Beyond stewardship and dominion? Towards a social psychological explanation of the relationship between religious attitudes and environmental concern

ABSTRACT

Research about the religion and environmental attitudes relationship in the United States has yielded mixed results. Some studies find that religion relates to heightened concern about environmental threats and greater environmental interest whereas others find religion relates to diminished concern and interest. A new perspective that applies ideas from psychology and sociology may help resolve these discrepant findings. It is hypothesized that religious meaning reduces concern with environmental threats since meaning helps people cope with distressing stimuli. This reduction is specific to threats and does not extend to environmental interest. Using the 2016 General Social Survey to test this hypothesis, after controlling for sociodemographic and political variables, structural equation modeling shows Americans who are more religious experience diminished sense of danger from environmental threats, yet exhibit heightened general environmental interest. These findings align with the proposed theory and suggest new ways to promote environmentalism and policy change.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• environmental threats
• interest in environment
• United States

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The baseline religious group refers to everyone else including people with no religious affiliation, Buddhism, Hinduism, other religious denominations.

2. We used SEM with maximum likelihood estimation for analysis. Instead of listwise deletion, this approach uses all information available in the presence of missing values in one or more variables. This method assumes joint normality and that missing values are missing at random (Acock 2013). We also examined the SEM using listwise deletion as a robustness check; the results are analogous.

3. We thank one reviewer for suggesting examining the interactive effect of denomination and religiosity on environmental attitudes. Based on Model 2.4 and Model 2.6, we added the interaction terms and tested whether identifying as Protestant or Catholic interacted with religiosity to influence attitudes about environmental threats or interest in environmental issues. We found no significant effects. In addition, the CFI values for these models with interactive terms decreased to 0.793 and 0.746, respectively, suggesting poor model fit. We agree that denominational differences may interact with religiosity to influence environmental attitudes and should be examined with future work.