Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The idea that humanity and nature are spiritually connected—ecospirituality—is a core aspect of cultural and religious worldviews around the world. Sociocultural factors, like religion, urbanization, and socioeconomic status, are hypothesized to shape people’s spiritual connections with nature, yet there are no systematic cross-cultural surveys of ecospirituality that can speak to these hypotheses. We present the results of a study assessing the associations between ecospirituality and these three sociocultural factors using a cross-cultural sample of religious individuals from 15 countries spanning the 5 major world religions (N = 11,186) and a sample of religious and non-religious individuals from the United States (N = 3,329). The overall pattern of results suggested that greater religiosity, urbanization, and socioeconomic status contribute to greater ecospirituality across cultural and religious contexts. Results in the sample of individuals in the United States largely departed from the results found across other countries in the cross-cultural sample, even other Western majority-Christian societies. This research contributes to our understanding of how sociocultural factors that are rapidly changing in many parts of the world may shape people’s connections with the natural environment.
Authors: Matthew Ira Billet, Adam Baimel
Institutions: University of California, Irvine, Oxford Brookes University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4413975655