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… is from pages 28-29 of the newly published final volume – Bourgeois Equality [2] – of Deirdre McCloskey’s essential trilogy on bourgeois values (footnote excluded; links added):
Or consider the emergence of a Nature-worshipping environmentalism that would have been viewed as a crazy luxury in the hardscrabble times of 1800 or even of 1933. The economist and student of theology Robert Nelson calls environmentalism the new religion of the West [3] (a West that nonetheless, outside of places like Poland or the United States, imagines itself to be irreligious)….
The economist and think-tank maven Fred L. Smith, Jr. speaks [4] of “eco-paganism”: “Most environmentalists do not, of course, see themselves as pagans,” he writes. “Yet many do espouse a watered-down form of pantheism which elevates nature to near the status of a deity.” By now the good people of rich and secular places such as Sweden, though contemptuous of the childish absurdity (as most Swedes believe it to be) of their ancestors’ worship of a Lutheran God, have found their transcendent in the worship of Nature, and spend their Sunday mornings devoutly gathering mushrooms and lingonberries in Nature’s forest.