In Canada the relationship between religion and nature has been troubled and uneasy. Lengthy difficult winters in a sparsely populated land dominated by an immense wilderness of granite rock have meant a country more promising for resources such as furs, minerals, forestry, or water than for the development of agriculture. The assessments of the religious possibilities of the natural--to say nothing of what might be termed a full-blown "religion" of nature--have been fraught with dualities and contradictions. The natural world has been regarded, from the general viewpoint of European immigrants at least, as more hostile than benevolent, and the prevailing Christian valuations, particularly if one considers the foundational myths as developed through Cartesian egocentricity and technological culture, have been typically negative or doubtful.
Various estimates still place Christianity as the religion of 80-90% of the people of Canada, though that proportion is dropping with the increase of those professing "no religion" and with the growth of other religions, especially through immigration. The effects of the combined factors of secularization and religious pluralism (especially with the influence of traditions having Asian roots) will doubtless alter what has been the customary Christian view of nature in Canada. And, of course, that Christian view will itself undergo alteration either internally or through adjustments to new cultural factors. But it was probably the general historic stance of western monotheism towards nature that Northrop Frye had in mind when he declared: "The Bible is emphatic that nothing numinous exists in nature, that there may be devils there but no gods" (Frye 1991, 26). From this negative perspective the natural world stands in opposition to, rather than facilitates, the established religious outlook, especially the ordered rationalities of the European Christianity imported into Canada. Christianity has generally tended to look to history, not nature, as the principal domain of revelation.
The realm of nature, if not precisely regarded as the abode of the demonic, is inhabited by powers frequently suspected of being antagonistic, chaotic, or indifferent. Canada's natural environment has remained vast and forbidding, capricious and unpredictable, standing in opposition to humanity's projects and aspirations, dwarfing and defeating the efforts of puny human beings to tame, domesticate, or impose their marks. Far from being an Edenic garden arranged for the habitation and enjoyment of human beings, the Canadian wilderness has been represented as "the land God gave Cain." Even when Canadians have permitted themselves to regard the natural world as living rather than dead, more vitalistic than mechanistic, then the Canadian landscape has often been conceived more as the realm of an "Ice Goddess," rather than that of an Earth Mother.
Of course, the effect of European Christianity on Canadian views of nature has by no means been uniform throughout all denominations, across all regions of the country, nor even through all of the successive eras and stages of settlement. In addition, even many Christians have found their religion's authorized stance towards the created order of nature to be something that they could not fully embrace. Here, as in so many other areas, a church's stated position is not the final or sole arbiter of people's outlooks and attitudes. Though the Bible as record of the mighty acts of God might be more reliable as a source of divine disclosure than the book of nature, nonetheless romantic or even deistic views of a revelatory natural world have also had their place.
Among all of the possible religious influences shaping the Canadian view of nature, the greatest alternative to western monotheism comes from the religions of First Nations peoples. Theirs is an outlook that sees the entire world filled with "persons," some of them human beings and some other than human. The aboriginal worldview, apprehending spiritual presences throughout the interpenetrating worlds of humans, of animals, and even extending to what others refer to as "inanimate" nature, tends to see the sacred as a living presence throughout the whole of reality. Indeed, "nature" as an isolable phenomenon capable of being analyzed (or even "appreciated") from without is contrary to the aboriginal modes of being in the world. John Badertscher rightly points out that First Nations peoples neither romanticize nor worship nor love nature, attitudes that make of nature a construct and requiring a distancing from it. Such views are based on the modern objectification of the non-human realm, an alienation then overcome through personification and reverence. Accordingly, contemporary pan-Indian spirituality is praised by environmentalists and feminists and neopagans alike for its high regard for the earth and for giving a religious basis to a more harmonious way of living.
This "indigenous" religious outlook, says Northrop Frye, presents itself as an alternative to the "imported" religion of the Europeans. Frye claims that the possibility of understanding nature as "home" rather than merely as "territory" sets up other creative options. For example, the settler might develop a sense of belonging here rather than emerging as potential colonizer or conqueror. Even more, if there is a fit between humanity and the rest of creation, then the natural environment can become something other than a setting for exploits, a storehouse of resources to be developed, or an emptiness to be filled with the objects of human manufacture and industry. Nature, that is to say, may have the potential to nurture and sustain humans. For if nature itself is conceived of as sacred then humanity need not look beyond the earth for salvation or for hope.
