From Vertical Dominion to Horizontal Responsibility
The growing number of people who identify as nonreligious is one of the most significant social changes in the contemporary world. This change impacts social life at the everyday level, in the ways that people create and experience community, and in the social institutions that structure those activities. How does community gardening fit into this picture of social change? This is not a book about gardening, though if you are a gardener you may recognize yourself in the pages that follow.
- From Vertical Dominion to Horizontal Responsibility
- Gardening as Ethical Practice and Social Action
- The NCF Project: Mapping Nonreligion in Diverse Societies
- Against Moral Decline Narratives: Reframing Ethics Beyond Religion
- Christian Hegemony and the Mischaracterization of Nonreligion
- Lifestance Beyond the Religion/Nonreligion Binary
- Community Gardens as Windows into Lived Lifestances
- Ethics, Food, and Governance in Community Life
Rather, this is a book about how community gardening can help us understand nonreligion. Community gardens are one place where people encounter others, both human and nonhuman, who are different than they are. They are sites of world-repairing work and community building. They are also places in which people often answer ‘I’m not religious’ when asked to identify their religious affiliation or belonging. But our discussion here is not simply about the number of people who say they are nonreligious. Underlying the activities taking place in community gardens is a shifting sensibility about the relationship between humans and the world around them.
Focused on the core question of how we can live well together in diverse societies, the NCF project explores the shifting terrain of religion/nonreligion and its impact.
That relationship is shifting from a vertical relationship to a horizontal one; from a relationship of human dominance to a relationship of shared responsibility and equality. This is possible because there is an increasing recognition that the current hierarchical model is untenable. The vertical model is rooted in religious teachings about the place of humans in the world, specifically about stewardship and the superior and exceptional place of human beings. Community gardens offer an ideal vantage point from which to explore some of these changes.
Gardening as Ethical Practice and Social Action
What do community gardens have to do with nonreligion or, for that matter, with religion? Gardening is an activity through which people build relationships, form communities, engage in ethical practices, give form to commitments to social and environmental justice, perform rituals, experience everyday wonder and awe, negotiate and navigate difference, and carry out acts of kindness, generosity and caring. It is the shared space of terrestrials, to use Bruno Latour’s concept.
It is also a site of contention and frustration. Gardening is a refraction point through which it is possible to understand how people are in the world and what matters to them. Rather than asking people what they believe or what matters to them in ways that are abstracted from their everyday lives, by focusing on gardening we enter the world of action—what people do.
This is a very different way of thinking about nonreligion. Community gardens are not the only place where this kind of research could be done, and we do not make that claim. But gardens are about life and the practice of gardening attends to things that illuminate the negotiation and navigation of many kinds of relationships.
Community gardens are also different from commercial market gardens in important ways: community gardens are not driven by the need to make a profit, but rather have goals oriented to growing plants for food and aesthetic pleasure. They also often have broader concerns with social justice and community building. They therefore provide an important context in which to examine relationships and ethics. In community gardens, religion, and/or the rejection of religion, are typically peripheral to the relationships and ethics of the gardeners.
The NCF Project: Mapping Nonreligion in Diverse Societies
The Nonreligion in a Complex Future (NCF) project is a Canadian based research project that focuses on identifying the social impact of the rapid and dramatic increase of nonreligion. International and comparative, our research sites include Canada as the focal point, with co-investigators, collaborators, advisors and partners in Australia, Latin America (Brazil and Argentina), the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland), the United Kingdom, and in the United States.
Community gardens provide an ideal setting to capture this substantive or positive concept of nonreligion.
Our primary focus is on empirically studying the relationship between increasingly complex diversities, created by growing nonreligious populations and institutions, and to build an evidence base from which to identify models for living well together in complex, diverse, and inclusive societies. All of these countries have a history of Christian majoritarianism. One of the things we are curious about is the substantive content of nonreligion, or, what some describe as its positive content.
Focused on the core question of how we can live well together in diverse societies, the NCF project explores the shifting terrain of religion/nonreligion and its impact. We are interested in changing and emerging moral frames, or perhaps more accurately, moral frames that have always existed but have been less visible than those attached to religion. Relatedly, we are intrigued by an emerging ethos of equality.
Against Moral Decline Narratives: Reframing Ethics Beyond Religion
These issues matter to us because we think that moral binaries are increasingly mobilized to create social division, whether they are political or religious binaries (among others).
But, we are also inspired, hopeful, and amazed by the many activities that are world repairing, that contribute to a sense of well-being and respectful engagement with the human and other-than-human world. In some ways this is an extension of the arguments of Beaman (2021) and Bennett (2001) to re-imagine ethics, community, and human flourishing as not constrained by religion and religious enchantment.
It was Max Weber, and more recently social theorists such as Peter Berger, Charles Taylor, and Jurgen Habermas, who tied the diabolical ethical issues that confront humanity to the decline of religion. This book is partly written with, and against, these theorists.
Christian Hegemony and the Mischaracterization of Nonreligion
While there is a decline in Christianity in the countries we study, we take the position that it remains hegemonic. To what extent that is the case is culturally specific and requires a detailed examination that is beyond the scope of this discussion. Some people, including scholars, lament the loss of that hegemony and some argue that it is no longer the case.
