ENVIRONMENTALISM: A NEW SECULAR RELIGION?

Nowadays our world is facing some important global problems; environmental problems are among the most important ones. In other words, we have faced with the widespread destruction of the environment. It threatens not only ourselves, but the whole world, future generations and other organisms. Against this threat, since the 1960s ecological wisdom and awareness have been raised. As a result of this, as an activist movement environmentalism has become popular in the 1980’s. This development has indeed gone hand in hand with the growing popularity of religion. So environmentalism, as an alternative paradigm, is not utterly independent of religion. I argue that our understanding of environmentalism can be greatly enhanced by taking the idea seriously that environmentalism is a version of the modern secular type of religion, because this issue is a complementary dimension of it. This paper will try to study some questions: “What is nature, human and god?”, “What is the relationship between god and nature?”, “Is environmentalism a new secular type of religion?” “Can environmentalism take the place of religion?”, “Is religion compatible with environmentalism, and to what extent?” By the way of entry into the debate on modernity and secularity, I will focus on a sociological answer to these questions about nature. This presentation examines the evolution of environmentalism from a movement to a religion. This paper will provide new perspectives to develop interdisciplinary approaches to nature, human, culture, and religion