The Rise of Religious Naturalism:
A New Public Theology of Sacred Nature
Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
Abstract
The Rise of Religious Naturalism: A New Public Theology of Sacred Nature explores the
emergence of Religious Naturalism (RN) as both a theological orientation and an
evolving cultural movement. Drawing on a genealogy that extends from Spinoza,
Emerson, and Dewey through Crosby, Goodenough, Wildman, Corrington, Hogue, and
Wheeler, the essay situates RN as a pluralistic tradition that grounds reverence,
meaning, and ethical commitment in the natural world without recourse to
supernaturalism. While RN has secured intellectual legitimacy through its Apollonian
emphasis on rational clarity, scientific credibility, and philosophical rigor, it has often
neglected the Dionysian dimensions of religion—ritual, ecstasy, embodiment, and
communal transformation. This paper argues that RN now stands at a crossroads: to
move from a worldview to a lived religion, it must integrate these missing dimensions.
The constructive proposal of Dionysian Religious Naturalism (DRN) addresses this
need, envisioning a public theology of sacred nature that weds intellectual seriousness
with embodied practice, ritual innovation, and ecological insurgency. DRN seeks to
cultivate a religion of sacred immanence adequate to the crises of the Anthropocene—
capable of inspiring reverence, sustaining communities, and animating movements for
planetary justice.
I. Introduction: The Return of Nature as Sacred
We are living through a profound spiritual transformation. Traditional religious
institutions across the Western world continue to decline, while ecological anxiety, social
fragmentation, inequality and various forms of oppression and discrimination and a
widespread search for meaning rise in their place (Taylor 2007; Pew Research Center
2023). Many people now find spiritual nourishment outside churches—on pilgrimage
trails, at climate protests, in forest shrines, during psychedelic retreats, and incommunities experimenting with new forms of ritual. This shifting landscape has paved
the way for Religious Naturalism (RN), a growing movement that reclaims the sacred
within the immanent, material world (Stone 2008).
i
Religious Naturalism is not a sect or creed but a pluralistic field of sensibilities . It seeks
to combine a scientific understanding of reality with spiritual depth, awe, and ethical
urgency ii
(Goodenough 1998; Crosby 2002). It deeply resonates with those disillusioned
by the excesses of supernaturalism yet unwilling to relinquish wonder, reverence, or a
iii
sense of the sacred . RN emerges as both a philosophical orientation and a lived,
evolving tradition—a response to the question: how do we live meaningfully and
reverently in a fully natural cosmos? iv
Contemporary RN thinkers have given shape to this response through diverse yet
overlapping contributions. Ursula Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998,
rev. 2023) elegantly translates molecular biology and evolutionary cosmology into
emotional, ritual, and ethical terms. Donald Crosby offers a tragic realism in works such
as A Religion of Nature (2002) and Living with Ambiguity (2008), grounding reverence
and obligation in nature’s generativity and finitude. Robert Corrington pushes RN into
ecstatic depths, exploring unconscious, erotic, and tragic dimensions of sacred
immanence (Corrington 2013). Michael Hogue (2010, 2018) connects RN to political
theology, public ethics, and planetary democracy, while Demian Wheeler (2020, 2021)
develops a historically grounded, pluralistic theology of sacred nature. Wesley Wildman
(2010, 2021) brings comparative and scientific rigor to RN’s metaphysics, exploring
consciousness, complexity, and religious evolution. Loyal Rue (2000, 2005) emphasizes
myth-making and narrative as indispensable to a naturalistic sacred, proposing the Epic
of Evolution as a binding cosmological story.
RN is not merely a theoretical stance but a cultural movement responding to our age of
ecological and spiritual precarity. It draws on scientific cosmology and evolutionary
theory as its foundational mythos (Rue 2000), affirming that our origin stories and
ethical commitments must be rooted in reality as understood by the natural sciences
(Goodenough 1998; Wildman 2010). Yet it also insists on ritual, symbol, and community
as essential components of religious life (Hogue 2010; Wheeler 2020). Without these,
naturalism risks becoming spiritually thin, offering cosmology without ceremony, ethics
without ecstasy.
At the same time, RN is marked by diversity and tension. It is a mosaic of approaches,
from Crosby’s metaphysical accounts to Stone’s minimalist openness, from Corrington’s
ecstatic depths to the ritual creativity of Naturalistic Pagans. These tensions mirror a
larger challenge: can a religion of nature be both intellectually credible and spirituallyvital? Can it satisfy reason while nourishing body, heart, and community (Hogue 2018;
Wheeler 2021)?
Religious Naturalism is arguably the dominant theological orientation among
contemporary Unitarian Universalists (UUs) . I estimate that about half of the 200,000 v UUs in the US are RN vii
. Once a haven for humanists, UU congregations have long
been hospitable to alternative conceptions of divinity and non-theistic spiritualities.
While the official stance of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) is one of
religious pluralism—open to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Pagans, and others
—RN receives only passing mention in official denominational theological texts. Yet
many of the leading figures in Religious Naturalist theology are either active members of
UU congregations or teach in UU-affiliated theological schools. This connection may
help explain why RN literature often devotes less attention to liturgy, ritual, and other
non-belief aspects of religion: for many UU Religious Naturalists, these needs are met
within the vibrant congregational life of Unitarian Universalism, with its developed
religious education programs, choral traditions, and deep commitments to social justice
engagement.
For more than a century, religious naturalism has existed largely as an undercurrent
within mainstream religious traditions viii
. It has provided a critical—if often marginal—
pathway for those who could not assent to the miraculous claims or supernatural
doctrines of their inherited faiths. For such individuals, biblical miracles and doctrinal
assertions about virgin births, resurrections, or divine interventions seemed implausible,
even garish. Yet rather than abandon religion altogether, they reinterpreted their
traditions in naturalistic terms. A Christian religious naturalist, for example, might read
the resurrection not as a literal return from the grave but as a profound metaphor for the
renewal of life, hope, and community. Likewise, Jewish religious naturalists have often
understood covenantal language in symbolic, cultural, or ethical terms rather than as
evidence of divine fiat. In these ways, religious naturalism functioned less as a
freestanding movement and more as an interpretive style within established religious
frameworks.
This long-standing posture—as a minority current inside larger faiths—shaped both the
promise and the limits of religious naturalism in the twentieth century (WIldman quote).
On the one hand, it allowed skeptics, humanists, and scientifically minded believers to
remain connected to traditions that provided identity, community, and ritual. On the
other, it often confined naturalistic reinterpretations to the status of theological footnotes
rather than foundations for an independent religious life. To the extent that religious
naturalism was noticed at all, it was typically treated as a theological tendency within
liberal Protestantism, Jewish humanism, or Unitarian Universalism, rather than as a
potential religion in its own right.
viix
This essay traces the emergence of RN as a new public theology of sacred nature .
Section II explores its intellectual roots from Spinoza to Dewey, Emerson to the Chicago
School. Section III examines contemporary thinkers and their diverse theological
commitments. Sections IV and V critique RN’s dominant Apollonian tendencies and
highlight embodied, Dionysian currents found in Pagan and eco-ritual practices. Section
VI proposes a Dionysian RN —a lived, communal, embodied religion of sacred nature x
for the Anthropocene, responsive to ecological grief, political struggle, and human
longing for wonder, ritual, and joy (Goodenough 2023; Corrington 2013; Hogue 2018).
Through this analysis, I argue that Religious Naturalism is not only a worldview but a
potential religion in its own right, capable of offering cosmology, ethics, ritual, and
xi
communal belonging without supernaturalism . Its future depends on whether it can
evolve into a fully lived tradition—rooted in reverence for the Earth, open to pluralism,
and bold enough to embrace the ecstatic and transformative dimensions of the sacred
natural world.
II. Historical Roots and Intellectual Genealogy
There have always been deeply spiritual individuals who nevertheless rejected
superstition and supernatural explanations of the world. Rather than attributing events
to divine intervention, fate, or miracle, they turned instead to reason, common sense,
and critical inquiry. Such figures were often branded heretics or freethinkers, and in later
centuries were associated with skepticism, rationalism, or outright atheism. Yet their
rejection of the supernatural did not necessarily entail a rejection of the sacred. Many
sought forms of reverence rooted in the natural world, affirming that wonder, awe, and
moral seriousness could arise without recourse to invisible powers.
At the same time, ecstatic forms of religion have a long and resilient history, stretching
back to humanity’s earliest spiritual practices. Long before the rise of dogmatic
traditions, religion was embodied in ritual, music, dance, and visionary states of
consciousness. The shamanic institutions of nomadic tribal peoples provided the
primary means through which spirituality, healing, and social cohesion were cultivated.
Through trance, rhythm, and often entheogenic sacraments, shamans mediated
between the human community and the more-than-human world, grounding their
authority in direct experience rather than in texts or creeds.
With the birth of agriculture and the rise of stratified societies, these ecstatic traditions
were gradually transformed. Shamans became priests, oracles, and magicians—figures
who carried forward fragments of the old ways even as they became enmeshed in thehierarchies of temple and state. In Europe, many of these ecstatic and entheogenic arts
were later driven underground by waves of suppression, most dramatically during the
medieval Inquisition. Practices once central to communal healing and cosmic orientation
were stigmatized as witchcraft, sorcery, or diabolism, leaving only traces in folklore,
mysticism, and clandestine ritual.
Religious Naturalism may be gaining visibility only in recent decades, but its heritage
stretches across centuries, woven from philosophy, theology, literature, and ritual
innovation. As Jerome Stone (2008) observes, it is best understood as an “underground
river” of naturalistic spirituality—a current that has repeatedly surfaced in Western
thought, only to be obscured by dominant supernatural theologies or reductive
materialisms. The genealogy of RN is not linear or monolithic. It is a tapestry of
overlapping visions that reject supernaturalism while retaining depth, awe, and moral
gravity, offering a way of being religious within a fully natural cosmos.
One early source was Baruch Spinoza xii
, whose Ethics (1677) equated God and Nature,
proposing a single, infinite substance expressed through rational laws. Although he
rejected divine providence and personal deity, he retained a language of blessedness
and joy grounded in understanding the necessity of the natural order (Nadler 2001).
Spinoza’s pantheism seeded the idea that reverence and sacred devotion could thrive
without transcendent agents, foreshadowing later naturalistic theologies.
European Romanticism, with figures like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe xiii
, deepened this
naturalistic reverence through poetic sensibilities that saw nature as living, self-
organizing, and meaningful. George Santayana later described religion as “poetry of xiv
the spirit” (Reason in Religion, 1905), a symbolic response to the natural order that
could inspire devotion without metaphysical illusions. These visions preserved the
mythic and aesthetic dimensions of religion while grounding them firmly in the natural
world.
In nineteenth-century New England, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836) and Henry
David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) offered a sacramental view of wilderness as a primary
text of revelation . They celebrated immersion in natural rhythms as a source of moral xv
clarity and spiritual awakening, integrating Romantic feeling with proto-ecological
consciousness. Their legacy continues in RN’s insistence that direct experience of
nature, not dogma or church authority, is the basis for spiritual life.
Early twentieth-century liberal Protestant theologians, especially those in the Chicago
School such as Shailer Mathews, Henry Nelson Wieman, and Gerald Birney Smith,
sought to reconcile evolutionary science, democracy, and religious ethics. Wieman
defined “God” as the creative power transforming human experience toward greatergood (1929). John Dewey xvi
, though a philosopher outside theology, radicalized this
approach in A Common Faith (1934), describing the religious as a quality of experience
oriented toward ideal ends—justice, cooperation, beauty—arising wholly within natural
and social processes (Alexander 2013). These pragmatist visions laid groundwork for
RN’s functional understanding of religion and its rejection of otherworldly metaphysics.
Process philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead xvii
(Process and Reality, 1929),
Charles Hartshorne, and Gordon Kaufman extended this naturalistic theology,
portraying divinity as emergent creativity, relational interdependence, and “serendipitous
creativity” at work in evolution and history (Kaufman 1993) xviii
. These ideas deeply
influenced Donald Crosby, Demian Wheeler, and others who articulate RN as faith in
the generative, unfinished becoming of the cosmos—a sacred creativity embedded in
natural processes.
The twentieth century also saw mythopoetic and depth-psychological currents revive
ritual and story in non-theistic frameworks. Sam Keen called for a Dionysian religiosity xix
rooted in body, eros, and myth (Hymns to an Unknown God, 1994). Jungian archetypal
psychology and the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement experimented with rites of
passageJungian archetypal psychology, with its focus on myth, symbol, and the
collective unconscious, deeply influenced alternative spiritualities. The Mythopoetic
Men’s Movement of the 1980s–90s, led by figures like Robert Bly, sought male initiation
through myth, poetry, and ritual—often in nature. While not RN per se, this movement
demonstrated how naturalistic spirituality could be Dionysian: embodied, communal,
and mythic. See Robert Bly, Iron John (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990); James
Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). and symbolic xx
enactments grounded in nature and psyche, not supernatural claims. Feminist and
ecofeminist voices xxi
such as Starhawk (The Spiral Dance, 1979) and Carolyn Merchant
(The Death of Nature, 1980) critiqued patriarchal and transcendent religious models,
creating earth-honoring rituals and theological visions of immanence and
interdependence. These traditions expanded naturalism’s scope beyond rational
cosmology toward lived ritual, embodied transformation, and political resistance.