Lifestances challenge both the privileging of religion as an organizing structure for life but also nonreligion as an othering concept.
Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge the power of the residue of Christian hegemony, particularly in narratives of contemporary society and its failings. For instance, nonreligious people are sometimes characterized as individualistic and atomized, lacking important social connections in society (Putnam and Campbell 2012). Society is depicted as secular and hostile to religious values, particularly conservative Christian values (Smith 2003). We argue this reflects the influence of Christian privilege on social theory.
We have avoided the use of the word secular in our discussion. It is not a word that is used by our participants, and as a scholarly concept it is fraught with convoluted and confused meaning that is often weaponized. Moreover, at stake in discussions of nonreligion and nonreligious people are values, ethics and morality.
We disagree that nonreligious people are without morals or have diminished moral commitments (Taylor, 2007; Hadaway, 1989; Smith 2003), or are yearning for ‘something more’ (Bellah et al 2007; Putnam and Campbell, 2012). We contend that this misunderstands what it is to be nonreligious, and in particular misunderstands the ethical, communal, and social justice commitments to be found in activities where religion is not a central concern, such as community gardens.
Lifestance Beyond the Religion/Nonreligion Binary
Our argument is that all people have commitments, practices, morality, and relational entanglements with both humans and other-than-humans. These commitments are part of their lifestance. In order to understand this we need to move beyond thinking in terms of the binary of religion and nonreligion. We did not seek out nonreligious community gardeners to interview. Rather, we interviewed community gardeners, asking at the end of the interview if they were religious or not.
Roughly calculated, just over half of the participants in our study self-identified as nonreligious. There were a few individuals for whom their religious commitments did profoundly shape their experience of gardening. Nonetheless, for the majority of our participants their religiosity, or the absence of religiosity, was not important to how they understood and experienced life and how they thought about their relationship to humans and non-humans. They engaged in ethical decision making, committed themselves to communities, engaged in regular practices, and were entangled in relationships. The majority of participants did all these things without framing them in terms of, or being motivated by, religion or the rejection of religion.
We argue that we need to think beyond what is typically understood by nonreligion. The typical understanding of nonreligion includes individuals who identify as atheists, humanists, agnostics, and in some scholarship also the spiritual but not religious, as well as those who are indifferent. Social context is important: in a society in which religion is a normative standard in the state and civil society, being religiously indifferent is extremely difficult.
It is also noteworthy that we are in a moment of intense and unpredictable social change related to religion. Increasing numbers of people have no religious reference point in their lives, meaning they have no religious upbringing, do not engage in any activities related to organized religion and therefore have no religious reference point. It seems odd to refer to them in relation to something that has never been present in their lives (i.e. ‘nonreligious’).
In response to this realization, we have adopted the notion of lifestance. We understand lifestance to include the behaviours, relationships, and beliefs related to one’s orientation to life and existence. Relationships are necessarily social and thus embed the social actor in social structure. Thus, lifestance is more than individual psychology and belief. This moves away from nonreligion as an absence category and instead focuses on how those who are not religious, or are other to religion, live their lives, develop their relationships, and think about their place in the universe. Lifestances challenge both the privileging of religion as an organizing structure for life but also nonreligion as an othering concept.
Community Gardens as Windows into Lived Lifestances
Community gardens provide an ideal setting to capture this substantive or positive concept of nonreligion. Community gardeners are literally handling life – from the microorganisms in the dirt to the plants they are growing to the ecosystem they are affecting with their work.
Ethics and relationships are at the heart of this project.
Their reflections on and our observations of their activities reveal their lifestances and the substantive content of their lives. Community gardeners have beliefs, they engage in relationships (with other humans, plants, and animals), they act ethically, and they develop communities. Some gardeners identify as religious, but many do not. For us, to be overly concerned with the categories of religion and nonreligion misses the point of what is happening in community gardens.
What happens in these places is primarily not about religion, even though some of the participants might be religious. Some scholars talk about this in terms of gardening being ‘secular’, ‘irreligious’, and/or ‘nonreligious’. But this language risks falling back into the binary of religion/nonreligion we are trying to avoid. This is why we talk about ‘lifestances’. It is important to use different language to talk about what is going on. It’s this broader and novel understanding of who and what people are that is revealed with the substantive turn in nonreligious studies and that we illustrate in this book about community gardens.
Ethics, Food, and Governance in Community Life
Ethics and relationships are at the heart of this project. The gardens are often explicitly ethical, aiming for self-sufficiency, the inclusion of marginalised communities and individuals, a recrafted and respectful relationship with fellow terrestrials and empowerment.
We were also interested in ‘allotment’ gardens that have no explicit social justice purpose, but simply provide space for people to garden. We were curious about food practices, for example whether people eat together or share time together other than in the garden. What do we learn about religion and nonreligion in this context? What sorts of rituals and practices do gardeners engage in?
How do they understand nature and the human relationship to the world around us? What role does nature (e.g., plants, gardens, animals) play in shaping the relationships that form in community gardens? How do people link their gardening with how they think about and interact with nature and the world around them?
In our research we use ‘community garden’ in the broadest possible sense to think about issues like food security, food sovereignty and urban agriculture and more complex relationships like governance, negotiating cultural difference, conflict management, zoning and land use policies, community ownership, the connection between land and racial justice.