Author Margaret Atwood, in this instance functioning as critic rather than novelist or poet, has proposed an influential summation of the typical Canadian attitude towards the natural, one that is implicitly religious because of the seldom articulated cultural ideologies originating and sustaining it. A generation ago Atwood published her controversial examination of Canadian culture entitled Survival. What she was arguing there, in a manner both heuristic and polemical, was that "survival"Ñwhich Atwood reduced to the need just to endure and remain alive--is the central motif of Canadian culture. Further, it happens that this struggle for survival ends more often in defeat than in triumph, so that failure has been felt to be the appropriate ending in Canadian literature. Simply put, the natural world as setting for this doomed struggle was unyielding and unreceptive. If the American organizing myth of the frontier generates feelings of excitement and adventure, and if in England the ideal that one's home is one's castle occasions contentment sometimes bordering on smugness, in contrast Atwood maintained that the Canadian symbol of survival created anxiety and disquiet.
Part of the angry reaction aroused in some quarters by Atwood's account was no doubt because her portrayal seemed to cast Canada as a pathetic nation of victims and losers. Some argued that the struggle to survive, to retain one's individuality, and to persevere against overwhelmingly odds are characteristic modern themes in the arts and cultures worldwide, and not just in Canada. Though not without gesturing towards the imagination of hopeful possibilities in the form of "jail-breaks and re-creations," the note sounded in Survival nonetheless was at jarring odds with the growing Canadian pride and optimism after the centennial year of 1967 and in the midst of the era of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
For all that, nature, and in particular climate, landscape, and geography, impinges powerfully on the Canadian consciousness, constitutive of character and values and other aspects of a national mythology. One Canadian scholar, Peter Slater, has persuasively advanced the case that nature, not history, is the source of whatever Canadian counterpart there exists to American "civil religion." For there is no great political event of defining national and historical significance to be located within the story of Canada: none, that is, more or less equally accepted everywhere by all groups. As might be expected in a country of such pronounced regional divisions, the events celebrated in one place are ignored in others. The heroes of one group are the villains of another. That lack of a unifying foundational legend befits a nation whose fondest image of itself is a multicultural mosaic or kaleidoscope, rather than a melting-pot. The quest for a national identity, and for unity at the federal level, has been an ongoing national preoccupation.
The sacred story of Canada, Slater states, especially if one looks to the foundational informing patterns of biblical myth, is to be sought in setting rather than plot. What unites Canadians, therefore, is the land itself as domain and backdrop of this national experiment and not particular historical figures, whether generals, politicians, statesmen, or legislators. There is for Canadians no Moses who led a people out of slavery to the promised land. Nor any prophet who denounced the forces of Babylon. Nor a messianic savior whose sacrifice won redemption for faithful followers. Formed neither in the fires of military revolution nor even in less dramatic ways of throwing off the yoke of a foreign conqueror, Canada's political history remains unexceptional and unexciting. What stirs Canadian patriotic fervor are songs and images of rock, lake, and tree, or wide prairies and snowy fastnesses, of freely roaming wildlife, and of rocky seascapes and mountains.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the symbols by which Canadians represent themselves to one another and to the world are drawn from nature. The Canadian flag, brought in during the early 1960s, meant replacing the British Union Jack (of uncertain status and not universally approved) with a single stylized maple leaf having no political origins and no associations with any other nation. While a monarch domiciled in the United Kingdom still appears on all currency (and some stamps), her visage shares space on most coins (including the recently added one- and two-dollar denominations) with wildlife such as the beaver, caribou, loon, polar bear, and a pair of maple leaves on the lowly penny. The Canadian national anthem, "O Canada," while it has undergone alteration and retranslation confusing to older singers, makes no reference to any historical event and person. Any debates surrounding it have focused on the repetition of "stand on guard," on whether "God keep our land" is too exclusively monotheistic, or on the sexism of "in all thy sons command." But its capacity to stir Canadian hearts surely resides in the opening line's reference to "our home and native land" or the nordicity of "the true North strong and free."
Canada has no alternative anthem to compare with "America the Beautiful" (unless one counts the Canadian version of "This Land is Your Land" with its substitution of Canadian place names, from Vancouver Island to Bonavista). But the Province of Quebec does have its own sacred song in the form of Gilles Vigneault's "Mon pays": "Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver" ("My country is not a country, it is winter"). And, in fact, to single out winter as the defining ingredient of Quebecois consciousness, as if to suggest that a very season is the most salient characteristic of the conditions of one's homeland, is not so far from what most Canadians suspect is our most common preoccupation. The Via Rail magazine provided to travelers on board Canada's national railway system once featured an article suggesting that the national obsession of Canada is simply the weather. Whereas the French speak incessantly about food, and Italians about love, Canadians are fixated merely on the weather. In the late 1990s the top news stories for three years running were about weather: disastrous floods on the Saguenay and Red rivers, and a devastating ice storm in Ontario and Quebec.
