‘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

Introduction

See the man stretching his arms

To the skies, over the lands

He needs no cathedrals

He has his temple where he stands

These metaphorical lines from Swedish singer Ulf Lundell's song Gå upp på klippan (Climb the Rock) from 1988, are representative of a recurring trope in the popular culture of Northern Europe (here defined as the Scandinavian countries plus Finland, Estonia and Latvia). This trope, which may be captured in the often-used phrase ‘the forest is my church’, reflects a notion that is widespread among the secular urban middle-class populations of these countries. Namely, that they today experience in nature what people previously experienced in the church. In other words, that it is in nature – and not in traditional religion – that they find a sense of sacredness, authenticity, purpose and stillness, qualities that they imagine that religious people get out of their religion.

In Northern Europe, the forest is my church-trope is expressed by innumerous public figures, poets, authors, pop-stars and athletes (Thurfjell 2020). It is also a theme that frequently appears in our interview material. As we have interviewed people who self-identify as secular about religion, they often speak about their relationship to nature. Similarly, in our interviews about people's relation to nature, religion-related topics often come up. It seems, then, that when the work-week is over, today's Swedes and Estonians proceed, not to the church, but to the forests, mountains, rivers and seasides; and when these allegedly secularised Northern Europeans claim to have had a spiritual experience, it is largely in these natural surroundings – and especially in the forest – that this experience has taken place.¹

When we ask Jaan, a 35-year-old secular Estonian about his relation to the forest, he expresses some kind of astonishment over his own feelings on the matter: ‘This is a topic that I can’t explain well’, he says hesitantly, ‘but if we talk about religion, then I would say that my church is in the forest’.

In this article, our ambition is not to prove that the forest is my church-trope exists, but to explore what it means. What, we ask, does it actually mean when our interviewees – often somewhat offhandedly – associate their relation to nature with religion? And how did this association develop historically? For us, then, expressions such as ‘the forest is my church’ denote an emotional appreciation of nature with existential connotations. The exact wording through which it is expressed may of course vary, and the exact expression ‘the forest is my church’ should be seen as our etic caption summarising a set of ideas and feelings repeatedly expressed in our material. Since the landscape typically encountered by people in these countries tends to be forested, this natural setting serves as the equivalent of nature in this article.

The prevalence of an existentially-imbued type of nature love within Northern European culture is confirmed by previous research (af Buren 2015; Ahmadi and Ahmadi 2015; Sidenvall 2010; Thurfjell 2015, 2020; Thurfjell et al. 2019; Uddenberg 1995). Surveys conducted to identify the reasons people frequent natural environments have found that the existential dimension is prominent, and that most individuals consider nature to be ‘sacred, animated, and inviolable’. Many report frequenting nature to ‘feel a connection to the greater contexts of existence (tillvarons sammanhang)’ or to capture a feeling of ‘reverence for nature and the vulnerability of being human’ (Uddenberg 1995). Several studies, also from outside of Europe, indicate that when secular people are asked to recall moving, profound or meaningful experiences they especially point to nature (Bramadat 2022; Caldwell-Harris et al. 2011; Preston and Shin 2017). It can be said with some confidence that for a majority of post-Lutheran Northern Europeans, nature has become a favoured milieu for sacred experience and existential contemplation.

This article aims to explore the relationship between religion, secularisation and such existentially-imbued love of nature in Northern Europe. In order to do so, we begin by analysing interviews conducted with a number of Northern European forest visitors so as to discover recurring themes in the way they describe their forest experiences. We then focus on how their descriptions associatively connect to religion and undertake a historical analysis of how this connection is linked to processes of modernisation. We conclude with a discussion that relates our specific findings to the general discourse on religion and secularity within the Study of Religions. It should be mentioned that while several studies indicate that secular urban people have similar experiences all over the world (Bramadat 2022), the geographical scope of this article is limited to Northern Europe.

Ethnographic material

Between the years 2018 and 2020, we conducted 142 semi-structured interviews of various lengths: 72 in Sweden; and 70 in Estonia.² Our participants were primarily urban secular middle-class people that were in the habit of frequenting forests. Some were directly approached in central Swedish and southern Estonian forest areas, whereas others were recruited in other places and by other means. It should be emphasised that the interlocutors belong to the urban mainstream of the population and that the forests they visit primarily are of the recreational type that are kept accessible close to cities. Other members of our research team conducted similar interviews in Denmark, Norway and Finland, the results of which also have informed our analysis. With regard to our Swedish and Estonian participants, although we do not know the extent to which they are representative of their populations, we have utilised their responses as both points of departure and illustrations of our various assertions.

