“God Has Entrusted The World To Us”: Climate Eschatologies in World (Risk) Society

• In Event: New Approaches to Measuring Religion and Its Effects

Abstract

This study explores how an institutionalized religion’s connection to world culture shapes its adoption of the anthropogenic model of climate change using Ulrich Beck’s risk society and John Meyer’s world society theories. Climate change is viewed in its cultural capacity as a risk whose definition and management are relegated by world society to a cadre of scientific experts, and a religious institution’s degree and manner of adoption of the anthropogenic model is predicted to change according to its level of connection to world society. It is hypothesized that (1) all religious organizations will offer an ethical, value-rational message on climate risks, (2) that religions more deeply embedded in world culture will more thoroughly enact the anthropogenic model, (3) pro-climate religious organizations develop hybrid “climate eschatologies” which moralize climate change rather than reiterate scientific causal narratives, and (4) that religions with less connection to world society will not adopt the anthropogenic model, expressing skepticism and traditional eschatology. Directed discourse analysis of 63 climate-related documents sampled from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), U.S. Episcopal Church (TEC), and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) support the hypotheses, with the highly embedded USCCB developing a highly systematized climate eschatology, medium-embedded TEC developing a weaker climate eschatology, and SBC failing to adopt the anthropogenic model of climate change.

Author

• Sebastian Ivan Miscenich, University of Utah