Environmental thinkers like Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac, 1949), Rachel
Carson, Thomas Berry (The Dream of the Earth, 1988), and Brian Swimme (The
Universe Story, 1992) developed planetary cosmologies of interdependence and
reverence. They proposed that scientific knowledge of evolution and ecology can
function as a new “sacred story,” orienting ethics and imagination toward planetary
flourishing (Tucker & Grim 2004). This insight underpins Loyal Rue’s Everybody’s Story
(2000) xxii
and Ursula Goodenough’s Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), which combine
biology and cosmology with emotional and moral response to the grandeur and fragility
of life.Modern Pagan and Druidic communities xxiii
created vibrant ritual ecologies aligned with
naturalistic metaphysics, developing seasonal festivals, rites of mourning for lost
species, and ecstatic dances celebrating earthly belonging (Halstead 2016; Steinhart
2018). These lived practices demonstrate that naturalism need not be thin or cerebral—
it can be embodied, communal, transformative, offering mystery and connection without
supernatural appeals.
By the late twentieth century, thinkers began to name and consolidate these dispersed
strands. Jerome Stone’s Religious Naturalism Today (2008) traced the “underground xxiv
river” from Spinoza to Dewey, Kaufman, and beyond, arguing for recognition of
naturalistic religiosity as a genuine alternative to both theism and reductive secularism.
Ursula Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998, rev. 2023) translated xxv
molecular biology and evolutionary cosmology into a language of awe, grief, and ritual
gratitude. Donald Crosby’s A Religion of Nature xxvi
(2002) and Living with Ambiguity
(2008) articulated a tragic, morally serious naturalism. Robert Corrington’s ecstatic
naturalism xxvii
(1994, 2013, 2016) explored unconscious and erotic depths of nature’s
sacred dimension. These contributions crystallized RN as neither supernatural faith nor
flat materialism, but an intellectually credible, emotionally rich, ethically urgent, and
xxviii
spiritually transformative religious option .
This genealogy reveals RN as a polyphonic heritage, shaped by rational philosophy,
poetic naturalism, feminist and ecological critique, grassroots ritual innovation, and xxix
scientific cosmology. It is not a single tradition but a confluence of attempts to sacralize
reality without recourse to supernatural beings or realms, to create meaning,
community, and reverence for life within the natural order. This pluralism is not a
weakness but a reservoir of possibilities, offering RN a wide repertoire of myths,
practices, and metaphysical frameworks as it evolves into a public theology of sacred
nature.
III. Contemporary Religious Naturalism: Shared Commitments, Divergent Visions,
and the Apollonian Bias
Religious Naturalism (RN) brings together a diverse network of thinkers united by a
shared conviction: that nature itself is ultimate reality, morally binding and spiritually
rich, without appeal to supernatural realms. RN attempts to reconcile science and
religion, provide existential meaning, and respond ethically to ecological and social
crises. Across its many voices, RN is conceptually rich but predominantly
Apollonian: rational, analytic, system-building, and emotionally restrained. Missing are
many of the Dionysian elements of religion—ritual ecstasy, embodied community,
mythic passion—that make spirituality a transformative lived experience. This sectionsurveys major RN thinkers, analyzing their contributions, conceptual frameworks, and
tendencies toward Apollonian order over Dionysian vitality.
Jerome A. Stone: Genealogist of Religious Naturalism
Jerome A. Stone is widely recognized for giving Religious Naturalism its xxx
contemporary identity and intellectual genealogy. In Religious Naturalism Today: The
Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative (SUNY, 2008), Stone surveys centuries of thinkers
from Spinoza and Emerson to Dewey and Kaufman, describing an “underground river”
of religious thought that honors nature without supernaturalism. Earlier, in The
Minimalist Vision of Transcendence (SUNY, 1992), he redefines transcendence as the
expansion of meaning and value within experience itself, not beyond nature. Stone
emphasizes that “religious naturalism is neither the negation of religion nor a covert
form of theism. It is a third way, reverent before nature yet free from supernatural
appeals” (2008, p. 12).
Stone’s Religious Naturalism operates through what he calls “selective retrieval,”
carefully extracting naturalistic insights from otherwise supernaturalistic traditions while
maintaining critical distance from their metaphysical commitments. His methodological
approach prioritizes intellectual genealogy over systematic construction, viewing RN as
an emergent tradition that gains coherence through historical continuity rather than
doctrinal unity. This is an important distinction: Stone is less concerned with producing a
totalizing system than with showing that RN has always already existed in fragments
and undercurrents, and that to recognize it as such is itself a constructive theological
move.
Yet Stone’s contributions remain largely conceptual and historical, curating ideas more
than developing embodied practices or ritual traditions. His vision, while foundational,
stays firmly Apollonian, leaving the Dionysian dimensions of lived religious experience
underdeveloped.
Wesley J. Wildman: Metaphysical Architecture and Comparative Theology
Wesley J. Wildman is RN’s most comprehensive philosophical theologian, constructing
a six-volume Religious Philosophy series that spans metaphysics, anthropology,
cognitive science of religion, and comparative theology. Among his central works are
Science and Religious Anthropology (Ashgate, 2009), Religious Philosophy as
Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry (SUNY, 2010), Religious and Spiritual Experiences
(Cambridge, 2011/2014), In Our Own Image: Anthropomorphism, Apophaticism, and
Ultimacy (Oxford, 2017), and Effing the Ineffable: Naming the Unnameable (SUNY,2018). Together, these works form a sustained constructive project unmatched in scope
xxxi
within RN .
Wildman situates religious impulses as natural phenomena, arguing that naturalism can
honor mystery, transcendence, and ultimacy without supernaturalism. In Religious
Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry (2010), for instance, he insists that
“religious naturalism need not be reductionistic; it can honor depth, mystery, and
transcendence within the natural order” (p. 58). He explicitly affirms, in public
summaries of his work, that “nature is sacred in its beauty, terror, scale, stochasticity,
emergent complexity, and evolutionary development” (Boston University, Center for
Mind and Culture).
Wildman’s naturalistic methodology employs what he terms “hypothetical realism,”
treating religious concepts as testable hypotheses about ultimate reality that must be
evaluated through interdisciplinary comparative analysis. His approach to
transcendence reframes it as “emergent complexity,” locating the sacred in nature’s
capacity to generate unprecedented forms of organization and meaning at higher levels
of systemic integration. His work develops metaphysical scaffolding that rivals classic
systematic theologies in depth and breadth.
The result is unparalleled in ambition and rigor. Wildman integrates natural and social
sciences, develops comparative models of ultimacy across religions, and constructs a
naturalist metaphysical framework with remarkable comprehensiveness. Critics praise
its interdisciplinary scope and the seriousness with which it treats religious phenomena.
Yet it remains highly Apollonian: conceptual, rational, abstract. Wildman’s RN is largely
a reflective orientation of mind, distant from ritual practice, communal embodiment, or
ecstatic transformation.
Donald A. Crosby: Architect of a Religion of Nature
Donald A. Crosby has defined one major stream of RN, producing over a dozen books
constructing a Religion of Nature as a full theological alternative to theism.
Representative works include A Religion of Nature (SUNY, 2002), Living with Ambiguity
(SUNY, 2008), Nature as Sacred Ground: A Metaphysics for Religious Naturalism
(SUNY, 2015), The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient
Life (SUNY, 2013), and Consciousness and Freedom: The Inseparability of Thinking
and Doing (2017). Across these works, Crosby insists that nature is ultimate reality,
sacred yet morally ambiguous. In A Religion of Nature he writes: “Nature is ambiguous.
It births life and beauty but also disease and death” (2002, p. 47).Crosby’s Religion of Nature centers on what he calls “tragic naturalism,” which
acknowledges nature’s moral ambiguity while still finding it worthy of ultimate
commitment and reverence xxxii
. His theological method combines existentialist courage
with process metaphysics, treating religious obligation as emerging from nature’s own
creative advance rather than from external divine command. Crosby blends process
thought, pragmatism, and existential theology to craft a moral framework of reverence,
courage, and obligation to future generations, facing suffering and finitude without divine
rescue or nihilism.
His work gives RN moral seriousness and theological weight, establishing it not simply
as an orientation but as a religion of ultimate devotion. Yet his approach remains
Apollonian—heavily conceptual and ethical, offering little by way of ritual, ecstatic
experience, or mythic embodiment. Critics such as Michael Hogue note that Crosby’s
RN inspires reflection but rarely builds thick communal practice.
Robert S. Corrington: Ordinal Phenomenology and the Unconscious of Nature
Robert S. Corrington radically rethinks RN by exploring nature’s unconscious depths.
Across Nature and Spirit (1992), Ecstatic Naturalism (1994), Nature’s Sublime: An
Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism (2013), and Deep Pantheism (2016), he develops ordinal
phenomenology, mapping four orders of reality from natura naturans (nature naturing)
through emergent semiotic forms (natura naturata). He describes the divine not as a
transcendent being but as the inexhaustible depth of nature itself: “The divine is not a
transcendent being but the inexhaustible depth of nature itself” (Nature’s Sublime, 2013,
p. 92).
Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism operates through ordinal phenomenology, mapping
nature’s unconscious depths through what he calls “selving”—the process by which
nature becomes self-aware through human experience and interpretation. His approach
uniquely integrates psychoanalytic insights with semiotic theory, treating religious
experience as nature’s own unconscious self-expression through human symbolic
xxxiii
consciousness .
Corrington fuses American pragmatism (Peirce), psychoanalysis, Continental
phenomenology, and semiotics to portray nature as chaotic, fecund, and sacred. His
ecstatic naturalism gestures toward Dionysian dimensions—dream, eros, trance, non-
rational experience—long suppressed in Western rationalism. Yet even Corrington
disciplines these ecstatic forces through ordered phenomenological mapping, making
his thought partly Apollonian. His work invites but rarely enacts ritual or transformative
embodied practice.Dionysian Naturalism as an Extension of Ecstatic Naturalism
Robert Corrington’s Ecstatic Naturalism advances a profound metaphysical claim: the
sacred is not a supernatural being but the inexhaustible depth of nature itself. Nature is
not flat, reducible to surfaces or material processes, but layered — containing semiotic
and psychical depths that perpetually exceed human grasp. For Corrington, this ecstatic
depth is both terrifying and liberating: it overwhelms systems of meaning, breaks open
closure, and reveals the sheer otherness within nature itself. It is a philosophy of
immanence, grounded in American pragmatism and enriched by phenomenology and
psychoanalysis, that insists we encounter the divine not outside the world but in its
uncanny interiority.
Dionysian Naturalism extends this vision but insists that the ecstasy of nature is not
merely metaphysical, it is experiential and embodied . If Corrington has mapped the xxxiv
ecstatic depth in semiotic and ontological terms, Dionysian Naturalism seeks to dance
it, drink it, breathe it in. Ecstasy here is not only a descriptor of nature’s ontological
overflow, but a phenomenological event accessible through ritual, myth, erotic play, and
especially entheogenic practices. When psilocybin or other plant sacraments dissolve
the ego and open the senses to unmediated wonder, one glimpses what Spinoza
named natura naturans—nature naturing, the creative source beyond representation.
On psilocybin, I have personally witnessed the dissolution of the boundaries between
self and cosmos, a direct contact with the creative depth Corrington names as sacred.
Dionysian Naturalism insists that this is not metaphor, not poetic suggestion, but a lived
possibility of religious experience.
In this sense, Dionysian Naturalism can be seen as an embodied extension of
Corrington’s ecstatic ontology. Where Corrington explicates the depth of nature in
systematic terms—via semiotics, aesthetics, and psychoanalytic categories—I enact it
through ritualized participation. Ecstasy, for me, is not only the ontological structure of
nature but the experiential condition of touching that depth. Corrington’s ecstatic
naturalism shows that the sacred depth is there; Dionysian Naturalism shows how
human beings might enter it, again and again, through rites, revelry, and entheogenic
communion.
This brings the project into contrast with Wesley Wildman’s “religious philosophy of
ultimacy.” Wildman frames ultimate reality (Ultimacy) as the horizon of human concern,
a regulative concept that gathers and orients religious imagination without appeal to
supernaturalism. His project, like Corrington’s, affirms the radical immanence of the
sacred but tends to render it in conceptual and comparative-philosophical terms.
Wildman’s ultimacy functions as an intellectual category, a way of naming the widestscope of meaning and concern. Corrington, by contrast, insists that depth is more than
a category—it is an ontological dimension that precedes, destabilizes, and shatters
categories. Dionysian Naturalism sides with Corrington here but pushes further: depth is
not only encountered in philosophy but in ecstatic trance, where words fail, and the
body shakes in rhythm with the cosmos.
Thus we might say: Wildman gives us ultimacy as concept, Corrington gives us depth
as metaphysics, and Dionysian Naturalism gives us depth as lived ecstasy. Wildman
sketches the widest intellectual horizon; Corrington discloses the abyssal strata beneath
our existence; Dionysian Naturalism drinks from that abyss, ritually and bodily, to enact
sacred nature as felt reality. In this way, Dionysian Naturalism both honors and
radicalizes its predecessors: it extends ecstatic naturalism from systematic description
into ecstatic participation.
Ursula Goodenough: Awe, Gratitude, and Biological Reverence
Ursula Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford, 1998; revised ed., 2023)
has popularized RN for a broad audience, translating biology into existential meaning.
Goodenough emphasizes steering clear of both reductionism and nihilism, a goal she
sees as achievable through an emergentist focus on nature’s inherent unpredictability.
For her, nature itself is the “locus of Mystery” (1998; reiterated 2023, p. 17), a Mystery
xxxv
that gives rise to wonder, and from that wonder, to awe .
Goodenough’s scientific naturalism employs what she calls “emergentist reductionism,”
which traces complex phenomena to simpler components while maintaining that
emergent properties possess genuine novelty and irreducible significance. Her religious
methodology treats scientific understanding as intrinsically spiritual, arguing that deeper
knowledge of natural processes enhances rather than diminishes experiences of awe
and reverence. She writes: “Reverence is the sense that there is something larger than
the self, larger even than the human, to which one accords respect and awe and
assent” (1998, p. 174).
