Beautiful British Columbia vs Friendly Manitoba: Where you live may influence your spirituality

What is it like to live, work...and be spiritual...where you are?

How are our spiritual lives shaped by place, whether we're Calgarians or Haligonians?

Cascadia (British Columbia, Washington State and Oregon) is a unique region, blending natural beauty and urban sophistication. It's also a place with a very high percentage of people who do not identify with any particular religion.

In 2011, 44% of British Columbians surveyed by Statistics Canada said they have no religious affiliation. In the rest of Canada, the numbers ran much lower; between 21-24%. Bramadat says those numbers have probably risen in the years since. They're higher among young people as well; he estimates that as many as 70% of his own students do not identify with a particular faith.

Paul Bramadat works in the heart of Cascadia. He's the Director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. The Centre is home to the Cascadia Project - a long-term study of religion, spirituality, secularity, and society in the Pacific Northwest.

In fact, the Cascadia region is so beautiful that Bramadat has coined a term for a particular kind of experience people have there: reverential naturalism. He defines it as,

"The sense that being out in nature is not just a place where one does spirituality or religion, but it is a medium through which it is done."  

Reverential naturalism

"One can be out in the natural world, one can have a view of the world as being worthy of reverence, and being in a sense -- arresting. In some sense it forces you to revere it because it is so beyond you. And in BC it is a tame majesty … Certainly in many other parts of the country you have majestic views and natural areas… but there's something about this context where, because the climate is so temperate, there's such a low level of pestilence, there's such a lot of food around… It's a peculiar mix of natural, vertical, towering beauty and the wide open spaces of the oceans… and a kind of coziness, what the Danes would call hygge."

Bramadat's role as an academic expert in Religious Studies often puts him in the removed 'observer's position' when it comes to this kind of subject matter.  But he says he has definitely had powerful experiences of reverential naturalism.

"There are moments where I stop, get off my bike, and stand there, and think not just 'my goodness am I ever lucky', but 'what is happening here? How am I being - in some sense - reconfigured, challenged to see myself not simply as a consumer of this image, and of this moment, but rather as something that is transformed, transfixed by that experience?'"

"Sometimes I think that when I'm in the presence of these reconfiguring or transfixing moments, it's actually challenging my ego, because the thing about a sublime experience, or reverential naturalism, is that it changes your sense of yourself being at the centre of everything."

While Bramadat and his colleagues investigate the influences of beauty, nature, culture, immigration, and history on religious practice in this one particularly stunning area of the world, it's natural to ask more broadly: How does our particular geographic location inform our spirituality?

Horizontal vs Vertical

Bramadat has lived in many regions of the country, including southern Ontario and the prairies (part of that time as a professor at the University of Winnipeg), so the comparisons come naturally to him:

"I love the prairies. I love that landscape. But it's a place of horizontal and somewhat elusive beauty. It requires your attention. You have to be paying attention to see it, because just being on the prairies, especially in the winter, can be incredibly… painful, actually. Even when your eyes and your heart are open enough to appreciate [that] kind of beauty … even then, you need to brace yourself for a long and heartless winter and for clouds of mosquitoes in the summer. In Cascadia, the beauty doesn't really require your attention, it reaches in and kind of grabs it."

But the question of locale and spirituality isn't just about which place is more mind-blowing or extreme. Bramadat has observed that differences in landscape and climate can affect social hierarchies -- and this influences our relationships with each other.

Relationships - a matter of survival

"In Winnipeg there is a way in which the harshness of the physical environment flattened the social hierarchy that one was plugged into… and so, regardless of what car you drove to the supermarket in, you actually did have something quite meaningful in common with the person who was checking out your groceries. Because you could have to rely on him or her to survive if, in fact, your car didn't work.

"Whereas I found that in more moderate climates, like in the Greater Toronto area and out here [in Victoria], the social hierarchies are quite acute and there's not much in common with the person [at the checkout]... and so there's a sense in which the physical or environmental realities in which we're plugged shape or give a kind of texture to the human interactions we can have."

So while harsh weather might come with hardship and lead to grumbling, Bramadat says the shared fight for survival can bring about a kind of solidarity that isn't always apparent in the more gracious climes of Cascadia. "I think it actually is a good reminder when it's a crushingly cold winter on the prairies …  that everybody is facing the same crushing experience of being freezing.  But out here on the west coast, you don't really have that. People might complain about the rain, they might complain if it's +2 degrees, but it's really not like what it is on the prairies."

So -- is there a link?

The researchers behind Cascadia Project hope to assemble a dynamic picture of spirituality in BC and the northwest United States. Bramadat says there isn't a clear link between geography and spirituality -- but that doesn't mean there's no merit in considering the correlation.

"I don't believe in environmental determinism, that where you live absolutely determines what kind of spiritual life is appealing to you. I do believe, though, that the physical realities of the place you live, whether that's Halifax or Brandon or Victoria, do shape the culture or the stories within which we make sense of our lives. So the natural environment is a kind of feature in that story.

"The question is, really, what does the community make of that story?  And out here on the West Coast, it's just very obvious to people that you should somehow factor in the natural environment when you're thinking about your spiritual life, or when you're thinking about ecological decisions and so forth."