Religion and Climate Change Indifference: Linking the Sacred to the Social (original) (raw)
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PloS one, 2015
Little research has focused on the relationship between religion and climate change attitudes and behavior. Further, while there have been some studies examining the relationship between environmental attitudes and religion, most are focused on Christian denominations and secularism, and few have examined other religions such as Buddhism. Using an online survey of 1,927 Australians we examined links between membership of four religious groupings (Buddhists, Christian literalists and non-literalists, and Secularists) and climate change attitudes and behaviors. Differences were found across religious groups in terms of their belief in: (a) human induced climate change, (b) the level of consensus among scientists, (c) their own efficacy, and (d) the need for policy responses. We show, using ordinal regression, that religion explains these differences even after taking into account socio-demographic factors, knowledge and environmental attitude, including belief in man's dominion ov...
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Annual Review of Environment & Resources, 2018
Understanding the cultural dimensions of climate change requires understanding its religious aspects. Insofar as climate change is entangled with humans, it is also entangled with all the ways in which religion attends human ways of being. Scholarship on the connections between religion and climate change includes social science research into how religious identity figures in attitudes toward climate change, confessional and constructive engagements of religious thought with climate change from various communities and traditions, historical and anthropological analyses of how climate affects religion and religion interprets climate, and theories by which climate change may itself be interpreted as a religious event. Responses to climate change by indigenous peoples challenge the categories of religion and of climate change in ways that illuminate reflexive stresses between the two cultural concepts. [pre-publication proofs; cite from the final paper at Annual Reviews]
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Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (eds.) Tucker, Jenkins, Grim, 2016
In exploring the relationship between religion and climate change this essay argues three things. First, it makes the case that religious thought and practice -- cosmologies, beliefs and perceptions, ethics and ways of life -- is important for understanding how the idea of climate change is given meaning in the contemporary world. Second, the meanings attached to climate change by different religious traditions will be diverse and at times contradictory. Third, more informed engagement with the world’s religions – on the part of scholars, advocates and politicians - is essential to shape the unfolding story of climate change and humanity.
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The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the ongoing and constantly evolving investigation into Christian attitudes about environmental issues generally and skepticism about climate change and climate policy specifically. This purpose is achieved primarily in two ways. First, it seeks to distinguish and disambiguate between skepticism about climate change among theologically conservative American Christians and skepticism about climate change policy. The study contributes to the academic literature by synthesizing two bodies of literature: that dealing with American Christians’ beliefs and climate change and that dealing with the nature of climate skepticism. Using the insights of Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory and a conceptual framework of Christian apologetics, theologically conservative Christians are defined by their beliefs related to the resurrection of Jesus. Skepticism about climate change is the independent variable. Skepticism about climate policy define the two dependent variables. This study was conducted as a quasi-experimental, cross-sectional survey of Americans of eligible voting age. Data was collected using an anonymous online survey. Participants were solicited using social media. Data was analyzed using logistic and ordered logistic regression to test for a statistically significant relationship between the variables. The hypothesis tested is that belief in climate change among theologically conservative Christians will be statistically correlated with skepticism about climate policy. This study’s hypothesis advances both the literature of religion and climate change and the application of Social Systems Theory to contemporary problems of public policy research. Final analysis found that a belief in climate change was a necessary but not a sufficient precondition for support of popular climate policy proposals.
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Environmental & Socio-economic Studies, 2024
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This volume represents an important milestone in the emergence of a new research field. Although connections between religion and climate have been made and studied for about as long as climate change has been a formal object of study, a recognized field for comparative, generalizing, and multidisciplinary exchange has emerged only in the past decade. 1 The