Goodenough offers rituals of gratitude, grief, and commitment grounded in evolutionary
science, forging emotional connection to life and death. While she invites deep feeling,
Goodenough’s RN is largely contemplative and individual. It lacks thick communal rites
or ecstatic celebration. Her contribution demonstrates RN’s potential for spiritual depth
grounded in science, yet remains Apollonian in tone and practice.
Loyal Rue: Mythic Orientation in a Disenchanted CosmosLoyal Rue reconstructs religion as a cultural adaptation, providing orienting stories that
bind facts and values into coherent meaning. In Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the
Epic of Evolution (SUNY, 2000), Rue argues that human beings require a unifying
cosmological narrative that situates them within the vast evolutionary process, giving
coherence to identity, value, and action. He famously framed this as the “story that tells
us who we are, where we are, what we are, and what we are to do” (2000, ix). Later, in
Religion Is Not About God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and
What to Expect When They Fail (Rutgers, 2005), Rue develops a functionalist theory:
religion survives because it generates the moral motivation and cooperative cohesion
xxxvi
that enable groups to flourish, not because of the truth of metaphysical propositions .
Rue’s mythic naturalism operates through what he calls “functional realism,” treating
religious stories as adaptive cultural technologies whose truth lies in their capacity to
orient human life and inspire cooperative behavior rather than in their correspondence
to metaphysical facts. His approach views myths as evolved cognitive tools that bind
factual knowledge with evaluative meaning, creating what he sometimes terms “noble
lies” necessary for sustaining cultures.
This framework gives RN a mythic architecture—an evolutionary epic as a shared
narrative for humanity—but Rue’s myths remain conceptual frameworks more than
embodied, communal enactments. The Dionysian dimension of lived, ecstatic
storytelling is absent, leaving his work firmly in the Apollonian register
Michael Hogue and Demian Wheeler: Public Theology and Planetary Ethics
Among Religious Naturalists attempting constructive theology, two figures stand out as
emblematic of divergent strategies: Demian Wheeler and Michael Hogue. Wheeler’s
Religion Within the Limits of History Alone (2002) re-situates theology on radically
historicist ground, while Hogue’s American Immanence (2018) reconstructs RN as a
public theology of ecology and democracy. Together, they illustrate both the promise
and the constraints of Apollonian RN when it leans heavily toward intellectual
construction.
Wheeler’s intervention is striking for its austerity. Taking Kant’s Religion Within the
Limits of Reason Alone as his foil, Wheeler insists that all religion must be approached
through the prism of contingency, history, and culture. Theological claims are not
timeless truths but historically situated constructions, embedded in particular lifeworlds
and communities. In this sense, Wheeler offers a naturalism that is ruthlessly
historicized: religious symbols, practices, and values are nothing more (and nothing
less) than cultural formations subject to change. His constructive theology resists
transcendence or metaphysical absolutes, rejecting even Crosby’s metaphysicalnaturalism and Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism for lapsing into universals. Yet
Wheeler’s relentless emphasis on history, while philosophically rigorous, risks a kind of
reductionism that strips RN of sacrality. His Apollonian orientation is unmistakable—
religion is analyzed, demystified, and contextualized, but never ritually enacted or
ecstatically lived.
Hogue, by contrast, expands RN outward into the realm of public theology and political
engagement. In American Immanence, he anchors RN within the broader currents of
American pragmatism, process thought, liberation theology, and environmental ethics.
His constructive theology is explicitly systematic: he engages loci such as anthropology,
soteriology, eschatology, and ethics, weaving them into a theology of immanence. For
Hogue, RN is not merely a worldview but a resource for democratic transformation,
ecological resistance, and anti-imperial critique. Where Wheeler deconstructs, Hogue
reconstructs. He envisions RN as a tradition capable of inspiring deep democracy,
radical ecology, and anti-racist struggle. His project is richer in praxis than Wheeler’s,
yet still predominantly textual and analytic—a theology written for seminar rooms and
public discourse rather than campfires, rituals, or dance floors.
Comparing Wheeler and Hogue reveals the dual tracks of Apollonian RN: one historicist
and deconstructive, the other constructive and political xxxvii
. Wheeler is valuable for
keeping RN from sliding into metaphysical nostalgia, but in the process risks reducing it
to cultural studies. Hogue demonstrates how RN can animate public theology and
ecological ethics, but his systematic constructions sometimes feel like overlaying
liberationist concerns upon a tradition that still lacks Dionysian embodiment. Both
thinkers illustrate the strengths of Apollonian RN—its intellectual coherence, its moral
seriousness, its openness to science and politics—yet both also expose its
weaknesses. History alone cannot ignite the sacred, and public theology, without ritual
depth, risks becoming an arid exercise in moral exhortation.
Seen from the standpoint of Dionysian Naturalism, Wheeler and Hogue thus become
crucial foils. They show us what RN looks like when it remains confined to the registers
of history, immanence, and intellectual construction. What remains missing are the
embodied practices, ecstatic states, and transformative rituals that give religion its
visceral force. Without these, RN may remain an elegant philosophy or a compelling
political theology, but not yet a religion alive in the flesh.
Bron Taylor: Dark Green Religion and Kinship with Religious Naturalism
While not strictly a Religious Naturalist, Bron Taylor’s Dark Green Religion: Nature
Spirituality and the Planetary Future (University of California, 2009) offers a parallel,
overlapping vision that enriches RN discourse. Taylor documents global forms of earth-based spirituality—biocentric animism, radical environmentalism, surfing subcultures,
and eco-pagan movements—that treat nature as sacred and morally authoritative. He
identifies recurring patterns of deep ecological ethics, animistic connection, and
xxxviii
ritualized reverence for the natural world across diverse cultures and subcultures .
Taylor’s approach employs “ethnographic naturalism,” studying earth-based spiritualities
as cultural phenomena while remaining methodologically agnostic about supernatural
claims yet deeply attentive to their ecological and psychological functions. His
comparative method treats diverse nature spiritualities as natural experiments in
human–environment relationship, offering empirical data about what forms of earth-
reverence prove most compelling and environmentally effective.
Taylor’s work resonates strongly with RN in its naturalistic metaphysics and
environmental moral focus, yet it often embraces Dionysian vitality missing from
mainstream RN thinkers. He describes ecstatic experiences in wilderness, collective
rituals of protest and celebration, and profound feelings of interconnection with non-
human life. By studying these practices anthropologically, Taylor provides RN a broader
context and a challenge: to become a lived, embodied religion of sacred nature, not just
a philosophical or ethical orientation. His work highlights the possibilities for RN to
engage with global ecological spiritualities and to learn from their ritual richness.
Taken together, these thinkers reveal a rich and evolving tradition of Religious
Naturalism. Stone anchors RN historically, offering an intellectual lineage and
conceptual clarity. Goodenough and Rue translate science and narrative into existential
meaning. Crosby and Wildman supply moral gravity and systematic metaphysics.
Corrington gestures toward ecstatic depths, while White and Hogue/Wheeler broaden
RN into justice and public theology. Naturalistic Pagans and Bron Taylor, meanwhile,
push RN toward ritual, embodied practice, and communal ecstasy.
Carol Wayne White: Sacred Humanity and the Future of RN
Among contemporary Religious Naturalists, Carol Wayne White stands out as a scholar
who expands the discourse in bold new directions. In Black Lives and Sacred Humanity:
Toward an African American Religious Naturalism (2016), she grounds RN in African
American religious thought, liberation theology, and ecological ethics, insisting that any
adequate vision of the sacred must reckon with race, embodiment, and social justice.
For White, “sacred humanity” is both a metaphysical claim and a moral project: it affirms
human dignity while situating us within the larger ecological web of life.Her later work, Religious Naturalism and Its Imprints: Eco-Justice, Narrative, and
Sacred Nature (2020), widens this project by foregrounding cultural narrative and eco-
justice practice as central to RN. Here White underscores that RN is not simply a set of
ideas but a lived tradition expressed in story, ritual, and activism. In doing so, she
expands the horizons of RN beyond its Euro-American, largely white liberal core,
pressing the movement to take seriously the intersections of ecology, race, and justice.
White’s contributions reveal that RN’s future depends not only on reconciling faith with
science or affirming nature as sacred, but also on embracing plural voices and lived
struggles. By naming “sacred humanity” as integral to RN, she brings into focus
dimensions of justice, embodiment, and cultural memory that are indispensable for a
robust public theology of sacred nature.
Comparative Analysis: The Apollonian Bias in Religious Naturalism
Despite their diversity, most RN contributions remain heavily Apollonian: rational,
structured, analytic, often confined to text and theory . Religious experience is xxxix
conceptualized rather than enacted; reverence is described, not ritually cultivated.
Ritual, mythic play, trance, song, and communal embodiment are largely missing or
underdeveloped. Even Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism is mapped with philosophical
order; Wildman’s vision is an architecture of ideas; Crosby constructs ethical
frameworks without ritual depth.
Religious Naturalism (RN) has, from its inception, leaned strongly toward what
Nietzsche might call the Apollonian pole of religion—rational, contemplative, ordered,
and disembodied. Its major architects have been philosophers, theologians, and
scientists, and their projects largely emphasize intellectual clarity, metaphysical
consistency, and compatibility with contemporary science. This orientation has lent RN a
certain intellectual elegance, but it has also narrowed the scope of religious expression
within the movement. Absent are the embodied, ecstatic, and communal dimensions
that Nietzsche identified with the Dionysian: ritual intensity, sacred excess, and
experiences of dissolution into the rhythms of nature and community.
Yet the picture is not so simple. Some figures, such as Robert Corrington, resist being
neatly classified as Apollonian. His ecstatic naturalism is systematic, metaphysical, and
rigorously argued—hallmarks of the Apollonian style—but at the same time it insists on
the necessity of chaos, eros, and sacred excess, elements of the Dionysian.
Corrington’s work illustrates how RN can straddle these poles, suggesting that the
binary, while useful, risks flattening the diversity of the movement. Indeed, some of RN’smost creative figures may be those who stretch across this divide, holding together
rational clarity and ecstatic intensity in ways that complicate Nietzsche’s schema.
The Advantages of the Apollonian Bias
It would be a mistake to assume that RN’s Apollonian emphasis is simply a flaw. For
many advocates and adherents, the very restraint of RN is part of its strength. First, its
rational and contemplative mode offers intellectual legitimacy. By presenting itself as
sober, rigorous, and science-facing, RN gains credibility in academic and public settings
where “religion” is often equated with superstition or dogma. Second, the Apollonian
character serves as a guardrail against the excesses of ecstatic religiosity. By
emphasizing reason and reflection, RN distances itself from the dangers of anti-
scientific spiritualism, charismatic authoritarianism, or emotional manipulation. Finally,
RN’s contemplative style fits well with the expectations of its core constituency—largely
middle-class, highly educated, and often professionally engaged with science or
philosophy. For such audiences, intellectual coherence and contemplative reflection are
valued more highly than ritual or ecstatic practice.
Why the Bias Exists
If RN tilts Apollonian, it is not merely by accident. The bias can be traced to several
structural and sociological factors. First, RN has been articulated primarily in academic
settings, by philosophers of religion, theologians, and scientists. Academic institutions
reward clarity of argument, intellectual rigor, and rational discourse, while often
penalizing embodied or ecstatic religious expression as unserious or primitive. Second,
RN’s long-standing attempt to remain in dialogue with science has encouraged its
adherents to emphasize rational explanation and metaphysical order. From Dewey
onward, RN thinkers have sought compatibility with evolutionary theory, cosmology, and
neuroscience, and this scientific habitus shapes what counts as legitimate religious
discourse. Finally, RN reflects the cultural background of its practitioners. Its origins and
current adherents are disproportionately white, middle-class, and highly educated.
Within these cultural milieus, the Dionysian—whether in the form of ecstatic ritual, bodily
performance, or emotional intensity—is often regarded with suspicion or dismissed as
vulgar. The Apollonian bias is, in this sense, both an intellectual inheritance and a
sociological inevitability.Toward a Dialectical Critique
At stake in all this is the question of what counts as a religion, rather than merely a
philosophy of religion. The Apollonian provides RN with rational clarity, intellectual
credibility, and compatibility with science—advantages not to be dismissed lightly. But
the Dionysian provides the embodied, communal, and ecstatic dimensions without
which no religion can be fully alive. A religion that is purely Apollonian risks being a set
of ideas rather than a way of life. The challenge, then, is not to reject the Apollonian bias
outright, but to see it as only one half of a necessary dialectic. To become a whole
religion, RN must find ways to embrace both poles—to wed the intellectual with the
ecstatic, the contemplative with the embodied, the ordered with the chaotic. This tension
sets the stage for the critical turn to come: a fuller exploration of the Dionysian elements
that RN has largely neglected, and the consequences of their absence.
IV. Missing Dimensions and Emerging
Horizons
Religious Naturalism, in its most compelling expressions, insists that nature itself is
sacred and worthy of reverence. Yet when we examine the tradition as it has developed,
we find that its Apollonian orientation—conceptual clarity, philosophical rigor, intellectual
respectability—has tended to eclipse the Dionysian energies of embodiment, ritual,
ecstasy, and transformative practice. This imbalance does not signal an inherent
deficiency but rather a stage of development. RN, born in academic circles and
nourished by educated, middle-class seekers, began by consolidating intellectual
credibility. Its strength has been conceptual precision; its weakness has been religious
vitality.
Donald Crosby’s More Than Discourse makes this tension clear. He argues that
symbolic expression, ritual forms, and embodied enactments are indispensable to a
xl
living religion, and that without them RN risks remaining “only discourse”(Crosby2014) .
