'The forest is my church' : Christianity, secularisation and love of nature in a northern European existential field

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.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).