While approaching our interlocutors, we presented our study as anthropological in order to avoid prompting overly religious responses to our questions. Our interviews generally began with a broad question pertaining to the role of the forest in the participant's life – typically, ‘What brings you to the forest?’ or ‘What do you get from coming here?’ The answers to these questions were often associative and fragmented, leading in a number of directions; our aim was to follow up on all such associations. In some cases, we asked the participants to reflect further on aspects of their forest encounters that related to personal experiences. Here it can be noted that our interviews contained a great variety of themes. When asked about their forest experiences our participants also broached topics that were not relevant in terms of the particular aims of this article – e.g., politics, sports, forest management, road construction, etc. While our participants mentioned a number of instrumental reasons for frequenting the forest (socialising with friends and family, physical exercise, berry picking, etc.), we found that their described experiences also contained an existential dimension. By this, we mean that they had a personal, meaningful and deeply felt side to them. In our analysis, we were able to identify seven recurring themes that provide a reasonable summary of what the forest means to our interlocutors on a personal and an experiential level. Let us say something brief about each of these:

• (1) Beauty

In answering questions about the experience of wandering in a forest, our participants’ most oft-repeated reply revolved around aesthetical descriptions – e.g., ‘beguiling’, ‘wonderful’, ‘wildly beautiful’, and so forth. The aesthetic or sensorial pleasure derived from their experience of the forest's natural beauty is connected to phenomena such as its shifting colours and light, the touch of bark, the scent of moss, the moisture of the rain, the sound of the breeze in the aspen trees, the feeling of cold air, wind or sunlight on the face, etc. All such phenomena are said to provide an aesthetic experience that is highly rewarding.

• (2) Peace and solitude

The second most recurrent theme is that of peace, silence and solitude – features that are often juxtaposed with contemporary urban life, which is described as hectic, stressful, emotionally exhausting, and ‘unnatural’. In contrast, most participants repeatedly depict the forest as peaceful, calming, still and serene – a place that enables them to ‘settle down’, ‘de-stress’, and ‘rest [the] mind’, affording time to contemplate, meditate and ‘recharge [their] batteries’.

• (3) Dissolution of sorrows

Many participants also describe the forest as a place that contains an atmosphere which is highly conducive for reflection on one's relationships, problems, and sorrows in life – enabling one to put such matters into perspective and understand how to handle them. The vastness and stillness of the forest, the rustling of the wind in the trees, the sense of security, etc. somehow bring comfort and allow for the unburdening of one's personal baggage. In this mood, the trees are perceived to be caring, loving, tolerant beings, in whose presence it is possible to relax and repose – or, in the alternative, to exhibit one's grief or cry.

• (4) A sense of connection

Our participants often mention that an important aspect of their forest experience entails the sense of connection they feel with the surrounding environment – and especially with the trees, both generally and in terms of a specific species, or even a particular tree. Many also report being filled with a feeling of oneness with the universe, with a sense of its vastness and their own insignificance. These sorts of perceptions (or existential insights) are described by some participants as causing them to reflect upon their own place in the world. Encounters with animals are often mentioned as intermezzos that both heighten this feeling and make their forest sojourns more interesting.

• (5) A sense of authenticity

Many of our participants perceive the forest as authentic in that it is seen as a ‘genuine’ natural creation, original in form, and wholly unspoiled by contemporary urban culture – the ‘really real’ thing, as one participant put it. Additionally, since rural life in general links to national and other identity narratives, nature's perceived authenticity sometimes connects to the endeavour to identify ‘one's own roots’, ‘one's natural habitat’ – that place where ‘I can really be me’. In combination, these two ways of perceiving nature's authenticity sometimes give rise to an eco-nationalist ideology that connects environmental protection to the preservation of national culture (Remmel and Jonuks 2021). Such eco-nationalist sentiments were particularly expressed by our Estonian participants.

• (6) A connection to childhood

When asked to describe their relation to the forest, many of our participants responded with recollections of positive childhood experiences and feelings – e.g., playing in the forest with friends or siblings, visiting the forest with parents or grandparents, and so forth. For them, in other words, visiting the forest in the present becomes a way of reliving the experiences of the past – of unlocking memories and feelings, of returning to the scenery and moods of childhood. This tendency indicates that in describing their forest experiences, our participants sometimes present romanticised notions of the imagined forest of their childhood rather than forest before their eyes.

• (7) An experience of a different world

For many of our participants, the forest experience is imbued with an atmosphere associated with fairy tales and folklore. The notion that the forest is ‘like a different world’ seems to connect to experiences of such allure and enchantment. Moreover, our participants sometimes express an animistic view of trees, speaking of them as persons with caring and energetic qualities.

Many psychological studies of nature experiences (Bethelmy and Corraliza 2019; Farias et al. 2019; Vining and Merrick 2012) refer to feelings of awe or an experience of the sublime as defining features. Here it should be noted that our participants only very rarely spoke of their forest experiences in such terms; on the contrary, these sorts of dramatic descriptions are strikingly absent from our material. Indeed, if they exist at all, they usually refer to forests experienced in other countries rather than the local woods visited each day. One may say that, the ‘church’ of the forest is my church-trope seems more a small, homey chapel than a large, magnificent cathedral.

It should be mentioned that there are some minor differences between our Estonian and Swedish interlocutors, particularly with regard to vocabulary, level of detail in the style of expression. The Swedes are often more elaborate and seem to be more ready to use religious vocabulary than the Estonians. This difference can probably be explained by the impact of Soviet anti-religious policies that abruptly cut off religious socialisation in Estonia since the 1960s (Remmel 2019). In the following discussion, we will, however, disregard of these national differences.

