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Free keywords:
Cascadia; Pacific Northwest; religion; spirituality; nature; reverential
naturalism
Abstract:
Abstract
Sociologists, anthropologists, and others interested in the relationship between reli-
gion and contemporary society rely on conventional concepts such as religion, spirit-
uality, irreligion, religious “nones,” secularization, and secularity that are bequeathed
to us by previous generations of scholars. These are useful tools for our work, but
from time to time we encounter a movement, an epoch, or a region that might make
us question the adequacy of the concepts and methods we have inherited. In a major
ongoing interdisciplinary study of the “Cascadia” bioregion of the Pacific Northwest
of North America, I became convinced that the existing metaphors and tools at our
disposal limited our ability to see and interpret the data we were collecting. In this
Working Paper, I use the large data set my research team created to introduce the con-
cept of “reverential naturalism,” a broad and naturalized schema or metanarrative
which helps to explain the ways Cascadians think and talk about religion, spirituality,
and nature. Although this metanarrative arguably permeates what we might call the
dominant cultural rhetoric of the region, it is as yet so inchoate or subliminal that it
is not easy to articulate. Here I identify some of this schema’s main features. At the
end of this Working Paper, I address the ways in which this metanarrative generates
additional questions that will enrich future reflections on religion both in this region
and elsewhere