Likewise, Eric xli
‘s studies of atheistic mysticism remind us that naturalistic
experience already carries the marks of the mystical: dissolution, wholeness, extremity,
and connection. Both thinkers point us toward a vision of RN that is more than rational
assent—it must also be lived, celebrated, enacted, and embodied.What follows is not a catalogue of deficiencies but an exploration of “missing
dimensions” as horizons already being charted. In each case, Dionysian energies are
pressing against RN’s Apollonian frame, demanding fuller integration.
Ecstatic and Transformative Experience
Religious Naturalism, in its Apollonian mode, has excelled at careful reasoning,
systematic exposition, and dialogue with the sciences. But its emphasis on clarity and
rational order has often left ecstasy, trance, and mystical transformation at the margins,
if not entirely excluded. This is striking because, across cultures and history, it is
precisely ecstatic rupture that gives religions their transformative power xlii
: the
Eleusinian Mysteries that promised initiates a vision of immortality, the peyote
ceremonies of the Native American Church that reoriented lives around sacred
communion, the shamanic initiations of Siberia that shattered and remade the novice,
and the ecstatic revivalist enthusiasms of Protestant awakenings that bound
communities in conviction. A religion that does not know ecstasy risks sterility, for
ecstasy is what unseats the ego, disrupts ordinary life, and opens the self to sacred
depths.
If we begin with the broadest lens, we see that transformation is the very business of
religion. Every tradition has cultivated rituals of change: Christianity through baptism
and rebirth, Judaism through teshuvah and covenant renewal, Buddhism through
meditative awakening, indigenous traditions through ordeal and initiation. Religious
Naturalism, for all its intellectual elegance, risks becoming bloodless if it does not
develop similar “technologies of transformation.”
In my own work (The Amethyst Path), I have argued that transformation must be
understood as layered: at once rational, mythic, and ecstatic. The rational provides
structure and integration, drawing from psychology’s stages of change and from
Unitarian Universalist pragmatism. The mythic provides narrative shape, linking
personal crises with cosmic cycles, much as the Hero’s Journey or the Pagan wheel of
the year has long done. And the Dionysian dimension provides intensity, embodiment,
and dissolution—those liminal technologies of trance, dance, fasting, erotic play, ritual
mourning, and vision-quest that shake the self open to new life. Without all three,
transformation remains partial.
Mystical experience in this sense is not an exotic add-on but the natural flowering of
human engagement with the sacred. Awe before a night sky, the pulse of communal
drumming, the dissolution of self in meditation, or the wild joy of a festival—all are
naturalist experiences of transcendence without recourse to the supernatural. In Morethan Discourse (2014), Donald Crosby warned that RN could collapse into mere
discourse unless it embraced such symbolic enactments; Eric Steinhart, in his proposal
of eupraxia, sought to build a naturalistic cycle of rituals, festivals, and aesthetic forms.
Both point to the same truth: without lived ecstasy, RN risks being a philosophy about
religion rather than a religion in its own right.
Entheogens extend this line of thought but do not exhaust it. Substances like psilocybin,
peyote, and ayahuasca are not alien intrusions but biochemical sacraments evolved
within nature itself. They have served as teachers for indigenous traditions and now, in
carefully structured ritual settings, can offer modern seekers access to what Spinoza
called natura naturans—the infinite creativity of nature. In my own ritual practice
described in Tripping with the Gods(2020), psilocybin served as a portal to dissolution
and rebirth, not as private sensation but as a communal ordeal structured by music,
chant, and ritual container. Yet it is crucial to stress that entheogens are only one path
among many. Breathwork, drumming, dance, visionary journeying, fasting, erotic play,
and ritualized mourning all open similar ecstatic states. The Dionysian principle is not
pharmacological but existential: nature transforms through fire, flood, and dissolution,
and so must we.
Such experiences also reveal the paradoxical truth that pathology can become portal.
Following James Hillman and Thomas Moore, we can see depression, addiction, and
anxiety not as failures to be cured but as the soul’s demand for descent (James Hillman,
*The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling* (New York: Random House,
1996).. Thomas Moore, *Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and
Sacredness in Everyday Life* (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).). Breakdown becomes
breakthrough, wound becomes initiation. A Dionysian RN would not pathologize
pathology but sacralize it—creating spaces in which grief, madness, and burnout can be
ritually transformed into sources of renewal.
This intuition finds empirical support in recent clinical research on psilocybin-assisted
therapy. Studies at Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London demonstrate that
carefully structured psilocybin sessions—complete with preparatory counseling, ritual
setting, and integration support—can produce lasting reductions in depression and
anxiety while generating what participants describe as profound spiritual experiences.
The protocols mirror traditional shamanic practice: preparation, ordeal, and reintegration
within a therapeutic container. Even Crosby, despite his measured tone, acknowledges
that mystical experience can be “shattering and rebuilding,” opening practitioners to
dimensions of nature that exceed ordinary consciousness. These convergent insights
from clinical science, archetypal psychology, and naturalist theology point toward the
same conclusion: transformation requires descent, and descent requires ritual
technologies that can hold both dissolution and renewal.What these ecstatic and transformative states ultimately teach us is not a single
doctrine but the limits of doctrine itself. They summon us toward what I call an apophatic
pluralist naturalism: a posture that honors the unsayable depths of nature, affirms the
multiple symbolic and ritual languages through which those depths are encountered,
and remains steadfastly naturalist in frame. Ecstasy thus becomes not ornament but
essence, not peripheral but central. For RN to become a true religion of sacred nature, it
must cultivate these Dionysian dimensions alongside its Apollonian clarity. Only then will
it move from being a worldview to becoming a transformative way of life.
Sacred Narrative and Myth: The Epic of Evolution as
Emerging Strength
Of the many “missing dimensions” within Religious Naturalism, perhaps the one where
the greatest progress has already been made is sacred narrative xliii
. Unlike ritual life,
ecstatic experience, or institutional continuity—which remain underdeveloped—RN has
generated a robust mythic tradition in the form of the Epic of Evolution. This narrative
demonstrates how evolutionary science has been mythologized, narrated, ritualized,
and even embodied in pedagogy and devotional practice.
The idea of the Epic of Evolution was first popularized by the biologist E.O. Wilson in xliv
On Human Nature (1978), where he proposed that evolutionary science could supply “a
mythology of our time.” It was then elaborated with particular force by Thomas Berry,
who tirelessly called for a “new story” adequate to humanity’s ecological and spiritual
predicament. In The Dream of the Earth (1988), The Great Work (1999), and with Brian
Swimme in The Universe Story (1994), Berry insisted that contemporary science offers
not just facts about cosmic history but the raw material for a shared sacred narrative.
Within the Religious Naturalist community, the Epic of Evolution has become both
intellectual framework and spiritual resource. Loyal Rue’s Everybody’s Story (2000)
distilled the narrative into a universal orientation: telling us “who we are, where we are,
what we are, and what we are to do.” Ursula Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of
Nature (1998; rev. 2023) explicitly endorsed the Epic as a binding narrative,
demonstrating how molecular biology and evolutionary cosmology can elicit reverence
and moral resolve.
Equally important, the Epic of Evolution has been embodied in ritual and pedagogy. Jon
Cleland Host created Cosmala prayer beads—280 beads, each representing a key
event in cosmic history, from the Big Bang to human culture. Used meditatively, the
Cosmala transforms evolutionary chronology into tactile devotion. Within Unitarian
Universalist congregations, the evolutionary epic has been incorporated into religiouseducation curricula: children walk “cosmic timelines,” string evolutionary necklaces, and
rehearse the story of life’s emergence as part of seasonal rituals. Congregational
services mark solstices, equinoxes, and Earth Day as sacred occasions situated within
the larger universe story.
Lisa Sideris , in Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World xlv
(2017), warns against treating science itself as an object of quasi-religious devotion,
reminding us that a viable religious naturalism must resist such Apollonian temptations
and remain grounded in the lived, messy realities of the natural world.
These developments make sacred narrative a partial but significant success story for
RN. Where ritual, ecstatic experience, and institutional life remain thin, the Epic of
Evolution provides a mythic spine on which symbolic and communal practice can grow.
It orients adherents to the cosmos, offers frameworks for gratitude and grief, and seeds
pedagogical and ritual innovation xlvi
. While not yet the full mythic universe of a mature
tradition, it is far more than abstract theory. RN has begun to tell stories that are sung,
dramatized, beaded, and celebrated—stories that bind communities together in
reverence for the Earth and cosmos.
Robust Community and Institutional Life
Religious Naturalism has tended to remain at the level of isolated individuals and private
conviction. Yet religions flourish only when embodied in communities, institutions, and
durable practices of care. Here, the Apollonian-Dionysian tension is not between reason
and ecstasy but between abstraction and embodiment.
The Religious Naturalist Association (RNA), led by Ursula Goodenough and others,
demonstrates how institutional forms can sustain an emerging movement. Its website,
board, educational resources, and active programming provide precisely the scaffolding
Crosby calls for. Likewise, Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregations already serve as
de facto RN institutions. Their liturgies—water communion, child dedications, climate-
justice rituals—are explicitly naturalist in content even if the vocabulary is not always
claimed. They train ministers, run seminaries, and maintain the infrastructure without
which RN risks remaining marginal.
The task is to name what is already happening: to recognize UU covenant groups,
pastoral care, and social witness as institutional carriers of RN. Here the Apollonian
drive for structure meets the Dionysian hunger for belonging. When RN embraces its
UU roots and RNA resources, it ceases to be merely a philosophical option and
becomes a community with staying power.Material Culture and Aesthetic Expression
Religious Naturalism has excelled in clarity of thought but faltered in richness of form.
Its great minds have described the sacredness of nature with elegance and precision,
but too often this remains at the level of abstraction. What has been missing is the
dense weave of material and aesthetic culture—the arts, spaces, images, and ritual
objects that make a religion not only an idea but a world to inhabit.
Donald Crosby, in More Than Discourse, speaks directly to this absence. He insists that
religious life can never be reduced to doctrinal statements, however carefully crafted.
Religion is constituted through symbols that exceed discourse, through poetic, imaginal,
and sensory forms that convey what cannot be captured in logic alone. Nature itself
offers inexhaustible sources of ultimacy—mountains, rivers, stars, the unfolding of
evolution—that act as living icons. Narratives of struggle, pilgrimage, or renewal provide
metaphoric shape to life’s path. And the arts—poetry, painting, music, ritual chant,
dance, meditative silence—constitute the aesthetic lifeblood of religion, carrying
meaning in tones and textures where words cannot follow.
Yet while Crosby makes a compelling case for the centrality of symbols, his own work
remains largely Apollonian in its orientation. He catalogs and analyzes symbols with
great philosophical care, but seldom ventures into the domain of ritual enactment. A
Dionysian Religious Naturalism would press further xlvii
. Symbols are not only to be
contemplated but activated, breathed into life, set ablaze in ritual, music, dance, and art.
They must be worn on bodies, carved into wood, painted on walls, carried in
procession, invoked in chant, and enacted in ceremonies that place the community in
direct relation to nature’s sacred depth.
Here the Naturalistic Pagan movement provides a model. Eric Steinhart has argued that
“rituals and myths are essential symbolic engines,” and communities such as Godless
Pagans have shown how altars, seasonal festivals, and grief rituals for extinct species
enact RN principles in tangible forms. Jon Cleland Host’s Cosmala beads, mapping
cosmic history, provide a tactile, aesthetic engagement with the Epic of Evolution.
Extinction rituals, fire circles, and seasonal rites create sensory environments where
sacred nature is not only contemplated but touched, sung, and danced.
Rites of Passage and Life-Cycle Ceremonies
Religious Naturalism has not yet developed robust alternatives to the great rituals of
birth, initiation, marriage, and death. Without such rites, adherents often fall back upon
secular ceremonies or borrow from traditions not their own. But rites of passage are notoptional—they are the skeletal structure through which communities acknowledge
transformation.
Here Pagan and Druidic traditions offer exemplars xlviii
. The Order of Bards, Ovates &
Druids (OBOD) explicitly frames life’s thresholds—birth, adulthood, marriage,
separation, death—as initiations into new realms of experience. Their ceremonies,
grounded in seasonal and cosmic symbolism, provide meaning where secular culture
too often leaves silence. OBOD even trains celebrants to lead these rituals, ensuring
that communities have guides to mark transitions with beauty, dignity, and depth.
This emphasis is crucial for Religious Naturalism. Where RN often remains cerebral,
Druidry reminds us that religion lives in rites of passage. These embodied practices do
more than ornament belief; they constitute the very texture of religious life. Religious
Naturalism has everything to gain by claiming such rites as its own. UU water
communions and child dedications are already RN in substance. Druidic funerals, with
their emphasis on release into nature’s cycles, provide models for naturalist memorials.
Public Theology and Social Engagement
Finally, RN must develop a robust public theology—one that connects ecological
reverence with democratic action, racial justice, and global equity. Here the Apollonian/
Dionysian frame reminds us that religion is not only about private contemplation but also
collective struggle, sometimes orderly, sometimes ecstatic.
Michael Hogue’s American Immanence and Demian Wheeler’s Religion within the
Bounds of Naturalism articulate RN as civic faith—rooted in ecological metaphysics yet
oriented toward democratic practice. Carol Wayne White has extended this by
foregrounding race, embodiment, and liberation, insisting that RN must be anti-racist if it
is to be credible. My own work presses further: ecological crisis cannot be addressed
without dismantling the petrochemical infrastructure of modernity and confronting global
inequality. Sacred nature demands revolutionary change.