Connections to religion

How, then, does the love of nature expressed through these seven themes, relate to religion? Needless to say, most of the activities performed in the forest, and many of the things that are experienced there, simply have no obvious connection to the religious sphere – neither in our participants’ understandings nor in our analysis. We have, however, discovered that our participants sometimes do associate their nature experiences with religion in differing ways. These associations are discursive insofar as they take place explicitly on the level of language and implicitly in the categorisation of reality that language communicates. It is quite clear that when talking of religion, our interlocutors refer to an Abrahamic organised religion template that in Northern Europe has primarily been represented by the Lutheran church. We have found it fruitful to single out seven types of associations:

• (1) A negative association to religion at large

Some of our participants are prone to characterise their nature experiences in contrast to aspects of organised religion that they oppose. Organised religion, in particular, is often associated with dogmatism and indoctrination, while nature is viewed as a domain of freedom and independence. Malin, a graphic designer born in the 1970s, is one of many that express this point of view. During regular walks through the recreational forests bordering her suburban Stockholm neighbourhood, she sometimes stops to lie upon the moss, feeling her problems dissolve as she immerses herself in the ‘loving care’ of the trees that surround her. Malin explains that at such times it feels as if she is connecting ‘to the great river underneath it all’ – an experience she clearly differentiates from that of organised religion. ‘Oh no, no’, she exclaims, ‘religion is like a cage, but this is about … being free and thinking freely’.

• (2) An ambiguous association to the church

There is an interesting ambiguity hidden in the way many of our participants employ the word ‘church’ in relation to the forest is my church-trope. It appears to consist of two implicit and somewhat contradictory beliefs: (1) the belief that one's own experience in nature is to some degree similar to that which previous generations of Christians experienced in church and (2) the belief that the church has been supplanted today by nature, and thus is no longer needed – a view that results in the distancing of oneself from that institution. Anna, a 50-year-old artist, serves as an example of someone that holds this perspective. When we met her in her forest cottage, she stressed that ‘if you have a forest, you don't need a church’. She then went on to characterise the church as something ‘irrelevant’, ‘something completely different’. The ambiguity is clear in these statements. The forest is said to have replaced the church, but this implies that at some point in history, the church gave to its congregations something similar to that which she now receives from the forest.

• (3) A positive association to pre-Christian religion

Our participants are often seen distancing themselves from the Christian church, which some of them accuse of having spoiled humankind's ancient purity and connectedness to nature. Some of them also hold a very idealistic view of pre-Christian life, which they describe as a by-gone golden age when our predecessors lived in harmony with their surroundings. Marta, a 45-year-old teacher, explains that although she herself does not have a direct connection to neo-pagan movement maausk (literally: Earth Belief) which advertises itself as a continuation of the animistic pre-Christian religion, she nonetheless feels her forest visits to be an inherent part of being Estonian.

• (4) A differing association to religious ethics

At times our participants speak about their relation to nature in ethical terms. For example, they may express feeling a moral obligation towards other species or a sense of moral guilt over their own and humanity's exploitation of nature. These types of feelings are expressed most often in strictly political terms, although some participants couch their responses in religious terms as well. With regard to religious connotations, responses may be both positive (as in pagan life being more eco-friendly) and negative (as in placing blame on Christianity for the environmental crisis). Sten, a nurse born in the 1970s, notes:

Everything is so different in our society now when we talk about the ecological crisis. In the old pagan days, when we were hunters and gatherers, we were givers. Now we are takers – we take more from nature than we give back. But deep inside, I think we are still the way we used to be.

• (5) An association to religious terminology

Just as the word ‘church’ has been used to describe the role of the forest in people's lives, other religion-related words have been used as well. Words such as ‘sacred’, ‘holy’, ‘religious’ and ‘magical’, for example, are commonly used to denote the specific feeling people have for their preferred natural habitat. When such expressions are employed, however, our participants regularly indicate that they are not entirely comfortable with their usage. Thus they introduce alternate phrases – or even qualifying gestures – in order to distance themselves from religious-sounding depictions of their forest experience. The use of expressions like ‘almost sacred’ or ‘sort of religious’ are prevalent in this regard, as is the use of ‘air quotes’, rolled eyes, and sarcastic intonations. It is interesting to note that the references to God or metaphysical references to transcendence were extremely rare.

• (6) An association to religious aesthetics

When our participants attempt to describe things that they appreciate about nature, they often rely on religious aesthetics – e.g., discussing nature in terms of its ‘mystical’ qualities or equating the beauty of a forest path with the beauty found inside a church. Participants are also found making religious comparisons that are architectural in type, as when a rock is compared to ‘an altar’ or the forest is characterised as a ‘cathedral’, ‘temple’, or ‘pillar hall’. Additionally, they are found describing their experience of the forest in terms of religious or mysterious ambiances such as ‘dimness’, ‘stillness’ or ‘absolute silence’.

• (7) An association to Protestant introspection

Finally, our participants’ tendency to spend time in the forest pondering deeply felt existential questions may also be something that triggers their association to religion. For them, the forest is a place of refuge – that place to go when there is a need for solitude and contemplation. They also link the forest to what they view as their most personal and existentially important feelings. To employ a Protestant theological expression, the forest is connected to their ‘ultimate concern’. That is why many mention wanting to have a nature-related symbol on their gravestone or to be buried in a forest-like park. As a space that is especially conducive to profound meditation on matters of great existential concern, the forest seems to play a role similar to that of a Protestant church.

