Today, I made my presentation at EASR 2024. Following the main topic of the conference, I demonstrated the “Ecology” chapter of my book. I was a little worried whether it would not offend some devout ecologists, but it was in fact very well received. We had a good conversation with a fairly large audience, and even my conclusion about the impossibility of defining religion (illustrated here by the case study of ecology as a secular religion) turned out to be less alarming than I’d expected. There were in fact many other scholars who seemed to be as skeptical about the religious-secular divide as I was. Most of them, however, preferred the terminology of “implicit religion”, which was a little surprise for me. Not because I hadn’t known the term before (or Edward Bailey, who coined it) but I didn’t realize how important it was for so many. If I’d known, I would have covered it more thoroughly in my own book, although I’m still not convinced that implicit religion is a less problematic concept than secular religion (or, for that matter, than “quasi”, “surrogate”, “intrinsic”, “remixed”, etc. religions). In any case, here is the short abstract of my presentation:
“While many religious traditions have (or can be re-interpreted as having) an ecological vision, there are also modern, secular forms of ecological thought and related movements which are sometimes described as ‘secular religions’, showing a substantive or functional analogy with their overtly religious counterparts. Such descriptions can be harshly critical, debunking the alleged “dogmatism” and “intolerance” of deep ecology, or ridiculing the ‘saints’ and ‘rituals’ of climate activism. On the other hand, there are some attempts which overtly declare that ecological thought should become something ‘like’ (even if not exactly as) a religion: an overarching code that requires a true conversion, with nature as a sacred entity at its center. Without such a basic transformation of human attitudes, the principles of ecology would remain shallow and without effect, especially when compared to the magnitude of the challenge.
The paper analyzes the discourse of these different approaches, using a concise set of examples from both scholarly literature and popular journalism from the 2010s to the present day. The scope of the investigation extends to mentions of ‘ecology’, ‘ecologism’, ‘environmentalism’, ‘climate activism’, ‘warmism’, and related topics such as ‘animal rights’, ‘vegetarianism’, and (ethical) ‘veganism’ in contemporary discourse, in connection with expressions like ‘secular religion’ and its synonyms (‘surrogate religion’, ‘secular faith’ or ‘cult’, etc.).
The prospective thesis is that both the negative and positive approaches – despite their different normative outlook – are right in suggesting that a radical ecological theory and practice is impossible without sharing some features of traditional religions: an idea of the sacred, a comprehensive worldview, a moral code, and at least some ritual and symbolic manifestations of commitment that bind the community together. What is more difficult to tell is whether the adjective ‘secular’ is needed at all in the discourse of such a ‘religion’. Or rather, whether the entire distinction between secular and genuine religions is not superfluous in the case of any sufficiently serious form of ecology.”
