Nationwide Park.
Thomas S. Bremer
Even though the group teaches that its Montana ranch is a sacred location of the ascended masters, fans’ holiest position within the Western Hemisphere is more or less 35 miles south of Yellowstone, in Grand Teton Nationwide Park. They imagine humanity started at Grand Teton Mountain and that the devoted will in finding their future there.
Accordingly, individuals imagine that Yellowstone and Grand Teton nationwide parks are brimming with non secular powers, sacred resources of sunshine and effort for all the global.
In my conversations with folks within the park, I discovered that only a few knew anything else about Yellowstone’s spiritual historical past in any respect – particularly Local American practices. The continued practices of non secular communities within the park stay invisible to just about all guests. Nonetheless, many travelers interpret Yellowstone’s wonders as proof of God’s handiwork.