Historical analysis: love of nature as a facet of modernity

How then do the love of nature and the forest is my church-trope fit into the larger picture of Northern European culture, how did they develop historically, and how do they relate to secularisation? Here we suggest that Northern Europeans’ love for nature as well as their associative connection of the forest with the church has developed alongside the societal and intellectual processes generally referred to as modernisation. Modernisation is usually conceived as a complex process of societal development consisting of a number of intertwined transformations regarding both the organisation of society and the mindset of its people.

Scholars have fashioned a variety of names by which to identify the specific sub-processes involved in modernisation (Pollack 2015). On a societal level, the sub-processes that have been thus far pinpointed include: differentiation (Berger 1967; Bruce 2016); disembeddedment (Giddens 1991); autonomisation (Wilson 1969); rationalisation (Berger 1967; Wilson 1982); societalisation (Wilson 1976); privatisation (Berger 1967; Luckmann 1967); disenchantment (Weber [1920] 1971); and, economic growth and the increase of existential security (Norris and Inglehart 2004). On the level of individual mindset and worldview, a long list of concepts includes pluralisation (Martin 1978), relativisation (Berger 1967), individualisation (Bellah et al. 1985), and bricolage (Luckmann 1979).

In their role vis-à-vis religion, these processes are generally considered driving forces of secularisation. They are also considered the reasons that, over the last three centuries, religious practices, ideas and institutions have been marginalised in society as well as in the lives of Europeans (Brown 2001; Bruce 2002). Some scholars, however, have interpreted these processes as having led to religious change rather than marginalisation (Davie 2000).

The role of nature has been largely overlooked in these discussions – something we are obviously attempting to redress in this article. Next, we present five societal transformations associated with modernisation and show how these connect to both secularisation and the growth of the love of nature. It should be mentioned that these transformations of course are far more complex developments than we will be able to give justice to in these brief summaries. Our ambition is to provide a condensed presentation of certain themes, and we are aware of the risk of stereotyping.

• (1) Industrialisation and urbanisation

The disintegration of the old self-sustaining society and the growth of city-centred modern industries broke existing social (including religious) bonds. If religion had been a sacred canopy that held the old society together, it is argued, that role was lost over time as the former society was gradually supplanted by the new one. Another distinguishing feature of industrialised city life is that it afforded the individual more leisure time as well as more options regarding how that time might be spent; this, in turn, led to a greater focus on quality-of-life issues and the exploration of experiences (Brown 1988; McLeod 2000, 7).

How, then, did nature become associated with the existential in this process? For one thing, urbanisation had the effect of distancing (or removing) more and more people from immediate contact with nature. It has been pointed out that this development gave rise to a certain spiritual alienation as people felt they had been reduced to mere means of production (Ducarme and Couvet 2020). Our point here is that it was this separation that enabled a romanticised appreciation of nature to flourish. Reacting against industrialisation's scientific rationalism, the romantics viewed ‘going back to nature’ as a solution. Nature, for the newly urbanised, came to be associated with childhood memories, and thus charged with feelings of nostalgia. In other words, the love for nature exhibited by modern Nordic people did not develop as a result of their closeness to nature, as one might presume, but rather because of their increasing detachment from it (Thurfjell 2020).

A prerequisite for this particular outcome was the newly developed infrastructure for sporadic leisure contact with nature. The physical distance from nature that urbanisation entailed necessitated an infrastructure that made nature accessible once again. Data from Estonia indicates that in the wake of urbanisation, three developments were particularly important to re-establishing the relationship between urban populations and nature: (1) the development of the means of transportation, both public and private; (2) the development of the five-day work week, which ensured that free time became available and (3) the development of designated nature routes, which enabled people to obtain quick, safe nature experiences (Remmel and Jonuks 2021). All these were the results of urbanisation and industrial development.

• (2) Increasing wealth and security of the middle class

The second societal transformation relates to wealth. Industrialised city life also brought increased affluence and security to Northern European societies, making possible a number of societal, cultural and intellectual changes. Political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have argued that increased wealth and security lead to a weakening of religious values because they offer the possibility of this-world fulfilment, making people less inclined to turn their hopes towards the hereafter. Although this theory has become more nuanced in the light of new data, evidence conclusively shows that existential security has led to a decline of religion, at least in many of the world's post-industrial countries (Norris and Inglehart 2015). In the aftermath of WWII, the Nordic (and especially the Scandinavian) countries evolved to become some of the most affluent, stable and socially secure welfare societies in the world (OECD 2020). Given this, it is not unreasonable to assume that this transformation helped bring about the marginalisation of religion, now a prominent feature of these countries.

