Saving Nature’s Cathedral. The Turn to Transnational Climate Action in the Swedish Pilgrimage Movement.

This project explores the current turn to ecological values and climate action in the Swedish pilgrimage movement in the Church of Sweden in a transnational context.

The project departs from the experiences of the initiative named Pilgrims Walk For Future, a pilgrimage walk from Vadstena to Cop26 in Glasgow in collaboration with Fridays For Future in the fall of 2021, intended to develop environmental work and awareness.

The aim of this project is to explore what the turn to ecology and climate action signifies for the development of the pilgrimage phenomenon, and vice versa how the presence of a religious-spiritual dimension influences climate activism.

Mapping the development in the Swedish pilgrimage movement as it engages in collaboration with new allies in the climate movement, the project seeks to open new paths in pilgrimage studies that visibilize and theorize pilgrimage as an arena for religious and non-religious responses to the climate crisis.

In locating the study in the field of environmental humanities, it will contribute to filling important gaps of knowledge regarding the role of religion in the new cycle of climate activism, in particular how ritual and political acts converge in new forms.

Finally, it will contribute to an understanding of major tropes at work in the climate movement, such as ‘climate justice’, ‘for future’ and ‘hope’ in local settings. The project will be carried out with multi-sited, mobile ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden and abroad.