Concrete practices already exist. RN theologians have addressed climate assemblies,
UU congregations have joined Black Lives Matter protests, Pagan eco-ritualists have
led extinction rebellions and pipeline blockades. These are not metaphors but lived
instances of sacred activism. Consider the scene at Standing Rock, where UU ministers
joined indigenous water protectors in ceremonies that blended Christian hymns with
Lakota prayers, where drummers beat rhythms that called participants into solidarity
with the Missouri River itself. Or imagine a more recent pipeline blockade in Appalachia,
where Religious Naturalists create temporary altars from stones and wildflowers, offerwater communion drawn from threatened streams, and chant the names of endangered
species while linking arms across access roads. A Dionysian RN insists that such
moments of struggle are rituals in their own right—embodied, collective, transformative.
Public theology here is not abstract discourse but dancing in the streets, chaining
oneself to trees, grieving with the earth, and demanding justice.
Conclusion: Toward Integration
The so-called “missing dimensions” of Religious Naturalism are not absent so much as
embryonic. They are Dionysian energies pressing against an Apollonian frame: ecstasy
against abstraction, community against isolation, symbol against concept, ritual against
theory, struggle against discourse. The task is not to import these from outside but to
recognize that they are already alive in Pagan ritual, UU liturgy, RNA resources,
ecological activism, and entheogenic communion.
To call RN “only a philosophy” is to mistake development for essence. In truth, RN is a
religion in the making, and its future depends upon integration. By weaving Apollonian
clarity with Dionysian vitality, it can become what it claims to be: a religion of sacred
nature, wild enough to transform both self and society.
This integration calls for what I term an apophatic pluralist naturalism—a methodological
stance that honors the unsayable depths of nature, affirms the multiple symbolic and
ritual languages through which those depths are encountered, and remains steadfastly
within a naturalist frame. Such an approach acknowledges that the sacred in nature
exceeds any single doctrinal formulation while insisting that all authentic encounters
remain grounded in the material cosmos revealed by science. It is apophatic because it
recognizes the limits of language before nature’s mystery; pluralist because it welcomes
diverse paths of access; naturalist because it requires no appeal beyond the creativity
of natura naturans itself. This stance allows RN to embrace both rigorous inquiry and
ecstatic practice, both institutional stability and revolutionary transformation, both local
community and global solidarity. Only through such integration can Religious Naturalism
fulfill its promise as a living religion adequate to our planetary crisis.
V. Dionysian Religious Naturalism as Insurgent Alternative
Religious naturalism stands at a crossroads. While liberal Religious Naturalism has
successfully reconciled faith with scientific reason, and progressive iterations have
expanded the scope of inclusion and justice, both remain constrained within modernity’sdomesticating framework. The ecological and social crises identified in Section IV
xlix
demand not accommodation or incremental reform, but revolutionary re-imagining .
Dionysian Religious Naturalism (DRN) emerges as this insurgent alternative—a
constructive response to the missing dimensions diagnosed earlier.
Liberal RN, exemplified in Unitarian Universalist circles, represents the mature flowering
of what Gary Dorrien identifies as liberal theology’s defining commitments: anti-
authoritarianism that validates religious truth through reason and experience rather than
scripture or hierarchy, and integrative mediation that rejects false binaries between
orthodox religion and secular disbelief.¹ This tradition successfully demonstrates that
“nature is enough” — sufficiently rich to inspire awe, reverence, and spiritual
commitment without supernatural beliefs. Yet liberal RN’s very success in making
religion intellectually respectable reveals its limitation: it has domesticated the sacred
into rational discourse, sacrificing the transformative power that Section IV identified as
l
essential for our planetary moment .
Progressive religious naturalism pushes beyond liberal reconciliation to center religion
on justice, inclusion, and ecological survival. William Murry’s Reason and Reverence
offers a representative example, grounding UU humanism in ecological concern and
social responsibility.² Progressive RN inherits liberation theology’s social commitment,
reinterpreting naturalistic tradition through the lens of racial justice, feminism, and
environmental sustainability. Yet, as Demian Wheeler observed in a 2017 sermon at the
First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis, progressive theology still tends to operate
through reform — expanding the tent while leaving the institutional house standing.³
This incremental approach, however well-intentioned, proves inadequate to the
civilizational transformation our planetary emergency requires.
Radical theology offers a more thoroughgoing critique, dismantling metaphysical God-
talk and embracing what Thomas Altizer famously termed the “death of God.”⁴
Contemporary radical theologians like John Caputo push further, deconstructing
religious tradition down to its cultural and philosophical skeleton while maintaining its
ethical and political urgency.⁵ Radical religious naturalists resonate with this complete
rejection of the supernatural and embrace of a fully this-worldly orientation. Yet radical
theology’s deconstructive project often remains academically contained, absorbed in
postmodern irony rather than generative practice. Its danger is precisely what Section
IV diagnosed: disembodiment — critique without ritual renewal, demolition without
communal reconstruction.
Dionysian Religious Naturalism transcends these limitations by refusing to stop at
lireconciliation, reform, or deconstruction . Over the past decade, I have developed DRNas a comprehensive alternative that addresses the missing dimensions identified in
Section IV while maintaining scientific integrity and ethical commitment.⁶ Where liberal
RN seeks to accommodate religion to modernity, DRN contests modernity’s flattening,
colonizing, soul-repressive logics. Where progressive theology reforms existing
institutions, DRN calls forth entirely new communal forms born in ecological struggle
and earth-celebration. Where radical theology deconstructs metaphysical idols, DRN
builds living symbols and embodied myths from direct experience of nature’s insurgent
creativity.
My work on DRN has unfolded across multiple essays and interventions. In Steps
Towards a Dionysian Naturalism I first argued that naturalism, if it is to become a lived
religious path, must embrace ritual, embodiment, and myth-making alongside reason. In
Nature Religions and Revolutionary Social Change, I situated DRN within a wider
genealogy of earth-based movements that link ecological reverence with political
insurgency. In Tripping with the Gods, I explored entheogenic practice and ecstatic
states as contemporary doorways into sacred nature. And in The New American
Religions of Nature, I mapped the plural religious experiments now emerging that share
this impulse to sacralize earth and embodiment outside supernatural frameworks. Taken
together, these writings envision DRN as a living alternative: a re-enchantment of
naturalism without abandoning scientific integrity.
DRN’s insurgent character lies not in rejecting reason but in refusing to be confined by
reason’s colonizing pretensions. Its sacralities are embodied and ecstatic: ritual, myth,
dance, intoxication, eroticism, solidarity, wildness. This approach directly addresses the
missing dimensions diagnosed in Section IV by restoring to religious naturalism
precisely what liberal theology has domesticated away — the transformative power of
non-rational encounter with the sacred. DRN calls forth new forms of religious
community adequate to our ecological age: congregations that live not only in books
and conferences but in bodies and bioregions, in seasonal ceremonies and social
struggle, in pastoral care and planetary healing. A mature DRN would offer the full
institutional apparatus of lived religion — leadership formation, sacred music,
consecrated spaces, rites of passage — while remaining scientifically grounded and
politically insurgent.
DRN thus represents more than another theological position — it is a prospective path
toward a living religion of sacred nature that balances intellectual rigor with embodied
practice, ecological reverence with ecstatic encounter, moral conviction with
revolutionary community. Not yet a religion in the fullest sense, DRN remains a
constructive vision responding directly to RN’s diagnosed limitations. It points toward
the emergence of an earth-based spirituality capable of inspiring the profound culturaland political changes our civilizational crisis demands. DRN is not merely private
spirituality but a public theology of insurgent nature, capable of shaping communal life
and political action — a wild church for a wounded world. The task of building such
communities remains collaborative and generative, requiring dialogue, imagination, and
experimentation far beyond any single theological vision. Yet DRN offers a horizon for
RN’s evolution: the transformation of religious naturalism from academic discourse into
lived tradition, from philosophical position into revolutionary practice.
V. Sacred Nature and Public Theology: Toward a Shared Future for Religious
Naturalism
Religious Naturalism provides a compelling cosmological and moral orientation,
grounded in contemporary science and reverence for the natural world. Yet, like its ritual
and communal life, its public voice is still developing. Many RN thinkers (Goodenough,
Rue, Crosby, Stone, Wildman, Wheeler) have articulated a broad vision of sacred
nature and ecological ethics, but this vision is not yet fully embodied in congregations,
ceremonies, or institutions capable of sustained public engagement. As such, RN often
appears as an academic discourse rather than a lived religious tradition capable of
shaping cultural narratives and social movements.
The task ahead is collective: to create a public theology lii
that speaks to the ecological
and moral crises of our time liii
while drawing from the emerging practices, rituals, and
community experiments outlined in recent RN scholarship and experimentation.
Dionysian Religious Naturalism (DRN) contributes to this project by seeking to re-
enchant naturalism through myth, ritual, ecstatic experience, and ecological praxis
(Mellinger 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2016a, 2016b, 2018, 2020a, 2020b, 2024). These
writings argue that a public theology grounded in sacred nature must not only describe liv
our shared cosmos but inspire communities to protect it, celebrate it, and grieve its
wounds. A public theology of sacred nature frames ecological destruction as both a
moral and political crisis, situating climate change and biodiversity loss alongside
poverty and oppression as urgent sites of theological engagement . Recent voices, lv
such as Michael Hogue lvi
, have begun explicitly framing ecological democracy as a
public theology of immanence, one that grounds resilience and solidarity in the shared
vulnerability of humans and ecosystems alike.
Such a theology would move beyond individual reflection to collective action: seasonal
rituals that honor ecological cycles, public ceremonies of mourning for extinct species,
activist rites sanctifying environmental resistance, and alternative rites of passage
rooted in naturalistic reverence. It would join ecological ethics with social justice,
addressing not only environmental degradation but also the interconnected injustices of
poverty, displacement, and exploitation (Mellinger 2016b, 2018).Public theology in RN, therefore, cannot remain a solitary intellectual exercise. It needs
communities, congregations, and interfaith collaborations that can translate abstract
reverence for nature into concrete forms of care, service, and advocacy. Many RN
adherents still find these communal and institutional supports in traditions like Unitarian
Universalism or Pagan groves. Future RN must cultivate its own, building networks of
shared ritual, leadership formation, pastoral care, and public presence capable of
sustaining moral courage and planetary hope.
DRN is one contribution to this shared effort, proposing a path toward an RN that is not
only a philosophy of life but a lived, embodied, and socially transformative faith tradition.
A mature public theology of sacred nature would invite people not just to believe
differently, but to gather, celebrate, resist, and heal together in the face of planetary
crisis. It is a task far larger than any one thinker or school of thought—a call to collective
creativity in shaping a naturalistic religion that serves its participants and speaks
prophetically to the wider world. In this sense, Religious Naturalism is poised not merely
to offer a private spirituality but to become a framework for collective action and shared
meaning in the public square. These emerging rituals of ecological reverence—whether
river blessings, climate marches, or indigenous ceremonies at sites of resistance—
embody the kind of public theology of sacred nature that Religious Naturalism can both
lvii
interpret and join .
VI. The Future of Religious Naturalism: From Vision to Embodied Tradition
Religious Naturalism today stands at a threshold. It has already offered profound
intellectual contributions: an understanding of the cosmos grounded in science, a
reverence for life that transcends dogma, and an ecological ethic urgently needed in an
age of planetary crisis. Yet as a lived religious tradition, RN remains inchoate, lacking
the shared rituals, institutions, and public presence that make religions durable sources
of meaning and belonging lviii
. The task before us is not to declare a new religion
complete, but to undertake the collective work of shaping one.
nature Sections IV and V identified the gaps RN must address to become more than a
philosophical orientation: embodied ritual practice, transformative experience,
communal institutions, public theology, and social engagement rooted in sacred
. Dionysian Religious Naturalism (DRN) offers one experimental path forward, lix
contributing practices and frameworks for ecstasy, mythic imagination, and ecological
praxis (Mellinger 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2016a, 2016b, 2018, 2020a, 2020b, 2024). ButDRN is not a final blueprint. It is an invitation to others to help shape a naturalistic faith
that truly serves its participants and their communities.
The future of RN will depend on collaborative creativity: scholars and practitioners
deepening its mythic and ritual life; local congregations and communities experimenting
with new forms of worship and spiritual care; activists integrating sacred ecology into
struggles for justice; artists crafting symbols, music, and material culture that embody
reverence for nature . Some of this work will grow within Unitarian Universalist lx
congregations, Pagan groves, or secular eco-communities; some may evolve into
wholly new institutions. What matters is not institutional uniformity but the emergence of
living traditions where people gather, celebrate, mourn, and act together in response to
the sacredness of the Earth.
Religious Naturalism’s promise is not only to think differently about the world but to live
differently in it lxi
. Its future depends on moving beyond solitary contemplation or
academic discourse toward shared practices that inspire awe, deepen connection, and
sustain moral courage in the face of ecological devastation. If this vision is realized, RN
could become a fully-fledged public religion—a religion of sacred nature capable of
guiding cultural transformation and healing our fractured relationship with the Earth.
As noted in the introduction, Religious Naturalism has found an especially receptive
home within Unitarian Universalism, a tradition whose pluralist ethos allows RN thinkers
and practitioners to flourish alongside Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans, and
others lxii
. This hospitable environment has given RN access to the rich liturgical,
musical, educational, and social justice life of UU congregations, often compensating for
the movement’s own underdevelopment in these areas. Yet the increasing prominence
of RN within UU circles raises important questions about the future of both traditions:
will RN remain one voice among many in a pluralistic chorus, or will it come to shape
the theological center of UU identity? If RN is to flourish beyond academic discourse
and informal networks, it will need to develop a fuller repertoire of lived religious
practices—rituals, seasonal observances, life-cycle ceremonies—while retaining the
theological openness that makes UU a natural ally. The challenge and opportunity
ahead is to let RN both draw strength from UU pluralism and, in turn, contribute its own
distinctive vision of sacred nature to the evolving UU tradition.