The increased wealth generated by the industrial system also led to the growth of an increasingly prosperous and educated middle class as well as to the flourishing of urban bourgeois culture, which had existed in Nordic societies since at least the seventeenth century. Indeed traces of such a culture can be seen in the poetry and the art from those previous centuries. After the Enlightenment, the sacralisation of nature became an important theme in the poetry and thinking of the urban bourgeoisie. For example, first nature and then majestic phenomena like waterfalls, steep mountains and thunder storms began to be referred to as sublime manifestations of the divine (Merchant 2003, 107–108). During the twentieth century, this romantic culture of nature sacralisation spread within an expanding middle class. Today, the middle class constitutes the vast majority of the populations in Nordic countries (Vaughan-Whitehead 2016), and it is within this growing substratum that love of nature has become widespread.

The sense of existential security generated by the new affluence was likely among the factors that made this romance with nature possible. Individuals that enjoy a rich, secure urban life are more inclined to appreciate the beauty of a landscape than those that must interact (and sometimes contend) with that landscape in order to survive (Norris and Inglehart 2004). Indeed, within the framework of Maslow's famous hierarchy, when lower-level needs have been met, people are then able to concentrate on higher-level concerns such as self-actualisation – e.g., through caring for and protecting the environment. This point is well illustrated by the global rise of environmentalism in the 1960s, which of course was a response to environmental degradation, but which also came as a result of the increased levels of education and affluence that followed the economic recovery after WWII (Longhofer and Schofer 2010; Nawrotzki et al. 2014; Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007).

• (3) The taming of nature

Scientific and industrial advances as well as the subsequent rise of existential security made it possible for modern urban populations to appreciate the beauty of the natural world for its own sake, largely because under these new conditions nature was no longer perceived as a primary threat to human survival. Thus it stands to reason that landscape painting first emerged as a major genre in Holland, a country that owes its very existence to the human control of nature (Bowie 2003, 167; Sorčan 2018). The ‘taming’ of nature also had theological implications. Previously, nature had been seen as a manifestation of God's magnificence; then, as a result of Cartesian thinking, that notion was replaced by a physicalistic understanding that subsequently led to secular cosmology (Bowie 2003, 33). Thus we can speak of the internal secularisation of nature due to the influence of (natural) science as a main source of disenchantment (Weber [1920] 1971). Nature as God's epiphany relied upon sublimity, whereas in the late eighteenth century, sublimity was transferred to nature itself and thus became a more secular aesthetics, making way for Romanticism's nature worship (Brady 2013, 38–39). Through this shift, nature became a setting, a backdrop, a spatial and physical mise-en-scéne (Porphyrios 1982, 62).

Historical material indicates that from this point onward – i.e., over the last 200 years – nature's image changed from negative or neutral to largely positive (Remmel and Jonuks 2021; Thurfjell 2020, 16). The earlier understanding of nature as either a utilitarian resource or a hostile environment was replaced by two dominating perspectives: (1) nature seen as a rare resource that requires protection, which stems from the environmentalist narrative and (2) nature seen as representing that which is ‘authentic’, which stems from the Romanticist narrative.

Connecting these discussions to our interviews, we can note that among our participants, nature is almost always perceived as a benevolent domain. When they came across forest fauna during their forest wanderings, for example, our participants regarded such encounters not as potential threats, but rather as peak moments of the entire experience. The only reported occasion associated with negative feelings was that of becoming lost in the woods; this unfortunate circumstance, however, was downplayed by reference to GPS tracking.

These discursive changes have made nature attractive to a wide range of fields, from nationalism to tourism to marketing to the energy and fuel industry – as indicated by the wide use of ‘ecological’ merchandise as well as the excessive use of the colour green in advertising.

• (4) Individualisation and the search for an authentic self

Individualism was a most prominent feature of the new urban middle-class culture that spread in the twentieth century. Put more broadly, the rise of individualism was due to a societal process in which the collective structures of a self-sustaining agricultural economy were replaced by an industrial economic system that called for individual workers. Within industrial societies, the old collective identities became obsolete, and thus the self-understanding, ethics and religious worldviews that were connected to those identities lost their raison d’être. This development made room for the elevation of individual preferences, identities and emotions as well as a middle-class culture characterised by self-realisation and consumerism. The view of the self that emerged from this process has been sometimes referred to as emotivist, referring to the notion that feeling is the most potent and real aspect of the self. The inclination towards spontaneous and expressive self-revelation, which this view promotes, correlates with the collapse of reliable institutional frameworks offering meaning and comfort (Lindholm 2008, 65).

There were a number of reasons that the individualist-emotivist culture became instrumental in making love of nature a recognisable feature of modern urban life. Firstly, it strengthened people's inclination to cultivate individual emotional experiences and to seek places outside of the collectively defined spaces to discover and develop their own individuality. Secondly, it encouraged a longing for authenticity – a new form of sacredness that appeared alongside the religious and in many ways started to replace it (Lindholm 2002). Modern urban life created affluence and security, but it also severed people from their old rural lifestyles and environments. Because of this, modern societies came under attack from several ideological viewpoints, all of which held in common the belief that modern urban life was less authentic. On the right of the political spectrum, this manifested as conservatism and nostalgia, while on the left it manifested as the notion of alienation. In general, it can be said that a feeling grew among urban populations that modern life was superficial and inauthentic in a way that the rural life of previous generations had not been. On an individual level, the longing for authenticity was mirrored in the effort to discover and express an authentic self – a true inner person, untainted by the falsehoods of modern life. In other words, for modern urban individualists, personal development involved discovering one's true inner self – i.e., becoming authentic (cf. Heelas 2008, 30). Moreover, since nature was perceived to be the most authentic thing, the search for one's inner authenticity intuitively turned to the forests, fields and streams of the natural world, where authenticity was literally everywhere to be seen, touched, felt and heard (see also Hanegraaff 1998).

