In the Hands of Gods or Men: Religion & Responses to Environmental Degradation

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In keeping with the annual meeting’s focus on “Populism and Privilege,” the panel explores a critical, underappreciated area of research: the role of religion in shaping understandings of and responses to environmental degradation. Though anthropogenic environmental degradation and climate change threaten humans across the globe, the world’s most socioeconomically and politically vulnerable populations will be hardest hit. In this context, religion provides ideational resources and community infrastructure that vulnerable groups draw upon to promote collective action. It also provides an ideological and interpretive frame that can draw privileged groups into action in solidarity with the vulnerable, or instead justify quiescence. The authors of these four papers consider religion as an ideational and institutional resource that can foster collective action. The panel brings together research on religious communities from across the world to discuss variation in how different faith traditions respond to manmade environmental stressors.

One paper compares support for environmental protection in Brazil and Kenya: challenging the prevailing assumption that Christian theology promotes a logic of environmental exploitation, the study highlights more recent findings that demonstrate different attitudes towards conservation across multiple Christian communities in these developing economies. The paper draws on surveys and qualitative fieldwork to evaluate how religion interacts with environmental activism, and explains subnational variation as the result of how religious institutions interact with the state.

The second paper uses the text of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as its TV adaptation, to highlight the responses of the American Evangelical community to environmental stressors. The paper raises questions about why this religious group has tended to reject scientific evidence for climate change and other ecological disasters and to embrace a theological justification for humanity’s domination of Creation. Socio-economic privilege influences how American Evangelicals and other marginalized groups perceive environmental change, and populist leadership have used Evangelicals’ religious beliefs to encourage specific reactions.

The third paper focuses on how spectacular manifestations of climate change, such as hurricanes of unprecedented force, can generate new cultural politics. Drawing on Sidney Verba’s theorization of American political religion, Marxist interpretations of public ritual, and Foucault and Bourdieu’s treatment of political culture as an arena of practice rather than belief, the paper considers the effects of two hurricanes: Hurricane Sandy in the US (2012) and Hurricane Gonu in Oman (2007). The paper posits the emergence of “disaster nationalism” in response to such cataclysmic events, and the embrace of self-sufficiency and community resilience as themes prevalent in both Christian and Muslim religious traditions. Evidence from these two case studies—drawn from interviews, archival research, and ethnographic data—demonstrates how the communities affected did not mobilize for a systematic policy response to climate change, despite being directly impacted by its effects, and discusses implications for how climate change disasters may be interpreted as they become more pronounced.

The fourth paper examines the contemporary emergence of environmental thought and activism within Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist communities. It analyzes how these different faith communities have used their existing texts, practices, and beliefs to inform their response to ecological degradation, specifically focusing on how different attitudes towards humanity’s relationship to the natural world inform whether a given religious community is more likely to adopt an attitude of conservation or exploitation. This research examines public lectures, letters, sermons, statements of faith from traditional and grass-roots religious leaders in order to analyze how they seek to legitimize and motivate a religious response to the threat of climate change.

The papers combine different methodological approaches, geographies, religious traditions, and areas of focus to offer an overview of how political science can approach matters of religion, the environment, and politics. The privilege to ignore the impacts of climate change, as well as the ways in which religious belief is manipulated by populist political leaders, influence the outcomes observed and the conclusions drawn.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 33: Religion and Politics

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 39: Science, Technology & Environmental Politics

Individual Presentations

• Religious Institutions & Support for Environmental Protection in Brazil & Kenya - Amy Erica Smith, Iowa State University; Lauren Honig, Boston College; Jaimie Bleck, University of Notre Dame

• Christian Resistance and Response to Environmental Disaster in Literature - Malori A. Musselman, University of Oregon

• Examining the Cultural Politics of Natural Disasters in the US & Oman - Tyler Schuenemann, UMASS Amherst

• Humanity’s Relationship to Nature: Implications for Conservation & Exploitation - Annelle Rodriguez Sheline, Rice University

Chair

• James L. Guth Furman University

Discussant

• Paul A. Djupe Denison University