Demian Wheeler, in his sermon Religious Naturalism: A Theology for UU Humanists
(2017), offers perhaps the clearest contemporary articulation of why Unitarian
lxiii
Universalism constitutes fertile ground for the flourishing of Religious Naturalism .
Defining RN as a worldview in which “nature is all there is” and yet remains the object of
ultimate concern, Wheeler frames it as a natural extension of UU’s liberal theological
heritage—anti-authoritarian in method, integrative in sources, and committed to aligningfaith with scientific and moral progress. Drawing on Sagan, Stone, Rue, Crosby, and
Goodenough, he presents RN as a “middle way” between supernaturalist religion and
reductive atheism, capable of offering humanists and theists alike a shared sacred
narrative in the “epic of evolution.” Crucially, Wheeler envisions RN as a theological
bridge across UU’s internal diversity, grounding ethical urgency in the ecological crisis
and calling for a “humble humanism” that celebrates life’s giftedness while
acknowledging human contingency in a vast, indifferent cosmos. His vision situates RN
not as a marginal orientation but as a theological future for UUism itself—one that could
model pluralistic and ecologically engaged religion for the wider culture.
lxiv
The journey ahead is unfinished, and it is larger than any one thinker or movement .
DRN is one contribution to a broader field of experiment and imagination. The future of
RN will be forged where ideas meet ritual, where communities invent new ways of
gathering, where ecological reverence and social justice are woven into the fabric of
daily life. This is not a distant dream but an open invitation: to help create a living,
embodied, and transformative faith adequate to the crises and possibilities of our time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No work such as this is ever written alone. It is born in conversation, nurtured in
community, and sustained by friendship and love. I bow with gratitude to the pioneers of
Religious Naturalism—Robert Corrington, Donald Crosby, Ursula Goodenough, Demian
Wheeler, Michael Hogue, Eric Steinhart, Bron Taylor, Lisa Sideris, Jerome Stone, and
Wesley Wildman—scholars and visionaries with whom I have been in conversation
across the years, and whose work has guided and inspired me. To Joanna Macy, whose
voice has always reminded us that hope is a practice, I give thanks. To John Halstead,
Jon Cleland Host, and the editors of the blog Naturalistic Paganism, for creating a
community of seekers who walk in reverence with science and nature, I am indebted. To
Starhawk, whose Spiral Dance I first read in San Francisco in 1981, sparking my
journey into naturalist spirituality, earth religions, and non-patriarchal paths, I offer
special gratitude. And to the Pagan and Druid communities of Santa Barbara County,
who continue to keep the flame of embodied spirituality alive, I give thanks for fellowship
and ritual shared.
I am grateful as well to the spiritual activists of CLUE Santa Barbara, my beloved
interfaith companions in the struggle for justice: Laurence Severance, Maureen Earl,
Martha Santrizos, Diane Fox, Lane Clark, Gene Michaels, Ken Ralph, Laura Pina, Ana
Arce, Lizzie Rodriguez, Emiliano Campobello, Rev. Julia Hamilton, Rich Appelbaum,
Rev. Carolyn Bjerke, Ila Fennell, Rev. David Moore, Radhule Weininger, Jeff Shaffer,and Emily Allen. Your faith in action, and your action as faith, have continually reminded
me what it means to walk together in hope.
To close friends Bill Shay, John F. Ely, Simon Gottschalk, and Valerie Yoshimura, I offer
my love and gratitude. To supportive colleagues Steve Clayman and Doug Maynard,
who sharpened my mind while encouraging my heart, I am indebted. To my professors
at UCSB—Dick Flacks, Harvey Molotch, Don Zimmerman, Tom Scheff, and Tomatsu
Shibutani—my lifelong gratitude, for they not only taught me sociology but also taught
me how to live it.
To new friends—Devin Larsen, Timothy John Largent, Joshua Segura, Javier Muñoz,
and Jordan Stires—thank you for the joy of companionship and the spark of fresh
imagination. To community activists Chuck Flacks, Suzanne Riordan, Krystal Freedom,
Nancy McCradie, and Sally Hamilton, I honor your fierce commitment to justice and
your tireless compassion for those on the margins. And to my family—Mary Mellinger
Kirk, Paul Robert Kirk, and Robert Kirk—I give thanks for the bonds of kinship that
ground all my journeys.
This work is for all of you, and for the countless others who have offered me
conversation, criticism, encouragement, or love. May these words reflect not only my
voice but the chorus of voices that have sustained me.
This paper is dedicated to my grandfather, Rev. Asa Wright Mellinger, who was born on
September 21, 1897, in Washingtonville, Columbiana County, Ohio, in a log house
within a Pennsylvania Dutch–speaking Mennonite family. He carried that heritage of
simplicity and rootedness with him throughout his life. He attended Mount Union
College, where he met his future wife, Edith Marion Ford, and went on to pursue
theological studies at Boston University and Harvard University in a joint program.
There, in 1925, he earned a Master of Sacred Theology, completing a thesis in the form
of a play, A Thorn in the Flesh, on the Apostle Paul. He was fluent in the classical and
biblical languages—Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac—yet lived with a
humility and plainness inspired by both his Mennonite upbringing and the harsh realities
of the Great Depression, which kept him and my grandmother in a life of radical
simplicity sustained by his modest ministerial salary. As a pastor, he became a gentle
and steadfast shepherd to his small, aging Yankee flock at the First Congregational
Church in Chicopee, Massachusetts, a struggling mill town along the Connecticut River
then filling with Catholic immigrant families. He offered kindness, pastoral care, and
steadfast presence in a time of decline for his congregation, embodying a ministry of
fidelity and compassion more than of institutional triumph.
i
Scholarly debates over the definition of “religion” are crucial for situating Religious Naturalism.
Émile Durkheim’s functionalist definition emphasized the social glue of sacred symbols and
collective rituals, Clifford Geertz’s symbolic approach described religion as a “system of
symbols” shaping experience, and Paul Tillich offered a theological definition of religion as
“ultimate concern.” Religious Naturalism challenges substantive definitions that require belief in
supernatural agents, but it clearly satisfies functional and symbolic criteria: it provides
communal orientation, symbolic depth, and an ultimate frame of meaning in nature itself.
Jerome Stone (2008) has argued that naturalistic forms of religion have always been present in
Western thought, even if marginalized, and Donald Crosby (2002, 2008) insists that reverence
for nature can perform all the functions of religion without reference to the supernatural. Thus,
RN emerges not as a dilution of religion but as a robust contender within long-standing
scholarly debates about what counts as “religion.”
ii
The relationship between science and religion has often been cast in terms of conflict,
independence, or integration. Ian Barbour’s classic typology (Issues in Science and Religion,
1966) distinguished conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration models, while Stephen
Jay Gould’s notion of “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) suggested that science and
religion occupy distinct domains. Religious Naturalism exemplifies a distinctive integrative
posture: it grounds religious awe and ethical commitment in scientific cosmology and biology.
Ursula Goodenough’s Sacred Depths of Nature (1998; 2022) translates molecular biology into a
hymn of praise, Loyal Rue’s Everybody’s Story (1999) interprets evolutionary cosmology as a
shared myth for humanity, and Wesley Wildman has consistently argued that religious
anthropology must engage contemporary science as its foundation. RN thus offers not a truce
between science and religion, but a fusion—religion reconstituted on the basis of
contemporary scientific understandings of the natural world.
iii
The dramatic growth of the religiously unaffiliated—the so-called “nones”—provides a crucial
context for Religious Naturalism. According to Pew Research Center surveys, the percentage
of U.S. adults identifying as religiously unaffiliated rose from 16% in 2007 to nearly 30% by
2021. Sociologists debate whether this reflects secularization, religious privatization, or the
emergence of new spiritual forms. Charles Taylor (2007), in A Secular Age, argues that
disaffiliation is not simple unbelief but a shift toward an “immanent frame” where meaning is
sought within this world. In this sense, RN offers a naturalistic religious option that resonates
with the cultural drift toward immanence: it preserves reverence, ritual, and depth of meaning
without invoking transcendent agents. Studies of “nones” show strong ecological and ethical
commitments, suggesting that RN may provide precisely the theological articulation of what
many already intuitively practice: treating nature as sacred without reference to traditional
doctrines.Religious Naturalism also inherits much from the trajectory of liberal theology in America. iv
Gary Dorrien’s magisterial three-volume Making of American Liberal Theology (2001–2006)
identifies the central commitments of liberal theology as anti-authoritarianism, pluralism, and
mediation between faith and modern knowledge. RN exemplifies these commitments in a
naturalistic key: it rejects authoritarian dogma, affirms plural forms of reverence, and mediates
between religious longing and scientific cosmology. Jerome Stone has described RN as part of
the “underground river” of liberal religion, while Donald Crosby and Ursula Goodenough have
embodied liberal values of openness, inclusivity, and dialogue in their writing and teaching. By
taking liberal theology’s insistence that truth is tested by reason and experience rather than
revelation, RN continues this heritage while extending it into a thoroughly naturalistic horizon.
It is no accident that Religious Naturalism has found its strongest institutional footing within v
Unitarian Universalism. Nearly all of the leading figures in the RN conversation—Ursula
Goodenough, Donald Crosby, Robert Corrington, Jerome Stone, Michael Hogue, and Demian
Wheeler—are UUs. This clustering is significant: UU congregations provide a denominational
home where naturalistic forms of spirituality can flourish without marginalization. As Stone
observes in Religious Naturalism Today (2008), UUism has long harbored the “underground
river” of naturalistic piety, sustaining it when more dogmatic forms of religion excluded such
voices. Goodenough’s Sacred Depths of Nature has been used in UU adult religious education;
Crosby’s works are studied in UU seminaries; Hogue teaches theology at Meadville Lombard
Theological School; and Wheeler explicitly frames RN as a “public theology” for UU. RN both
benefits from and enriches UU by providing a coherent theological orientation around sacred
nature. In this sense, UU functions as a crucial incubator for RN’s intellectual and liturgical
development.
vi
The number of Unitarian Universalists depends on how one counts. The Unitarian Universalist
Association (UUA) reports about 150,000 official adult members on its annual rolls. National
surveys such as Pew’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study yield a much higher figure—roughly
0.3–0.4% of U.S. adults, or between 600,000 and 900,000 people who self-identify as UU. The
oft-cited “200,000” is therefore a middle estimate, reflecting a reasonable guess at the number
of active participants: more than the official membership, but far fewer than all who check the
UU box in a survey. It is best understood not as a precise statistic but as a shorthand for the
active community situated between those two extremes.
vii
In the 2001 Faith Communities Today survey, 54% of Unitarian Universalists identified as
“humanist.” At that time, “humanist” typically meant non-theistic and science-affirming, but
with a distinctly anthropocentric cast. In the two decades since, amid accelerating ecological
crisis and the discourse of the Anthropocene, many who once claimed the humanist label have
shifted their emphasis toward ecological embeddedness, evolutionary cosmology, and
reverence for the natural world. In other words, the vocabulary has evolved. What counted as
“humanist” in 2001 looks in 2025 much closer to what scholars and practitioners now call
religious naturalism. Thus, citing the 54% figure is not a sleight of hand but an interpretive
update: the same constituency, under changing historical conditions, now speaks a new
religious language.viii
Jerome Stone famously described Religious Naturalism as an “underground river” running
through Western intellectual and religious history (Religious Naturalism Today, 2008). This river
surfaces in the rational mysticism of Spinoza, the nature religion of Emerson, and the
pragmatic naturalism of John Dewey’s A Common Faith (1934). It flows as well through the
writings of Henry Nelson Wieman and the Chicago School, which sought a naturalistic
grounding for religious values. In the twentieth century, it reemerges in humanism and process
thought, only to come into clearer definition through the writings of Crosby, Goodenough, and
Corrington. The metaphor of an underground river suggests both marginalization and
persistence: naturalistic forms of spirituality have long existed beneath the surface of more
dominant religious currents, waiting for cultural conditions to allow them to emerge more
visibly. RN today represents the surfacing of this subterranean current into a more explicit and
self-conscious tradition.
ix
The emergence of Religious Naturalism must be situated within the broader field of religion-
and-nature studies, which has crystallized in recent decades. The Journal for the Study of
Religion, Nature, and Culture (founded 2007) has provided an interdisciplinary home for
scholarship exploring how human cultures engage the natural world religiously. Bron Taylor’s
Dark Green Religion (2009) framed a spectrum of earth-based spiritualities, ranging from
radical environmental activism to neopagan ritual, as “religion” despite their divergence from
classical theism. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim’s Religion and Ecology project at Yale,
initiated in the 1990s, brought world religions into dialogue with environmental crisis, while
Michael Hogue (2010, 2018) has advanced eco-theological forms of RN. Within this scholarly
ecology, Religious Naturalism is not an isolated construct but a well-positioned stream,
providing philosophical clarity and theological articulation to the broader “religion and ecology”
subdiscipline.