Thus urbanisation, affluence, and individualism help to explain why modern urban Northern Europeans intuitively turned to nature as a positively charged space where persons could go to discover their authentic self. But why did they connect this to religion? To understand this, we need to see how the meaning of religion changed over this period of time.

• (5) Differentiation and the spiritualisation of religion

The final societal transformation that we want to point out concerns language and the changing conception of religion itself. Generally speaking, it can be said that over the course of the twentieth century, the role and meaning of religion became narrowed in Northern European public discourse. This development is linked to an aspect of modernisation often referred to as differentiation, and sometimes as segmentation, rationalisation or disembeddedment. It has been argued that modernity created a functional and structural separation of various societal spheres that once had been intertwined – e.g., science, economics, medicine, the family, and so on (Wilson 1982). With differentiation, all these spheres became disentangled, and hence autonomous. The same thing happened with religion, which in the nineteenth century became a separate sphere of life rather than the overarching system it once had been. In the Northern European countries, this process can be seen in the gradual dismantling of the Lutheran state churches. In Sweden, for example, the Lutheran Church functioned as the main bureaucratic apparatus of the state. In addition to its ceremonial and theological functions, it was responsible for the administration of justice, education and welfare, among many other things. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards this role began to change as the Church was step-by-step deprived of all its official functions, leading to the complete abolishment of the state church system in the year 2000.

The constriction of the Church's official functions coincided with the narrowing of the meaning of religion. As such, Christianity in Nordic countries became less and less an inclusive category that encompassed all aspects of life and more and more a narrow sphere centred around existential questions and faith. Through this process, religion became ‘religious’ – i.e., a faith- and emotion-centred separate sphere of life that provided answers to ‘ultimate’ questions.

There are many historical explanations regarding why the new differentiated concept of religion became centred on existential questions and faith. The foremost reason is probably the impact of Protestant theology. In the Northern European countries, the Lutheran state churches had been promoting a faith-centred understanding of Christianity since the time of the Reformation. Perhaps even more significant than this is the fact that waves of Christian revivalists had regularly swept through these countries since the late seventeenth century. As such, movements like Pietism, Herrnhutism, Baptism and Pentecostalism have had a powerful impact in terms of shaping the popular image of what religion in general and Christianity in particular is supposed to be about. And, as compellingly expressed in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, one's inner feeling is of pivotal importance in this new existentially-oriented, faith-based form of religion.

The discursive narrowing of the concept of religion facilitated the emergence of two new categories: the secular and the spiritual. The same discursive logic that evolved before, during and after the Enlightenment, and that eventually relegated religion to a separate sphere of life, also gave rise to the concept of ‘the secular’ as a neutral realm in relation to religion (Fitzgerald 2007, 6; Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2020). This category was soon accompanied by another, the spiritual, which in the new discursive climate challenged the boundaries between the secular and the religious (van der Veer 2014). According to Huss (2014) ‘the spiritual’ has supplanted ‘religion’ as the new ‘ur-concept’ by the beginning of twenty-first century. It is believed to be present both within and outside of religion, thus enabling ‘the formation of new lifestyles, social practices, and cultural artefacts’ that are neither religious nor secular by definition. The appearance of these new concepts also enabled their amalgamation, thus facilitating the spread of diverse secular spiritualities – that is, existentially-oriented spheres of life that exist outside the sphere of institutionalised religion.

Here it can be added that conceptualising religion as a separate and distinct category also led to what might be called touristification (Stausberg 2011, 64–68). Religion, in other words, could now be looked upon as something to be viewed as one might view a painting or a statue in a museum, taken or left to whatever degree one chooses. Our relationship with nature followed along similar lines. In the wake of urbanisation, nature itself became a separate domain – one that could be approached from the outside and beheld with the gaze of a tourist (Thurfjell 2020).

Discussion: an existential field

So far, we have provided a description of the existentially imbued love of nature found among secular people in contemporary Northern Europe, summarised by us as the forest is my church-trope, and which is characterised by a number of recurring features. We have also presented a structured analysis of the ambiguous ways in which our participants have experientially and discursively connected their love for nature to religion. In addition, we have provided a historical analysis suggesting that this love developed as a facet of modernisation and as a consequence of urbanisation, increased wealth and individualism. Our conclusion is, that the same processes that contributed to the marginalisation of institutional Christianity also contributed to the rise of nature as an existential resource, hence interrelating it with secularisation. The discourses surrounding both religion and nature were synchronically changed in ways that caused them to now appear within the same domain.

