Preparing for the Coming Storm: Right-Wing Spiritualities and Environmental Consciousness in the United States

Abstract

New age spirituality has long involved ecospirituality and nature religion. It has also typically been associated with left-wing politics. However, I argue that this political assumption is no longer tenable, and that right-wing political positions, particularly libertarianism, are a prominent feature of contemporary new age spirituality. People involved in new age spirituality remain committed to nature and ecospirituality, but they now fuse these commitments with conspiracy theories, providing elaborate explanations for the current ecological crisis beyond those validated by environmental science. The mix of conspiracy theories and new age spirituality has been termed ‘conspirituality’ by scholars, and I argue this overlap accounts for how the ecologism in new age spirituality can become ecofascism. Methodologically grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Arizona since 2012 and content analysis of interviews and digital media, I explore how and why environmental consciousness in new age spirituality has taken this direction.