‘The forest is my church’: Christianity, secularisation and love of nature in a northern European existential field

ABSTRACT

This article employs ethnographic material from Sweden and Estonia to examine the relationship between religion and the love of nature in Northern Europe – a region known for its widespread secularisation. We propose that the existential depth that is often ascribed to nature experiences in this part of the world points to a facet of the secularisation process, indicating that love of nature among today's Northern Europeans is deeply entangled with the processes of modernisation. The article provides a historical analysis of how this phenomenon arose and explores ways of approaching it that move beyond the religious-secular dichotomy. It concludes by construing love of nature as belonging to an ‘existential field’ in the Northern European cultural landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Nature
• secularisation
• existential field
• secular-religious dichotomy
• nature religion
• environmentalism

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the reviewers and editors Steven Engler and Michael Stausberg, for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Approximately 30% of Norway and 50–70% of Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Finland are covered by forest (WBOD 2022).

2 This research project was approved by the regional ethics committee in Stockholm on 15 February 2018, document number 2017/2540-31/5.

3 Similar to our findings, Bramadat (2022) has dismissed ‘spiritual’ as making people ‘wince because it is so associated with pagan, new age, and 1970s connotations’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Baltic Sea Foundation's grant, ‘Relocation of Transcendence: the Sacred of the Seculars around the Baltic Sea’; the Estonian Research Council grant, ‘Estonian Environmentalism in the 20th Century: Ideology, Discourses, Practices’ (PRG 908), Templeton Foundation grant ‘Understanding Unbelief in Estonia’, and the EEA Financial Mechanism Baltic Research Programme in Estonia (EMP340).

Notes on contributors

David Thurfjell

David Thurfjell is a historian of religions and a Study of Religions professor at Södertörn University in Stockholm. He has published widely and led several research projects in the fields of Islamic, Romani and secularity studies. His present research concerns religion and secularity in Scandinavia. Among his publications are the monographs Living Shi’ism (Brill 2006), Faith and Revivalism in a Nordic Romani Community (Tauris 2011), Godless People (Norstedts 2015) and People of the Spruce Woods (Norstedts 2020).

Atko Remmel

Atko Remmel is assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tartu. He has published on secularisation, (non)religion and nature, historical and contemporary forms of nonreligion, the junctions of (non)religion and nationalism, and Soviet antireligious policy and atheist propaganda. He is one of the editors of the volume Freethought and Atheism in Central and Eastern Europe: The Development of Secularity and Non-Religion (Routledge, 2020).