“Ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.” Job 12:7-8
Whatever you might think about religion in America, it remains a persistently spiritual society. Even many of those who leave churches behind continue to call themselves spiritual. A new study from the Pew Research Center reports that large majorities of Americans believe people have souls (86%) or believe in God or a universal spirit (83%). Seven out of ten U.S. adults identify as spiritual in some shape or form.
Defining spirituality is tricky; the word is amorphous by definition, slipping through your fingers just as you think you’ve captured it. “Belief in a spiritual realm” gets close, in the way it hints at or hopes for something beyond the material world. Many people explain spirituality through the lens of connection: connection with God, connection with their innermost selves, connection with ancestors, connection with fellow humans.
These examples are notably anthropocentric. But data shows that a growing number of Americans are also turning to nature for spiritual connection—particularly those who identify as spiritual but not religious (SBNR). By and large, SBNRs are not any more spiritual than their spiritual-and-religious counterparts. The difference is their perception of nature. In the natural world, SBNRs are far more likely to see spiritual forces at work.
To this group, spiritual energy can be encountered in the mountains, a grove of trees, or a river, and a relationship with the natural world is essential to their spiritual lives.
This divide between those who find meaning in nature and those who don’t piqued the curiosity of Megan Ulishney, a Catholic feminist theologian who teaches at Boston College. “To me, my religion and theology is something that really contributes to and provides a framework for my nature spirituality,” Ulishney says. Many major religions hold a theology of nature, she adds, or offer resources for approaching nature in a spiritual way. But according to major surveys, most people who consider themselves both spiritual and religious don’t see a strong link between the environment and their religious tradition.
Ulishney watched the rise of nature-based spirituality among the spiritual-but-not-religious set with interest, comparing it to her own sense that theology actually deepened her reverence for the earth. This led her to design a research project aimed at understanding why the American spiritual landscape is turning greener, and how people seek connection with the divine outside of church walls.
Greening spirituality
Ulishney chalks up the rise in nature-centered spirituality among SBNRs in part to our digital culture. “We spend so much time on screens. There’s all this research about rising mental health challenges, rising rates of anxiety and depression, and then all this accompanying research about the way nature affects us and has healing properties.”
As a professor, Ulishney has observed a tendency among her students to seek spiritual refreshment outdoors. Each semester she assigns them a project: develop your own spiritual practice. Many students choose to integrate nature into their practice. Beyond a sense of peace and connection, they tell Ulishney about the spiritual freedom they feel outdoors. “It doesn’t feel pressurized in any way,” she explains. “It’s not like: now you need to try to become more holy… it feels like a very pressure-free space to just kind of let your spirit expand, have some peace, some quiet, and some time away from the technology that we’re so connected to all the time.”
In addition to technology’s grip on our lives, secularism propels people out of churches and into the woods. “The quest for meaning does not disappear when one finds that the so-called world religions don’t offer compelling metaphysical explanations for existence,” says Bron Taylor, professor of Religion and Environmental Ethics at the University of Florida and author of Dark Green Religion.
“The impulse to view life itself as sacred in some way and worthy of reverence is a completely understandable human impulse.”
For those who adopt a naturalistic rather than a theological worldview, the world itself becomes a source of meaning. Across cultures, Taylor sees a growing recognition that humans can find spiritual fulfillment “in the awe and wonder and beauty and diversity of life on this planet.”
Church in the wild
For many years, Victoria Loorz wrestled to reconcile her theology and her spirituality. As a Christian pastor, she experienced God in relationship with the natural world. But those two things felt deeply disconnected within her religious context. “I had to ask, ‘Do I need to leave my religious tradition in order to be faithful to my spiritual reality?’ And as I dug into the Bible, I [realized], ‘No—it’s just I’ve had these lenses that overlooked it.’”
Loorz sees the relationship between love of God and love of nature as deeply embedded in the Christian scriptures. She points to all the leaders that God calls into the wild to prepare them for ministry: Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, Jesus. Through studying scripture, she also discovered language emphasizing the importance of the more-than-human world. “Every single time Jesus went to pray, the preposition that’s used is that Jesus went into, not in, the mountain or the wilderness or the garden,” Loorz says. “[Into] is not a locational word, it’s a relational word. He went into relationship with the wilderness to pray.”
Reconciling these two seemingly-disparate parts of her faith led Loorz to leave traditional architecture behind and start outdoor services for her church in Ojai, California. This became the first wild church in the Wild Church Network, which Loorz founded in 2016. The Center for Wild Spirituality soon followed, home to a two-year seminary program for those who feel “the call of the holy wild.” Seminarians come from varying faith traditions and spiritual backgrounds, but all are in the process of reconnecting their spirituality with the rest of the living world. Around forty percent affiliate with Christianity, including Loorz herself, albeit on the edges of “the Christ tradition.” At least half are SBNRs.
Since its founding, the Wild Church Network has expanded to include wild sanghas, wild temples, and other religious traditions. About half of churches in the network are led by lay people, those who aren’t clergy or ordained in any official capacity. These leaders range from therapists to academics to lawyers. Their role is less that of a pastor and more of a facilitator, guiding people to connect their longing for communion with the natural world.
Loorz sees Wild Churches as containers for holy encounters. They attract people who’ve long known that they can touch the numinous through encounters with wild places and other species, but have lacked the language or community to share this knowledge. Many Wild Church members have left institutional religion behind, but still long for a like-minded spiritual community. Regardless of their diverse religious or irreligious backgrounds, Loorz says that all Wild Church attendees share a sense of sacred connection to the more-than-human world.
“It's not like this is a new tradition, a new religion. It's a way of being alive and spiritually connected within any tradition,” says Loorz.
It’s a form of mysticism, of seeking union with the divine. “That’s really what the Wild Church experience is: an unmediated and yet held container to connect with the sacred, directly.”
An ethic of kinship
Although a causal relationship between spending time in nature and environmental action hasn’t been clearly demonstrated, it makes intuitive sense that someone with a spiritual connection to nature would be motivated to try to care for it. That link is something Ulishney hopes to study directly in her research. “This is one of the things I’m really interested in: Is there at least a correlation between people who would express a strong sense of nature spirituality and concrete actions that they’re doing to address the ecological crisis?”
Loorz believes there is. “You hear people say all the time that beneath the climate crisis, it’s a spiritual problem, right? Yes, we’ve got all these technological and legal problems—but underneath it is a spiritual problem, a worldview of disconnection.”
This worldview of disconnection, she says, leads to a lack of care for other species, which in turn opens the doorway to abuse and exploitation. Her hope for Wild Churches, and for anyone who finds spiritual renewal through communion with nature, is to recognize and reinvigorate the kinship between humans and all other life. To know, and eventually to love, the other members of our shared home.
“The beloved community extends beyond our own species,” says Loorz. “To think that it doesn’t is damaging not only to the earth, but to our own selves and our own spirituality in ways that we’re just awakening to again after being disconnected for so many generations.”
Annelise Jolley is a journalist and essayist who writes about place, food, ecology, and faith for outlets such as National Geographic, The Atavist, The Rumpus, and The Millions. Find her at annelisejolley.com.
