Parareligion, Earth Nationalism, and the Quest for the Sacred in Nature

If we eschew the essentially religious quest to determine and enforce the boundaries of religion, and instead, examine environment-related social phenomena for religion-resembling characteristics, we gain insight into the human impulse to find the sacred in nature. Although such perception of nature is commonplace, based on historical and ethnographic evidence on four continents, I argue that such “dark green religion” (or religion-resembling nature spirituality) is now spreading rapidly. Those engaged in what I have called ‘spiritualities of belonging and connection to nature' regularly use religious terminology to express what they find most meaningful, for example, speaking of nature as sacred, averring that nature has intrinsic value, and contending that humans ought to treat it with reverence. Since Haeckel and especially since Darwin, such religion – or whatever terminology one prefers to label it, parareligion, secular religion, or quasi-religion are terms that some find apt – is increasingly fused to the ascendant evolutionary/ecological worldview. This development has profound implications, providing an understanding of the cosmos and the human place in it that has scientific legitimacy. Consequently, modern people find such a worldview more compelling than conventional religions with their beliefs in non-material divine realities. Today, nature-as-sacred spiritualities drive the commitments of many in civil society, business, and government. There is even tantalizing evidence that a global civic earth religion is beginning to emerge. Yet spiritualities understanding the sacred as something to which we belong rather than as a place beyond this world have often been viewed, especially in the West, as spirituality, politically, and morally dangerous. Examining both the emerging forms of Earth Nationalism, and the ongoing resistance to such a ideology, reveals both changing understandings of the sacred and suggests that these trends are not only increasingly influential but that they may even be decisive in Earth's future bio-cultural evolution.