DI write this essay not as a detached observer but as a scholar-participant who has long x
wrestled with the promises and limits of naturalistic spirituality. My own trajectory has
consistently pressed Religious Naturalism toward what Robert Corrington names the
“ecstatic,” but with a more explicitly Dionysian accent. In Steps Toward a Dionysian Naturalism
(2015), I began to argue that RN requires ritual, ecstasy, and embodiment if it is to function as a
living religion, not simply as a philosophy. This project was extended in Nature Religions and
Revolutionary Social Change (2016), where I examined how sacralizing nature can animate
political movements for justice as well as personal spirituality. In Tripping with the Gods (2017),
I turned to the entheogenic dimension of experience, suggesting that psychedelics might
function as sacraments in a naturalistic framework, and that altered states of consciousness
can deepen RN’s experiential grounding. Finally, in The New American Religions of Nature
(2018), I analyzed plural eco-spiritual movements in the contemporary U.S.—including
Paganism, eco-activist ritual, and psychedelic communities—as evidence that new naturalistic
religions of sacred nature are already emerging. Taken together, these works highlight
dimensions often underdeveloped in more Apollonian strands of RN: embodied ritual, ecstatic
experience, communal celebration, and insurgent politics. Where figures such as Crosby,
Goodenough, and Stone offer conceptual clarity and philosophical rigor, my own contributions
seek to restore Dionysian vitality, pressing RN toward the fullness of a lived, celebratory public
theology of sacred nature.
xi
While often articulated in academic or theological terms, Religious Naturalism also intersects
with lived cultural practices that sacralize nature outside traditional churches. Bron Taylor’s
Dark Green Religion (2009) documents spiritualities of nature among surfers, environmental
activists, and neo-pagan groups, all of which resonate with RN’s reverence for the natural
world. Ecofeminist writers such as Starhawk (The Spiral Dance, 1979; Dreaming the Dark,
1982) have pioneered rituals that embody nature’s sacredness through seasonal cycles,
feminist liturgies, and political action. Naturalistic Pagans and Druids (e.g., the Order of Bards,
Ovates, and Druids) have also contributed practices that enact reverence without theism,
drawing on myth and ritual to deepen ecological awareness. RN is enriched by these adjacent
traditions, which provide embodied, communal forms that balance its more Apollonian
academic discourse. In climate marches, solstice festivals, and psychedelic retreats, RN finds
kinship with a broader cultural movement that treats nature as sacred and ultimate.
xii
Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) has long been read as a ur-text of naturalistic spirituality. By
equating God with Nature (Deus sive Natura), Spinoza offered a framework in which reverence
and rational inquiry could coincide. Though controversial in his own time—condemned by
religious authorities—Spinoza became a touchstone for later naturalists who sought a
worldview stripped of supernaturalism yet still deeply religious. See Baruch Spinoza, Ethics,
trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). For biography and context,
Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).xiii
Romanticism reframed nature as source of beauty, power, and sublimity, countering
Enlightenment rationalism with a poetics of life. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe exemplified this
orientation, not only in his literary work but in his scientific writings on color and morphology,
where he sought living patterns rather than mechanical laws. Romantics provided the
emotional and aesthetic vocabulary that later Religious Naturalists drew on to animate nature
with meaning. See M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971); Nicholas
Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
George Santayana, though often remembered as a philosopher of skepticism, described xiv
religion as “poetry of the spirit.” For Santayana, religion functioned aesthetically and
symbolically, shaping moral imagination rather than asserting supernatural truths. This
anticipates a key RN theme: that symbols, myths, and rituals may be true as vehicles of
meaning even if not metaphysically literal. See George Santayana, Reason in Religion (New
York: Scribner’s, 1905), 23.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) stand as xv
foundational American texts for naturalist spirituality. Emerson sacralized the “transparent
eyeball” of perception, while Thoreau embodied a life experiment of simplicity and attunement
to natural rhythms. Both provided a distinctly American genealogy for RN: reverence for nature
rooted in lived practice and literary witness. See Emerson, Nature (Boston: James Munroe,
1836); Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854).
xvi
John Dewey, philosopher rather than theologian, gave RN its most enduring philosophical
classic in A Common Faith (1934). Dewey redefined “the religious” as a quality of experience
available without belief in the supernatural. His faith was faith-in-humanity and faith-in-nature,
in the processes of growth and inquiry. Dewey’s pragmatic recasting of religion is a
cornerstone for religious naturalists who see value in religion’s functions without recourse to
metaphysical claims. See John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1934). For interpretation, Thomas Alexander, The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the
Aesthetics of Existence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
xvii
Process thinkers infused naturalism with metaphysical ambition. Alfred North Whitehead’s
Process and Reality (1929) envisioned reality as relational and dynamic. Charles Hartshorne
extended this vision in explicitly theological ways, while Gordon Kaufman reframed “God” as a
symbol for creative mystery. For RN, these figures opened ways to conceive of divinity as
immanent within natural processes rather than transcendent beyond them. See Whitehead,
Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929); Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948); Gordon Kaufman, In Face of Mystery (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993).xviii
The early twentieth-century Chicago School theologians (Shailer Mathews, Henry Nelson
Wieman) sought to reconcile modern science with religious faith. Wieman, in particular,
described God as the “creative event” within natural processes—a view both radical and
deeply naturalistic. This early theological naturalism prefigured later RN by treating creativity
and relationality in the world as objects of ultimate concern. See Shailer Mathews, The Faith of
Modernism (New York: Macmillan, 1924); Henry Nelson Wieman, Religious Experience and
Scientific Method (New York: Macmillan, 1926).
xix
Sam Keen’s Hymns to an Unknown God (1994) was a passionate call to recover the
ecstatic, erotic, Dionysian dimensions of spirituality. Keen’s critique resonates strongly with my
own: modern religion, including RN, risks becoming overly cerebral, neglecting the embodied
and the ecstatic. Keen’s work was formative for those of us who sought a naturalist path alive
to ritual, eros, and joy. See Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God (New York: Bantam, 1994).
Jungian archetypal psychology, with its focus on myth, symbol, and the collective xx
unconscious, deeply influenced alternative spiritualities. The Mythopoetic Men’s Movement of
the 1980s–90s, led by figures like Robert Bly, sought male initiation through myth, poetry, and
ritual—often in nature. While not RN per se, this movement demonstrated how naturalistic
spirituality could be Dionysian: embodied, communal, and mythic. See Robert Bly, Iron John
(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990); James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper
& Row, 1975).
xxi
Feminist and ecofeminist spirituality brought the body, gender, and ecology to the forefront.
Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance (1979) and Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980)
together advanced a naturalist ecofeminism that honored earth and body as sacred. Their work
expanded naturalism’s scope to include not just philosophy but lived ritual communities and
political praxis. See Starhawk, The Spiral Dance (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979); Carolyn
Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).
xxii
Loyal Rue crystallized a key insight of RN: humans require overarching stories to orient their
lives. In Everybody’s Story (2000), Rue argued that the “Epic of Evolution” could serve as a
unifying myth for our time—scientifically credible yet existentially meaningful. His subsequent
Religion Is Not About God (2005) pressed further: religions endure not for their supernatural
claims but for their capacity to organize meaning and values. Rue’s work gave RN its strongest
mythic articulation. See Loyal Rue, Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2000); Religion Is Not About God (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2005).
xxiii
Contemporary Pagan and Druidic communities, though diverse, demonstrate how ritual
ecologies can flourish without supernaturalism. Many self-identified “naturalistic Pagans” or
“atheistic Druids” explicitly reject the supernatural while affirming the mythic, ritual, and
communal functions of religion. Their seasonal festivals and embodied practices offer living
laboratories for RN. See John Halstead (ed.), Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic
Pagans (2016); Eric Steinhart, Atheistic Paganism: Paganism without Gods (Durham:
Apocryphile Press, 2018).xxiv
Jerome Stone’s Religious Naturalism Today (2008) was a watershed in giving RN both a
name and a genealogy. By retrieving thinkers from Santayana to Dewey and Wieman, Stone
showed that RN was not an isolated eccentricity but a continuous tradition. His work re-
legitimized RN as an option in theology and philosophy, making possible the flourishing of the
contemporary conversation. See Jerome A. Stone, Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a
Forgotten Alternative (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).
Ursula Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998; rev. 2023) may be the single xxv
most widely read RN text. With luminous prose and clarity, she presents molecular biology and
evolutionary science as sources of reverence, wonder, and moral orientation. While often
critiqued for its Apollonian restraint, Goodenough’s book is indispensable for showing how
scientific literacy itself can be religiously transformative. See Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred
Depths of Nature, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023
xxvi
Donald Crosby has been RN’s most systematic philosopher. In A Religion of Nature (2002)
and Living with Ambiguity (2008), Crosby articulated a comprehensive worldview: finite, tragic,
awe-inspiring, and demanding reverence. His work exemplifies RN’s Apollonian seriousness
but also gestures toward existential depth. Crosby stands as both philosopher and pastoral
voice for RN. See Donald A. Crosby, A Religion of Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002); Living
with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008)
xxvii
Robert Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism resists RN’s Apollonian tendencies by insisting on
polytheism, archetypal imagery, and sublime excess. In works like Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of
the World (1994) and Nature’s Sublime (2013), Corrington shows how naturalism can be
Dionysian: wild, erotic, terrifying, ecstatic. His work is a provocation for those of us who seek a
more embodied and insurgent RN. See Robert S. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the
World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Nature’s Sublime (Lanham: Lexington
Books, 2013).xxviii
It is striking that many of the most prominent contemporary exponents of Religious
Naturalism are themselves Unitarian Universalists. Ursula Goodenough has long identified with
UU communities, and The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998; 2nd ed. 2023) has been widely used
in UU adult religious education, covenant groups, and eco-spirituality circles. Donald Crosby,
author of A Religion of Nature (2002), Living with Ambiguity (2008), and More Than Discourse
(2014), writes explicitly as a UU; his work has been taught and reviewed within UU theological
circles as exemplary of a naturalistic faith stance. Robert Corrington—whose “ecstatic
naturalism” is developed in Nature’s Religion (1997), Nature’s Sublime (2013), and Deep
Pantheism (2016)—is likewise a UU thinker; his Peircean and depth-psychological project can
be read as a UU-compatible philosophy of religion that presses the tradition toward a more
Dionysian embrace of the unconscious, the aesthetic, and the numinous in sacred nature.
Demian Wheeler, UU minister and theologian, offers perhaps the most explicit framing of RN as
a UU “public theology” in Religion Within the Limits of History Alone (2019), positioning RN as a
bridge for pluralism within the UU tradition. Jerome A. Stone has long been recognized as a
leading UU theologian of RN—A Minimalist Vision of Transcendence (1992), Religious
Naturalism Today (2008), and The Coming of Religious Naturalism (2019) each advance a UU-
grounded naturalist theology. Michael Hogue, Professor of Theology at Meadville Lombard
Theological School, extends UU naturalism into postmodern, political, and ecological registers
in The Promise of Religious Naturalism (2010) and American Immanence (2018). Taken together,
these figures illustrate the depth of the UU–RN nexus: Unitarian Universalism has provided a
living denominational home for Religious Naturalism, while Religious Naturalism in turn has
offered UU theology a coherent and increasingly visible identity as a religion of sacred na
Feminist theologians and eco-spiritual activists have long argued that RN risks privileging xxix
intellectual clarity over embodied vitality. Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance (1979) and Charlene
Spretnak’s Religious Nature of the Feminist Movement (1981) foreground ritual, embodiment,
and community. Their work underscores that naturalism need not be cerebral—it can be
danced, sung, and enacted. The contrast with RN’s Apollonian bias highlights one of the
“missing dimensions” that ecofeminists have already begun to fill.
Jerome A. Stone’s Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2008) is widely credited with reviving the term “religious naturalism” and
giving it intellectual legitimacy. His earlier The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1992) reframed transcendence as expansion of meaning within experience itself,
not an appeal to any supernatural beyond. Stone’s methodology—what he calls “selective
retrieval”—demonstrates both his historical breadth and his restraint: he reclaims what can be
salvaged from religious traditions while rejecting their supernatural scaffolding. The result is a
genealogy rather than a metaphysics, a carefully curated history rather than a fully built system.
xxxxxxii
xxxi
Wesley J. Wildman stands out in RN for sheer scope. His Religious Philosophy as
Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010) outlines the comparative
method he uses to analyze ultimacy across traditions, while Science and Religious
Anthropology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) grounds religious experience in evolutionary and
cognitive science. Later works such as In Our Own Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017) and Effing the Ineffable (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018) extend this inquiry into
anthropomorphism and mystical ineffability. Together they form a kind of “systematic theology
for naturalists”—philosophically ambitious, scientifically conversant, and cross-cultural in
scope. Yet Wildman’s brilliance is also his limitation: his RN is largely conceptual, Apollonian in
its rigor and abstraction, leaving ritual and embodiment for others to develop.
Donald A. Crosby’s work spans more than a dozen volumes, including A Religion of Nature
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), Living with Ambiguity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), The Thou of
Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), and Nature as Sacred Ground (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015).
What unites them is a sober recognition of nature’s ambiguity: the same processes that birth
beauty also generate destruction. Crosby insists this ambiguity is not a reason for nihilism but
for reverence, obligation, and moral courage. His work has given RN one of its most sustained
and serious voices. Yet, as even his admirers note, Crosby rarely turns to ritual or embodied
practice—his is a theology of reflection more than celebration, Apollonian in its gravitas.
Robert S. Corrington’s Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), Nature’s Sublime (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), and Deep
Pantheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) form the core of his ecstatic
philosophy. Drawing on Peirce’s pragmatism, Jungian depth psychology, and semiotics,
Corrington portrays nature as layered, fecund, and terrifyingly excessive. He insists that
nature’s unconscious overflows rational order and demands symbolic response. Corrington’s
thought resists reduction to tidy categories, offering RN a Dionysian energy often missing from
its Apollonian colleagues. Yet even he tends to map ecstasy rather than enact it, producing a
metaphysical poetics of ecstasy more than a ritual one.
