Religious Environmental Movement Research Articles

Mapping the field of religious environmental politics

Abstract Until fairly recently, consideration of religion has been marginal or even non-existent in the scholarly discourse about environmental politics. Renewed attention to the intersection of these fields has been encouraged by a recent widening in discussions of ‘environmental values’ to include the role of religious institutions and personal belief in forming spiritual environmental values and renewed attention to the place of ethics and religious institutions in global environmental politics. Following a range of historic declarations by religious leaders, the recent encyclical by Pope Francis signalled a new level of integration between Catholic concerns for social and environmental justice. Yet, much of the continued engagement by large environmental NGOs and governments has continued to ignore the complex interrelation of local, intermediate and transnational religious political ecology. In this article, which is based on data gathered during five years of fieldwork, primarily with British Christian REMOs (religious environmental movement organizations), I probe the complexities of political engagement with religious environmentalism which arise from the many different organizational iterations these groups may take. On the basis of such investigation I suggest that effective high-level engagement with REMO groups will be greatly enhanced by a nuanced understanding of the many different shapes that these groups can take, the various scales at which these groups organize, and the unique inflection that political action and group identity can take in a religious context.

To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement, by STEPHEN ELLINGSON

To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement, by STEPHEN ELLINGSON

To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement

To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement

To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement. By Stephen Ellingson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. x+203. $30.00 (paper).

<i>To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement</i>. By Stephen Ellingson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. x+203. $30.00 (paper).

What is Eco‐Theology?

What is Eco‐Theology? Lawrence Troster When I first began to be active in the religious environmental movement over twenty‐five years ago, I was often invited to be part of interfaith panel discussions to discuss how religious traditions viewed the environment. On these panels there was usually found a Protestant, a Catholic (Christians always seemed to get two seats), myself representing Judaism, a Muslim and sometimes a Buddhist and a Hindu. Each of us would, of course, say that our religions were “green” and quote a few teachings from our sacred texts. After all, who would want to say in a public forum that our traditions were not “green”? My own involvement with religious environmentalism had developed out of my theological interest in the science and religion dialogue and from my personal concern about climate change. After having participating in a number of these dialogues, I realized that what we were all saying was essentially nonsense. How could ancient faith communities, based on pre‐modern sacred texts, be “green,” when the modern environmental crisis was unprecedented in kind and in scale from any previous human encounter with the natural world? While Judaism, for example, has traditional sources that are concerned with consumption, local pollution and water conservation, it would be beyond my ancestors’ comprehension to understand climate change, species extinction and toxic pollution. Thus traditional religions cannot be “green,” for two important reasons. First of all, there is a qualitative difference between modern and pre‐modern technology and how it affects the environment in both spatial and temporal terms. Secondly, and more importantly, over the last several hundred years, scientific knowledge of the natural world has developed exponentially, thus creating a worldview that is radically different from that of our ancestors. For example, the development of evolutionary theory and the discovery of the genetic code have collapsed the “sacred hierarchy” of the Abrahamic faiths which saw an ontological divide between humans and the rest of life. This new scientific understanding of biology has called into question one of the most fundamental doctrines of those traditions: that humans are created “in the image of God,” an idea that lies at the heart of these communities’ ethical systems. Therefore no faith communities could truly be “green,” and traditional sources may be mostly irrelevant to developing a modern religious perspective on the environmental crisis. I was seeing in these interfaith panels what Catholic theologian John Haught called the “apologetic” religious response to environmentalism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when environmentalism was first becoming a widespread popular movement, there was an attack on traditional religions that claimed that they were one of the main factors for humanity's destructive exploitation of the natural world. In response, Christian and Jewish theologians countered both the historical basis of this attack, but also tried to show how their traditions had many sources that could be in conformity with the modern environmental ethos. As Haught characterizes it, this approach argues, “if only we practiced the timeless religious virtues we could alleviate the crisis…If we allowed our lives to be shaped by genuinely Christian virtues, our relation to nature would have the appropriate balance, and we could avert the disaster that looms before us.” In this “apologetic” reading of Judaism and Christianity, the traditions as they already existed could be completely adequate for a response to the environmental crisis. In Judaism, for example, several traditional halakhic (legal) texts were held up to show that the Jewish tradition was already as “green” as it needed to be and that Judaism had an environmental ethic that long ago anticipated the modern environmental movement. The apologetic response usually ends up espousing a stewardship ethic in which humanity and its needs are still the central priority. Many religious communities still adhere to this kind of response but, in my own reflections of how faith traditions have responded to climate change, the most important crisis facing humanity since the development of nuclear weapons, it is completely inadequate and has had relatively little effect on how those communities have actually acted. And so I needed to dig deeper. Haught saw in 1993 the beginning of what he called “the sacramental approach...

What is Eco-Theology?