The entanglements of nature and religion have previously been addressed by scholars mainly in two ways. The first interprets the constellations of nature and religion in terms of the religion/secular dichotomy. Here, mushroom picking, picnicking, mountain biking, kayaking and other nature-related practices are treated as rituals or elements of lived religion, and the sense of sacredness that people are found to experience in nature justifies categorising that whole domain under the label of ‘religion’ (e.g., Sanford 2007; critiqued by Ramey 2015). Similarly, authors that focus on the history of environmentalism (Ivakhiv 2017; Morriss and Cramer 2009 and others) have noted the Christian roots of contemporary environmental ethics, and address environmentalism as a secular(ised) form of Christianity. ‘Environmentalism’, to quote Robert Nelson ‘is Calvinism minus God’ (2011, 195).

However, scholars engaged in the study of secularisation have noted that the view of a linear change from the religious to the secular is overly simplified: rather than being seen as something that simply disappears in the wake of secularisation, religion is seen in more complex terms as something that changes in nebulous ways as the discursive categories and institutions that surround it are renegotiated (Ammerman 2007; Heelas and Woodhead 2005). Scholarship on nonreligion also has emphasised the artificiality of these classifications since the bulk of this field's empirical findings seem to fit neither religious nor secular categories.

Thus, one way to address nature and religion is represented by scholars, who have found that their empirical material transcends the dualistic religion-secular divide. Their solution is to define their material as ‘both/and’. The examples include nature religions (Albanese 1991), eco-spiritualities or nature spiritualities and (dark) green religions/spiritualities (Taylor 2009), with reverential naturalism (Bramadat 2022) as the latest addition.

In line with this research, our empirical material also indicates that our interlocutors´ love of nature is neither religious nor secular and we hence conclude that it would be more fruitful to interpret their nature experiences in ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’ terms. For instance, our participants use both religious and secular references when attempting to describe their thoughts, feelings and practices with regard to nature. For our participants, the question of whether their love of nature is secular or religious is unimportant, and the analytical attempt to squeeze their experiences into one or the other – or for that matter into the spiritual box – is not helpful.³ Given this, it can be said that love of nature constitutes a form of meaning-making that intersects both these categories, but that their ambiguity and unwillingness to make strong assertions in either direction points to the conclusion that it is a field the borders of which follow delineations other than those suggested by religion-secular categories.

In order to conceptually address this type of findings, a growing number of scholars propose alternative concepts for the study of religion-related phenomena (Beaman and Stacey 2021; Lee 2015; Taves 2020; among many others). The present analysis is in keeping with this scholarly trend. We propose that the notion of ‘field’ is useful to pinpoint the domain where nature and religion is interfaced (cf. also Saler 1993, 2008, who argues for ‘family resemblances’). Here, we follow Quack and Schuh (2017) who, building on the notions of Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 94–114; for an alternative interpretation of Bourdieu's ‘field’, see Reeh 2013), employ the field metaphor to capture the nebulous character of the type of experiences we are dealing with here. For them, the field concept:

[Highlights] forces and relationships (viz. magnetic-field) where something is at stake and different agents compete with each other (viz. battle-field) according to a set of implicit ‘rules’ (viz. playing-field), where borders, positions and relations are constantly contested and renegotiated … Such a relational approach replaces substantialist questions on what is religion and nonreligion, and asks instead, e.g., how representatives of a religious field, those who oppose them, and commentators of such debates mutually constitute and shape each other's positions. (Quack and Schuh 2017, 11)

Thus the field notion serves to indicate both connection and competition. In a ‘religious field’, then, activities such as praying in a mosque or participating in a church service will be compared and contrasted – and will contend with each other on that field; similarly, in a ‘political field’, things like rallying for a party on the left and voting for a party on the right will compete. These fields define the semantic and cultural logic of a particular society as a relational domain without clear boundaries or fixed contents. It can be defined by actions, but it also can be discursive – as is largely the case with our ethnographic material.

We also build on Lois Lee (2015) who, in order to avoid the burdensome dichotomy of religion and secularity, has suggested the notion of ‘existential cultures’. The existential relates to questions of existence – i.e., to matters of life and death, to relations with loved ones, to health and beauty, to the problems, purposes and directions of life, and to the underlying meaning of it all. Although it connects to religion in a variety of direct and indirect ways, it does not have religion at its centre.

Combining the approaches of Quack, Schuh and Lee, we suggest the notion of ‘existential field’ as an analytical category to identify the domain in which our participants’ love of nature takes place. Within this field, nature experiences co-exist with religious, spiritual and secular matters. It contains (or cluster together) a variety of seemingly disparate phenomena, including frequenting the forest, sharing time with friends, doing yoga, visiting a psychotherapist, listening to classical music, attending a church service and so on – all framed within the context of caring for one's physical and spiritual (or, more widely, existential) health, pointing to the fact that the pervasive orientation of the existential field is that of wellbeing.

The identification of an existential field also highlights the role of health in contemporary religious and spiritual traditions. Indeed, as a result of the twentieth century rise of well-being culture, appreciation for nature has become deeply interconnected with physical and existential health. Wellbeing culture also has become deeply entangled with topics of religion and spirituality due to the influence of Eastern religious practices like yoga and Ayurveda, which in the Western context often lose their theological connection and become ‘secular’ health-related practices (Borup 2017; Peng-Keller 2019). Some scholars have even spoken of the market-oriented ‘healthification’ of religion (Borup 2017). In this process, religion's function is increasingly understood as that of promoting individual well-being. Many of our participants see the church as a last resort in case of physical or existential health-related problems, with some even arguing that the main reason to join a church is for the positive (existential) health benefits that this might entail. Thus, traditional Christianity has been recategorised as one of a number of existential health practices rather than as the exclusive provider of a particular worldview, a particular form of salvation, and so forth. This point may also be illustrated by the renewed interest and (re)invention of pilgrimages (Stausberg 2011, 55–68) as one of the many contemporary nature-related health practices, which highlights the ambiguous borders of religious and secular discourses (Sepp and Remmel 2020).