My own articulation of Dionysian Naturalism takes Corrington’s metaphysical insights and
translates them into lived possibility. If ecstatic naturalism identifies the depths of nature as
sacred excess, Dionysian Naturalism insists that these depths must be encountered in ritual,
trance, dance, and entheogenic communion. This project, outlined in essays such as Steps
Toward a Dionysian Naturalism and Tripping with the Gods, is not merely philosophical but
experiential—inviting seekers into practices where nature’s ecstasy becomes embodied. The
distinction between Apollonian description and Dionysian enactment marks the shift from
philosophy of religion to religion as lived.
xxxiii
xxxivxxxvi
xxxvii
Ursula Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, xxxv
1998; rev. 2023) remains the most widely read RN text. Her strength lies in rendering molecular
biology into existential meditation: grief rituals for death, gratitude rituals for life, awe before
complexity. The accessibility of her prose has made her a beloved figure among scientists and
seekers alike. Critics, however, note her Apollonian style: contemplative, private, intellectually
luminous but ritually thin. Still, Goodenough demonstrates with unmatched clarity how science
itself can be a wellspring of reverence.
Loyal Rue’s Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution (Albany: SUNY Press,
2000) distilled the evolutionary narrative into a sacred epic that orients human life within
cosmic history. In Religion Is Not About God (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005),
he argued that religion survives not because of metaphysical truth claims but because of its
adaptive social functions: binding values, motivating cooperation, sustaining community. Rue
gives RN its mythic backbone, but his myths remain Apollonian in style—analytic and
functional rather than ecstatic or embodied.
Demian Wheeler’s Religion within the Limits of History Alone: Pragmatic Historicism and
the Future of Theology (New York: Routledge, 2020) represents RN in its most austere
Apollonian form: everything historicized, contextualized, nothing transcendent. His project
safeguards RN from metaphysical overreach but risks draining it of sacrality. Michael S.
Hogue’s American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018), by contrast, situates RN as public theology, engaged with ecological
crisis and democratic practice. Hogue’s vision is constructive, liberationist, and activist, but still
largely text-based. Together, Wheeler and Hogue illustrate the strengths and limits of
Apollonian RN: rigor without ecstasy, politics without ritual, theology without dance.
Bron Taylor’s Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009) documents earth-based spiritualities from surfing
subcultures to radical environmental movements. His ethnographic work highlights practices of
ritual protest, ecstatic immersion in wilderness, and embodied forms of reverence—dimensions
that RN often lacks. Taylor’s comparative frame situates RN within a larger global field of
naturalistic spiritualities, offering both context and challenge: unless RN embraces ritual and
ecstasy, it may remain an Apollonian enclave while parallel movements claim the Dionysian
terrain.
xxxix
The Apollonian/Dionysian contrast, drawn originally from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy
(1872), has proven a fertile heuristic for assessing modern religion. Where Apollonian order
emphasizes clarity, restraint, and harmony, the Dionysian celebrates ecstasy, embodiment, and
excess. Many commentators on RN (including myself) have noted how its philosophical rigor,
while admirable, can eclipse the messier dimensions of ritual, myth, and embodiment. For
Nietzsche, the vitality of Greek tragedy came from the tension between both forces; the same
may hold for RN. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage, 1967).
xxxviiixl
Donald A. Crosby makes this point with characteristic candor in More Than Discourse:
Symbolic Expression and the Natural World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). He argues that RN
must engage symbolic and aesthetic registers or risk devolving into dry philosophical analysis.
Crosby’s critique is prescient: much of RN’s energy has been invested in conceptual mapping,
leaving ritual and praxis underdeveloped. His insistence on the indispensability of symbol and
story remains a rallying point for those who want RN to be more than a seminar religion.
xli
Eric Steinhart’s Atheistic Mysticism (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) argues that naturalistic
worldviews can generate mystical experiences—wholeness, dissolution, connection—without
recourse to supernaturalism. His work demonstrates that transcendence is not the monopoly
of theism. In this sense, Steinhart shows one pathway for RN to develop Dionysian dimensions:
cultivating ecstatic practices consistent with naturalist commitments.
xlii
Mellinger, Wayne Martin. 2016b. “Nature Religions and Revolutionary Social Change:
Advancing a Practical Theology of Spiritual Activism.” Naturalistic Paganism (blog). [A version
also appears in the blog Gods & Radicals: A Site of Beautiful Resistance.]
xliii
Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988) popularized the idea
that myths are not outdated superstitions but perennial structures of meaning. For RN, Loyal
Rue’s “Epic of Evolution” represents one such mythic structure, but without ritual it remains
incomplete. Dionysian RN insists that myth and ritual belong together—story enacted in body,
symbol, and community. See also Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), for the importance of ritual as embodied practice of
meaning.
xliv
Loyal Rue’s Everybody’s Story (2000) remains a seminal attempt to craft a unifying
naturalistic myth: the evolutionary epic as sacred story. E.O. Wilson’s phrase “the epic of
evolution” in Consilience (New York: Knopf, 1998) gave the movement a memorable tag, while
Thomas Berry tirelessly promoted “The Universe Story” (1992, with Brian Swimme) and later
The Great Work (1999). Berry and Swimme’s Journey of the Universe (2011, with Mary Evelyn
Tucker) further extended this mythos for popular audiences. More recently, Swimme’s
Cosmogenesis (2022) offers a personal narrative of awakening to cosmic story. These works
represent perhaps the most successful collective effort within RN to develop mythic resources.
xlv
Lisa H. Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2017). In this work, Sideris critiques the tendency in some
strands of science-and-religion discourse to “consecrate” science through mythic or religious
framing, particularly in cosmic evolution narratives. While she acknowledges the power of awe
and wonder, she argues that genuine ecological reverence requires attending to the messy,
violent, and indifferent aspects of the natural world, not only its grandeur. Her analysis offers a
crucial corrective to overly Apollonian renderings of the Epic of Evolution.xlvi
The “epic of evolution” has not only been told but ritualized. John Cleland Host developed
the “Cosmala,” a strand of prayer beads with 276 beads marking milestones in cosmic history.
Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, through their “Epic of Evolution” preaching and curriculum,
sought to embed this story in congregational life. These efforts demonstrate that RN can
generate not only myths but ritual forms—though they remain marginal compared to traditional
liturgies. See John Cleland Host, “The Cosmala: Prayer Beads for the Epic of Evolution”
(online, 2014); Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution (New York: Viking, 2007).
xlvii
My own contributions to this Dionysian turn in RN are found in essays such as Steps
Toward a Dionysian Naturalism (2017), Nature Religions and Revolutionary Social Change
(2018), Tripping with the Gods (2019), and The New American Religions of Nature (2021).
Across these texts, I have sought to articulate a naturalism that embraces ritual ecstasy,
psychedelic sacrament, and revolutionary politics. These writings stand as experiments in
crafting what I call a Dionysian Naturalism: insurgent, embodied, ecstatic.
xlviii
Contemporary Pagan and Druid movements demonstrate that naturalistic religion can thrive
ritually without theism. Their seasonal festivals, nature-based rites, and communal rituals
embody precisely the kind of Dionysian energy RN often lacks. Scholars such as Sarah Pike
(Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves, 2001) and Graham Harvey (Animism: Respecting the Living
World, 2005) have shown how these communities ritualize ecological reverence. Naturalistic
strands within these movements (e.g., “Godless Pagans”) reveal a practical convergence with
RN, even if the vocabularies differ.
xlix
The language of insurgency in religion has deep roots. Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of
Tragedy (1872) introduced the Apollonian/Dionysian polarity as a way of contrasting
disciplined, rational order with ecstatic, embodied experience. Religious Naturalism has been
predominantly Apollonian in its development—conceptual, respectable, academically secure.
To call for a Dionysian turn is to insist that religion must also be embodied, ecstatic, and
insurgent: not simply reflective of the given order but disruptive of it. See Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).
l
Gary Dorrien’s monumental The Making of American Liberal Theology trilogy (2001–2006)
documents the rise of liberal theology as rational, ethical, and conciliatory. Religious Naturalism
inherits much of this DNA: anti-authoritarian, scientifically literate, philosophically careful. Yet
the very traits that secured liberal theology’s respectability also limited its vitality, producing
what Sam Keen once criticized as “bloodless religion.” Dionysian RN emerges as a critique of
this lineage, seeking to restore what liberal theology domesticated. See Gary Dorrien, The
Making of American Liberal Theology, Volume 1: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).
lilii
he term “public theology” was first coined by Martin Marty in the 1970s to describe religious
discourse that engages broad civic issues rather than remaining confined to sectarian
concerns. David Tracy deepened this project by distinguishing between the “publics” of
academy, church, and society. Religious Naturalism’s shift toward public theology places it in
this lineage but with a decisive difference: its publics are defined not by ecclesial tradition but
by planetary ecology. See Martin E. Marty, The Public Church (New York: Crossroad, 1981);
David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981).
liii
The Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch in which human activity has become
the dominant planetary force, calls for new religious frameworks. Bruno Latour (Facing Gaia,
Cambridge: Polity, 2017) insists that politics itself must be rethought in light of Gaia as a living
agent. Dipesh Chakrabarty (The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2021) underscores the need for reimagining human belonging on a planetary
scale. A public theology of sacred nature situates RN as a constructive response to this crisis:
not merely personal consolation, but a planetary ethic.
liv
Thomas Berry insisted that “the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of
objects,” a conviction he framed in terms of “sacred nature.” In The Sacred Universe (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2009), Berry argued that ecological survival demands
reverencing the Earth as sacred. Bron Taylor, in Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the
Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), demonstrated
ethnographically that many contemporary movements—surf culture, radical environmentalism,
biocentric activism—already operate within a worldview of sacred nature. These convergences
suggest that RN’s central symbol has wide resonance across religious and secular publics.
lv
Liberation theology, inaugurated by Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll:
Orbis, 1973), insisted that theology must begin from the perspective of the oppressed and
marginalized. Political theology, in Carl Schmitt’s controversial formulation (Political Theology,
1922), argued that modern political concepts are secularized theological ones. RN, by contrast,
offers a political theology of sacred nature: an insistence that ecological destruction and
climate injustice are simultaneously political and spiritual crises. Eco-liberation theology in
Latin America and ecofeminist theology in North America have made similar claims, but RN
presses the point from a fully naturalistic base.
lvi
Michael S. Hogue’s American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2018) advances a public theology that weds ecological survival to
democratic resilience. He argues for humility, resilience, and solidarity as cardinal virtues for an
age of crisis. Hogue’s framing resonates strongly with RN, though Dionysian RN presses
further: from resilience to ecstasy, from solidarity to insurgency.lvii
Public theology depends not only on ideas but on symbols that can animate civic
imagination. Catherine Keller’s Political Theology of the Earth (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2018) argues that ecological imagery is already shaping political imaginaries. River
blessings, climate marches, tree plantings, and indigenous-led rituals at pipeline protests all
function as sacraments of sacred nature in the civic sphere. RN can both interpret and
participate in these rituals, offering a language of sacred nature that is intelligible across
religious and secular publics.
lviii
Classic sociology of religion reminds us that institutional durability—ritual, leadership,
organizational continuity—is what differentiates fleeting movements from established traditions.
Max Weber’s analysis of routinization of charisma (Economy and Society, 1922/1978) and Ernst
Troeltsch’s distinction between church, sect, and mysticism (The Social Teaching of the
Christian Churches, 1912) illustrate the importance of these structural dimensions. RN’s
challenge is precisely here: how to move from intellectual charisma to routinized, embodied
community.
lix
These gaps echo Donald Crosby’s warning in More Than Discourse (1996) that religion
cannot subsist on ideas alone, and Eric Steinhart’s proposals for eupraxia—ritualized,
communal practices for naturalists (2018). Together, they suggest that RN’s next phase must
be pragmatic and creative: building practices, not just theories.
Examples of this collaborative creativity already exist. The Religious Naturalist Association lx
(RNA), founded in 2014, has developed resources, programming, and networks that provide
scaffolding for RN as a movement. Unitarian Universalist congregations, as noted earlier, have
functioned as de facto RN institutions through rituals like water communion, religious
education, and climate-justice activism. These institutional carriers illustrate how RN can move
from solitary philosophy to communal tradition.
lxi
Comparative cases show how intellectual currents become religions through ritual
embodiment and institutionalization. Buddhism’s spread into the West, for instance, depended
not only on its philosophical appeal but on the creation of sanghas, meditation centers, and
ritual life. Paganism’s contemporary revival illustrates a similar trajectory: from academic
discourse on myth to living communities with festivals, ordination pathways, and published
liturgies (see Sarah Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves, 2001). RN’s potential future parallels
these developments.
lxii
UU’s pluralist embrace has indeed been decisive. Historian Leigh Eric Schmidt (Restless
Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, 2005) shows how liberal traditions function as
incubators for new religious orientations by providing liturgical, educational, and organizational
support. For RN, UU congregations have provided precisely this fertile ground, enabling RN
thinkers to teach, publish, and ritualize their commitments without needing to create entirely
new institutions from scratch.lxiii
Wheeler’s sermon, delivered at the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, is a key
contemporary articulation. By presenting RN as a bridge between UU humanists and theists,
Wheeler frames RN not as a fringe option but as a theological future for UU itself. His emphasis
on “humble humanism” and the “epic of evolution” resonates with broader RN themes of
reverence, contingency, and ecological urgency. This sermon deserves recognition as one of
the first explicit UU endorsements of RN as a theological center.
Scholars of new religious movements note that traditions often crystallize at moments of lxiv
crisis when intellectual resources meet ritual creativity and social need (see Catherine
Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 2007). RN today stands in precisely such a liminal
space: capable of remaining a diffuse orientation or becoming a consolidated religion. Its future
depends on whether its adherents can translate cosmology into ceremony, ethics into activism,
and reverence into enduring communal life
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