A relatively recent academic construct, nature religion has been used since the 1970s as an umbrella concept under which to group a variety of earth- and nature-centred spiritualities believed by practitioners to have been prevalent before the rise of monotheistic religions. Such religions are often portrayed as remnants which have survived the repression of monotheism, particularly Christianity, and which are now reemerging or being recreated or revived through imaginative reconstruction. Nature religions thus tend to include animistic, pantheistic and polytheistic religions, varieties of Neo-Paganism, ecospirituality such as Deep Ecology, indigenous, shamanic, or tribal religions, and some New Age beliefs and practices.
Nature religion focuses on religions that revere nature and consider it to be divine, sacred, or populated by spiritual beings. Current academic use of the term ‘nature religion’ has developed from Catherine Albanese’s (1990) usage in Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age, in which she defined nature religion as beliefs, behaviours, and values which make nature a ‘symbolic centre’. While recognizing the value of the construct in bringing to light the diversity of religious practices which do take nature as a symbolic referent, Albanese’s term has been criticized as too broad to be of practical use. Some academics suggest instead that phrases such as ‘the natural dimension of religion’, or ‘nature influenced religion’ be used to distinguish those religions which see nature as important but not sacred, and keeping ‘nature religion’ exclusively for reference to religions which regard nature as sacred.
As well as resisting the domination of monotheisms and their perceived desacralization of nature, practitioners of nature religion also see themselves as critiquing secularization and the centralized authority of global capitalism. Such a stance has led to involvement in anti-globalization and protests against the World Trade Organization, often taking the form of non-violent direct action, as well as protesting against the destruction of the environment. Spiritual intimacy, connection, and harmony with nature is held up as the ideal position for humanity. There is, however, a negative side to nature religion that exists not in harmony with, but in control, mastery, and manipulation of nature and other people, either through magical or mystical means, or through the politics of racist and far right movements which are based on a connection to the land. These might include Nazism and some heathen organizations such as Hammarens Ordens Sallskap (‘In the Company of the Order of the Hammer’), who consider multiculturalism and homosexuality to be the cause of confusion and problems, and seek an end to immigration since they believe that a people’s identity derives from the land.
On the more positive side, nature religion often inspires practitioners to actively concern themselves with environmentalism, although this is not necessarily a greater concern than that of the population at large. Pro-environmental practices and an ethic of care for the earth are tied in with the idea of communion with a nature imagined to exist beyond civilization or at least beyond mechanized, urban living, both of which are seen as environmentally destructive. Political consciousness is thus derived from, or seen to go hand in hand with nature as an instructive spiritual or religious metaphor. This relationship is, however, often imbued with ideas of ‘supernature’, in terms of a dialogical communion between humans and a nature populated with powers, deities or other beings. Boundaries between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’, between the religious and the non-religious, are thus made permeable and crossed in the imagining of nature religion and the action which its beliefs inspire. Such ambiguity is not regarded as problematic by practitioners, who seek to overcome dichotomies between nature and culture and embrace an idea of immanence.