The ambiguity and health-relatedness are present in the two principal dimensions of our participants’ experience of the forest: (1) an existential dimension, in the sense that the forest provides meaning and well-being without the constraints of dogmatism – and largely without reference to the supernatural and (2) an apparent Christian dimension, in the sense that the forest somehow gives rise to perceptions and sentiments that are linked – sometimes positively and sometimes negatively – to that particular tradition. The forest is my church-trope compliments the Christian sanctuary, but also contains a dissatisfaction with the organised faith. In other words, the forest is a church not only because it constitutes a place of comfort, silence and solace, enabling persons to connect to their authentic inner self, but also because it is everything that the church is not. That is why our participants prefer Sunday walks in the forest to visiting an actual Christian church.

In this way, the discursive logic behind the forest is my church-trope becomes clear. Religion and nature carry similar functions: they both provide a connection to one's inner self, which affords existential security; and they both reduce anxiety and contribute to mental well-being, life satisfaction and a sense of meaningfulness. This comparison is made stronger by similar space-specific attributes: the visual similarities between the Gothic cathedral's vaulted ceilings and the forest's trees bending high above the visitor's head; the ambient similarities between the forest's silence and the silence inside a cathedral when visited during non-ceremonial hours.

As we noted, there are many instances in which the relationship between nature and religion can be described as symbiotic or ‘both/and’, as with ‘nature religions’ (Albanese 1991) or Christian environmentalist thought. However, in the mindset of our secular Northern European participants, the functional similarity of nature and the church places them into the same ‘existential marketplace’. Thus, the existential field also can be described in economic terms as a competitive market. As argued by Stolz et al. (2016), modernisation brought about an enormous diversification of society; and, as a result, religion was superseded by attractive secular alternatives to whatever it had previously provided. Spiritual (or, in our understanding, existential) needs are met by spiritual goods in a market governed by the interplay of supply and demand. Nature, in the eyes of our interlocutors, adds an alternative that is neither secular nor religious, an alternative that is free of Christian theological implications. This is also illustrated by Ferguson and Tamburello’s (2015) study of the relationship between low church adherence and the supply of ‘natural amenities’ such as beautiful landscapes and good weather. Although their analysis provides ambiguous results, they conclude that ‘natural amenities’ do indeed compete with traditional religious organisations, at least with regard to time and resources. In conversations with our participants, we similarly found that spending leisure time for the sake of personal well-being is the central element in discussions about religion, secularity and nature. From the perspective of our participants, nature has the advantage of offering authentic, positive ‘goods’ that come without the constraints of dogmatism.

Thus, it can be said that nature is in competition with institutions such as the church when it comes to fulfilling existential needs. This competition can be either direct (e.g., walking in the forest vs. attending mass) or indirect, but the role of nature as a competing ‘existential resource’ highlights its interrelatedness with the processes of secularisation.

The element of competition also connects with the academic discussion regarding how secularisation happens. There is a plethora of evidence indicating that the resilience of religion (or, for that matter, any tradition) is largely dependent on socialisation. People are socialised into their religiosity (as indeed to any social value system), and thus the decline of religion can be seen as a symptom of changed patterns of intergenerational socialisation (Voas 2020). While the discourse surrounding traditional religion in the secular culture of Northern Europe often involves a negative assessment (see Remmel and Friedenthal 2020; Thurfjell 2015), the discourse of a benevolent nature in need of our protection has been increasingly reproduced by the educational system and the general culture. As Nelson (2011) puts it, ‘Any similar proselytizing of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other historic religion would be strictly prohibited in these settings.’ What we are witnessing, then, is the diminishment of socialisation into ‘traditional’ religiosity and the increase of socialisation into a love of nature which is supported by the cultural narratives conveyed through upbringing, education, media, and public discourse.

Conclusion

In this article, we have used ethnographic material from Sweden and Estonia to explore the relationship between religion and love of nature among secular people. From the conversations with our interlocutors, we identified several recurring themes, which indicate that both nature and religion are perceived as deeply entangled with existential questions, but most importantly, with individual well-being. We have provided an analysis of how this entanglement historically developed and conclude that the existential qualities that often are ascribed to nature in this part of the world have developed historically as a specific facet of the process of modernisation. If we regard our participants as reflecting the state of mind in a secularised society, then the picture that emerges is not one of complete irrelevance of religion, but rather one of reordered categorisations. Where some aspects of traditional religion are rendered obsolete, others prevail or reappear beyond the religion-secular divide. We suggest that this situation can be conceptualised as a competitive existential marketplace and propose the concept ‘existential field’ to denote this shared area where different solutions to existential questions and problems appear.

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).

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).

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’.