With Faith to Match the Mountains: Religion and the Rebuilding of America’s National Parks

As tourism to national parks boomed following World War II, the National Park Service invested in the Mission 66 program, a 10-year-effort to improve visitor facilities. A little explored component of this effort was the investment in religious services and chapels, represented by the interdenominational group A Christian Ministry in the National Parks (ACMNP). ACMNP’s model worked by recruiting seminary students to run worship services in the summer. Initially a part of the ecumenical National Council of Churches (NCC) and a relatively private effort, by the 1960s and 1970s, the government had grown comfortable with ACMNP’s presence in the parklands, arguing that it provided a tangible good to park communities. Ultimately, ACMNP provided valuable morale to park communities, fulfilling the Mission 66 efforts to interpret the “spiritual” values of the National Parks and commodifying church as a product of postwar tourism. This bubble burst following a lawsuit in the 1990s, when a new religiously pluralistic age forced ACMNP to reevaluate its relationship to the National Park Service.