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A sample entry from the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London & New York: Continuum, 2005) Edited by Bron Taylor © 2005 All Rights Reserved Nature Religion in the United States 1175 categorically cannot be expressive of it. To use the term in Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, the singular allows it to be applied to any religious group, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America on the basis of criteria that are not dependent on any par- Today. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986 (1979). ticular religion. Albanese, Catherine L. Nature Religion in America: Nature religion can be distinguished from other From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Chicago: religion on the basis of its understanding of trans- University of Chicago Press, 1990. cendence. Nature religion can then be constructed as a Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” In Beyond type of religion in which nature is the milieu of the sacred, Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. and within which the idea of transcendence of nature Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, 168–89. is unimportant or irrelevant to religious practice. By diZerega, Gus. Pagans & Christians: The Personal Spiritual this definition, not only contemporary Paganism and Experience. St. Paul, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publica- indigenous traditions, but practices and beliefs of any tions, 2001. religion can be expressive of nature religion. This Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the definition recognizes that a religion can be expressive of Philosophy of Religion, vol. II. Peter C. Hodgson, ed., nature religion without being exhaustively defined by R.F. Brown et al., trs. Berkeley: University of California nature religion. For example, not all contemporary Pagan Press, 1987. religious traditions are expressive of nature religion by Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of this definition, since some posit divinity transcendent of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University nature, as in the panentheism of Gus diZerega (2001). Press, 1999. Transcendence, in nature religion, tends to be lateral Pearson, Joanne, Richard H. Roberts and Geoffrey Samuel. rather than vertical. Spirits and deities are of this world Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World. rather than beyond it, and can be contacted through the Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. natural world. Nature religion is this-worldly religion. Schelling, F.W.J. On University Studies. E.S. Morgan, tr. Contemporary expressions of nature religion are often Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1966. explicitly this-worldly, with the hope that a valuation of Schlegel, Friedrich. Lucinde and the Fragments. Peter this world and none beyond it will encourage us to respect Firchow, tr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota and preserve it. In nature religion it is more often culture Press, 1971. than nature that is transcended. This is to be expected in Taylor, Bron. “Nature Religion and Ecology” (Ecology and phenomenon that are often seen as countercultural, as are Religion Section). In Lindsay Jones, Editor-in-Chief. many of the phenomenon of nature religion, such as the The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan, Christian folk singers discussed by Albanese, and modern 2005 (2nd edn). British witchcraft as described by Ronald Hutton (1999). Taylor, Bron. “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part The usefulness of the term “nature religion” lies in II): From Earth First! and Bioregionalism to Scientific the broadness of its applicability. It is limited in being Paganism and the New Age.” Religion 31:3 (July applied only to the United States, or only to contemporary 2001), 225–45. Pagan religious traditions. It is useful to look at wider Taylor, Bron. “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part I): social and cultural developments in terms of nature From Deep Ecology to Radical Environmentalism.” religion, and to look for expressions of nature religion in Religion 31 (2001), 175–93. mainline religious traditions, such as creation spirituality Zell, Tim. “Paganism & Neo-Paganism: The Old Religion & in Christianity, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s practices in the New.” Green Egg V:48 (1972). engaged Buddhism, and to look for this-worldly expres- See also: Bioregionalism; Bioregionalism and the North sions of mainstream traditions. However, it remains to be American Bioregional Congress; Celestine Prophecy; seen how useful the term might be in understanding Deep Ecology; Earth First! and the Earth Liberation indigenous traditions. There have been no in-depth studies Front; Nature Religion in the United States; Paganism of specific groups or spiritual traditions in indigenous (various); Radical Environmentalism; Religious Studies cultures in terms of nature religion, probably in part and Environmental Concern; Romanticism (various); because “nature religion” is yet another Western category, Snyder, Gary. but also because it is a relatively new area of research in the study of religion. Nature Religion in the United States Barbara Jane Davy (This article is adapted from material previously published Further Reading in Catherine L. Albanese, Reconsidering Nature Religion Adams, Frederick. “Feraferia for Beginners.” Earth (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002) and is Religion News 1:5 (1974), 51. used with the permission of the publisher.) 1176 Nature Religion in the United States What does it mean to speak of nature religion? For a Philosophically considered, the universe is com- general audience in the Western and English-speaking posed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, world, probably the first reference that comes to mind is therefore, all that is separate from us, all which land-based and environmental. Nature means grass and Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, trees, panoramas and vistas, mountains and lakes and both nature and art, all other men and my own body, oceans. So nature religion means beliefs and practices that must be ranked under this name, NATURE. involve turning to God in nature or to a nature that is God. For a smaller, largely self-identified group in the Here Emerson invoked “both nature and art” to define same Western and English-speaking world, nature religion nature, and then he went on to explain that the term had signals Goddess more than God, and nature is the principal both a “common” and a “philosophical import.” “Nature, trope for a religiosity that calls itself pagan or, alternately, in the common sense,” he wrote, “refers to essences neo-pagan. To invoke nature religion becomes a way to unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is call attention to one’s pagan/neo-pagan spirituality and, applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as also, group commitment. For still others who have a in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.” Yet of this latter – familiarity with Western religious and theological history, of “art” – Emerson was dismissive. Human operations the term nature religion is teasingly close to two others – collectively considered were “so insignificant, a little natural religion and natural theology. chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an These last are designations that arose in an eighteenth- impression so grand as that of the world on the human century Enlightenment context under the guiding star mind, they do not vary the result” (Emerson: 1971, 8). of deism. For the Enlightenment, natural religion made Many, of course, would be less speedy to relegate human sense in contradistinction to supernatural religion – the constructions to a cosmic recycle bin. Yet in the space revealed religion of Christianity based on the inspired between Emerson’s two definitions – his “philosophical” word of scripture. Natural religion therefore meant the sense and his “common” one, there stands an American religion of reason alone; or, in tandem with human definitional and historical territory that may fruitfully be reason, the religion that looked to nature as its holy explored under the rubric of nature religion. book of inspiration. It ranked inferior or superior to Since the rubric is distinctly nature religion and not Christianity, depending on prior belief commitment and simply nature theology, let it be clear that any American point of view. Still more, if it was counted superior, it historical survey must move beyond beliefs regarding was thought to be grounded in the essential order of nature, however reverent and profound. Rather, the rubric the universe and of all things. In a distinctly Christian must encompass cultural practice that is intimately con- understanding, natural theology became the system of nected with belief both in condensed symbolic settings religious thought constituting knowledge of God and (i.e., in ritual and devotional situations) and in more divine things that one could obtain by reason alone. It was broad-gauged and general ones (i.e., in everyday suspect and generally rejected in Protestant theological behaviors that act out ethical stances and convictions). circles of Reformation provenance (because of their It helps to remember, too, that to engage in such an view of the fallen nature of humanity) but more warmly American historical survey of nature religion is hardly a received by Roman Catholics and, later, by liberal minor exercise or an add-on from the point of view of the Protestants. Western religious tradition. With theology or religious In light of all of the above, what other way or ways thought as its strong suit,
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