Many songs of regional significance invoke geography and nature, as for example Newfoundland's "I'se the boy that builds the boat" with its catalogue of island place-names, or the evocation of "the sea-bound coast" and "mountains, dark and dreary" in "Farewell to Nova Scotia," or the summer camp-song engraved on the memories of generations of Ontario teenagers, "Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver/ Where still the mighty moose wanders at will." The prairies too have their songs of praise, as for instance Ian and Sylvia's "Four Strong Winds:" "Think I'll go out to Alberta,/ Weather's good there in the fall." In the same vein Gordon Lightfoot's "Alberta Bound" in its opening lines, "Oh the prairie lights are burning bright/ The Chinook wind is a-moving in/ Tomorrow night I'll be Alberta bound."
If climate, geography, or nature in general are unifying forces in Canadian consciousness, then it is little wonder that possible scarcity of natural resources such as water and natural gas and old-growth forests, the threats to wildlife species, the depletion of fish stocks, loss of sovereignty in Arctic waters, or encroachments on the 200-mile limits of coastal waters, all command large amounts of attention, from politicians to ordinary citizens. Again, it is little wonder that with a comparatively small population spread so thinly across an immense land, Canadians tend to pay special attention to that which unifies people and spans those distances. Asked to name a Canadian hero, most Canadians would be at a loss unless you were to mention the possibility of Terry Fox. This young runner who had already lost a leg to cancer performed the equivalent of a marathon per day during the spring and summer of 1980 engaged in the effort to run, in his gimpy one-legged lope, westwards across Canada. He had got almost halfway when the recurrence of the cancer to which he eventually succumbed forced him to suspend his attempt in northwestern Ontario. Since then annually sponsored runs in his name have raised millions of dollars worldwide for research into cancer.
Alternatively, Canadians are anxious about transportation and communications in the far-flung reaches of their country. When Wilfred Cantwell Smith asked Peter Slater who might be the Canadian "Augustine," Slater found himself having to name a thing rather than a person, and suggested the Canadian Pacific Railway. The CPR was the foremost achievement of Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald's "national dream," linking together the western reaches of Canada with the east. Canadians have been known to be the most frequent users in the world of the telephone (itself a Canadian invention), and today rank among the greatest users of the internet. Others might see as inordinate the concerns people in Canada have about any threats to their national airline or railway or broadcasting system, but for them these are the glue that "keep the country together." With the death in 2002 of the popular Peter Gzowski, for a decade host of "This Country in the Morning," a national three-hour CBC radio show, a wave of national mourning and reminiscence was set off to rival that at the death of the most famed sports figure or politician. Speaking of the way his program moved through the time zones from east to west, gathering up guests and stories along the way, Inuit singer Susan Aglukark likened Gzowski's effect to a particular kind of Arctic wind that picks things up from one place and carries them along to another.
A full comprehension of the relation between religion and nature in Canada involves balancing the relative impact of the major religion's (or religions') official estimation of the nature world with the informal "folk" religiosity of people's reverence for nature held even despite such teaching. Added to that, an interpreter must assess the attitudinal effects of environmentalism and nature mysticism in shaping a different consciousness. And, finally, the incalculable impact of various natural symbols and stories and songs must be factored in. The result, surely, is what might be termed a distinctive Canadian "aesthetic" of nature that is informed at all levels by religions and the religious. At one of these levels at least, most Canadians would understand or assume nature to be sacred, however much formal religious views would purport the opposite. Their attachment to the geography of their homeland in all of its varied natural beauty, enduring the climatic contradictions of long cold winters and brief hot summers, and understanding the self in the context of nature's infuriating self-presentation of welcoming nurturance and hostile rejection has lead to mixed attitudes of insecurity and respect.
William Closson James, Queen's University at Kingston, Canada
Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972.
Badertscher, John. "Northern Lights: Canadian Studies in Implicit Religion." Implicit Religion, 3: 1 (2000), 15-29.
Frye, Northrop. "Haunted by Lack of Ghosts: Some Patterns in the Imagery of Canadian Poetry." In David Staines, ed. The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977, 22-45.
Frye, Northrop. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
James, William Closson. Locations of the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature, and Canadian Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998.
Slater, Peter. "On the Apparent Absence of Civil Religion in Canada." In Henri-Paul Cunningham and F. Temple Kingston, eds., L'Amité et le Dialogue entre le Québec et l'Ontario/ Friendship and Dialogue between Ontario and Quebec. Windsor, ON: Canterbury College, University of Windsor, 1985.