Nature religion

A nature religion is a religious movement that believes nature and the natural world is an embodiment of divinity, sacredness or spiritual power. Nature religions include indigenous religions practiced in various parts of the world by cultures who consider the environment to be imbued with spirits and other sacred entities. It also includes modern Pagan faiths, which are primarily concentrated in Europe and North America. The term "nature religion" was first coined by the American religious studies scholar Catherine Albanese, who used it in her work Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (1991), and she later went on to use it in other studies. After Albanese developed the term, it has been used by other academics working in the discipline. Catherine Albanese described nature religion as "a symbolic center and the cluster of beliefs, behaviours, and values that encircles it", deeming it to be useful for shining a light on aspects of history that are rarely viewed as religious. In a paper of his on the subject, the Canadian religious studies scholar Peter Beyer described "nature religion" as a "useful analytical abstraction" to refer to "any religious belief or practice in which devotees consider nature to be the embodiment of divinity, sacredness, transcendence, spiritual power, or whatever cognate term one wishes to use". He went on to note that in this way nature religion was not an "identifiable religious tradition" such as Buddhism or Christianity are, but that it instead covers "a range of religious and quasi-religious movements, groups and social networks whose participants may or may not identify with one of the many constructed religions of global society which referred to many other nature religion." Peter Beyer noted the existence of a series of common characteristics which he believed were shared by different nature religions. He remarked that although "one must be careful not to overgeneralise", he suspected that there were a series of features which "occur sufficiently often" in those nature religions known to recorded scholarship to constitute a pattern.