Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality, and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest (UBC Press 2022) is the first research-driven book to address this complex transnational region. I was the Principal Investigator of this project. In this paper, I provide an account of: a) a pervasive default orientation we might call “reverential naturalism”; b) the decline of Christian denominations, and; c) counter-intuitive examples of spiritual and religious innovation, especially in putatively secular urban spaces. Second, I reach beyond the project data to address: a) the ways the much-celebrated spiritual openness associated with the region is related to neoliberal political and economic dynamics, and; b) the impact on the region of distinctive national norms evident in the different ways Canadian and US societies manage health care, political discourse, and racial politics. While previous work suggested that the region is an outlier, Religion at the Edge provides a compelling case that the region helps us understand other regions of North America and in fact other modern liberal democracies in which religion and spirituality are changing rapidly.