W hen I first began to be active in the religious environmental movement over twenty-five years ago, I was often invited to be part of interfaith panel discussions to discuss how religious traditions viewed the environment. On these panels there was usually found a Protestant, a Catholic (Christians always seemed to get two seats), myself representing Judaism, a Muslim and sometimes a Buddhist and a Hindu. Each of us would, of course, say that our religions were “green” and quote a few teachings from our sacred texts. After all, who would want to say in a public forum that our traditions were not “green”? My own involvement with religious environmentalism had developed out of my theological interest in the science and religion dialogue and from my personal concern about climate change. After having participating in a number of these dialogues, I realized that what we were all saying was essentially nonsense. How could ancient faith communities, based on pre-modern sacred texts, be “green,” when the modern environmental crisis was unprecedented in kind and in scale from any previous human encounter with the natural world? While Judaism, for example, has traditional sources that are concerned with consumption, local pollution and water conservation, it would be beyond my ancestors’ comprehension to understand climate change, species extinction and toxic pollution. Thus traditional religions cannot be “green,” for two important reasons. First of all, there is a qualitative difference between modern and pre-modern technology and how it affects the environment in both spatial and temporal terms. Secondly, and more importantly, over the last several hundred years,

Examining the Impact of Religion on Environmentalism 1993-2010: Has the Religious Environmental Movement Made a Difference?

Keywords:religion, environment, religion environmental movementAbstractThe view that emerged in the social science and religious literature is that Judeo-Christian tradition was in part responsible for the environmental crisis by fostering a or mastery-over-nature orientation. Despite the growing significance of the environmental movement, most church bodies had not addressed the problem officially until the early 1990s. Several national and faith-based organizations evolved to catalyze interest and organize the movement. This paper examines whether those efforts resulted in a significant change in environmental attitudes, beliefs, or behavior among the religiously involved. Using data from the General Social Survey for 1993, 2000, and 2010, results indicate that the respondents' denominational identification, grouped in terms of its liberal, moderate, or fundamentalist orientation, was weakly but significantly associated with several indicators of environmentalism for all three study years. These associations remain relatively consistent throughout this period, suggesting little change overall in the relationship between religious identification and environmental concern.IntroductionReligion's role in the environmental crisis in America has been extensively discussed in the literature. In 1967, Lynn White attempted to explain the root cause of the world's mounting ecological crisis. His article, published in Science, blamed the problem on Judeo-Christian values. White asserted that the Judeo-Christian tradition encouraged an anthropocentric orientation which is inimical to environmental concern. In particular, the mandate to dominate and exploit nature for human ends resonated with Western technological mastery over the world. This view undermined the long held notion of many primitive religions that humans cannot exceed the confines of the natural world with impunity. White concluded his argument by saying that . .we shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man (1967, p. 1207).While White's thesis pertained mostly to macro level and historically specific social change, research has followed the implication of his thesis for understanding the relationship between religion and environmental concern at the individual level (Eckberg and Blocker, 1996). Along this line, many studies have supported a negative relationship between conservative religiosity and environmental concern (Hand and Van Liere,1984; Eckberg and Blocker, 1989; Guth, Kellstedt, Smidt, and Green, 1993; Guth, Green, Kellstedt, and Smidt, 1995), although some studies have found little to no correlations between the two (Boyd, 1999; Greeley,1993; Hayes and Marangudakis, 2000, 2001). Further research has shown that religious commitment is not inimical to more environmentally responsible behavior (Haluza-Delay, 2000; Hitzhusen, 2007; Kanagy and Willits, 1993). This line of argument suggests that acceptance of a dominance over nature orientation does not necessarily equate to poor environmental attitudes and actions. In general, the view emerging from the literature is that fundamentalist or conservative Christianity is associated with lower levels of environmentalism while religious liberalism tends to be more supportive.The potential theological causes of this association are not well understood. Some have argued that the dominion mandate is more likely to be affirmed by more Biblicist theological traditions (Hand and Van Liere,1984). Other analysts suggest that the negative relationship between conservative Christian and environmentalism is less theological and more cultural, particularly given the religious right's hostility toward what is perceived to be a liberal and modernist cause (Eckberg and Blocker, 1996). The disparate nature of many of these findings is due in part to the unique methodological features of each study (Eckberg and Blocker, 1996; Djupe and Hunt, 2009). …

The Structure of Religious Environmentalism: Movement Organizations, Interorganizational Networks, and Collective Action

Historically, religious groups have been absent from the American environmental movement, but since the late 1990s a host of new religious environmental movement organizations (REMOs) have emerged. Little is known about REMOs or how religion structures the nascent movement field. Drawing on interviews with leaders of 63 REMOs in the United States, we examined whether theological frames and religious affiliations, on the one hand, and environmental interests, on the other, shaped the formation of information exchange and joint action between REMOs. The results show that shared religious affiliations and theological frames are directly associated with joint action between REMOs. In contrast, shared environmental interests are associated directly with information exchange, but not joint action. The results suggest that cultural aspects of religion are linked to the structure of the religious environmental movement.

Renewal: Stories from America's Religious-Environmental Movement A Sacred Duty: Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal the World Eating Mercifully

Renewal: Stories from America's Religious-Environmental Movement A Sacred Duty: Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal the World Eating Mercifully