Climate Politics and the Power of Religion uses religion as a lens through which to assess the diversity and unpredictability of cultural responses to global climate change. By focusing on the varied contributions that religion makes to climate change policy in particular cultural contexts, this series of essays also serves as a critique of scholarship that views global climate change as a generic singularity of human harms to a warming planet without an acknowledgement of the varied cultural practices that contribute to and influence responses to climate change. As stated in the introduction by the volume’s editor Evan Berry, “the politics of climate change involves not only a commitment to global justice but also an insistence on particularity, autonomy, and difference. It matters how different communities render climate change within their own moral vocabularies, and it matters whether and how such moral claims find purchase in public debates about climate policy” (2).
By focusing on religion in addressing these cultural particularities contributing to political responses to climate change, this anthology claims to be addressing the following knowledge gaps: a lack of empirical information about religion and climate change in poorer societies, especially where Christianity is not the dominant religious tradition; a lack of attention to religion among the core social scientific literatures on climate change; and a lack of reflection about politics in much of the literature on religion and the environment (3). In doing so, the authors included in this volume have contributed to a more thorough understanding of the intersection of religion and climate change by documenting a more diverse and locally situated sample of the varied and sometimes contradictory ways in which religion and religious people contribute to conversations pertinent to the making of climate change policy.
This volume attempts to address the aforementioned gaps in knowledge in three sections: Religion and Construction of National Climate Policy, Transnational and Theoretical Considerations, and Religion and the Complexity of Public Environmental Discourse. In section I, article topics include the unanticipated limitation of Catholic influence on environmental policy in Duterte’s Philippines due to disagreements with the governing regime not related to environmental policy (chapter 1); the competing conceptions of God in Trinidad as alternately showing favor for the island nation in relation to hurricanes and conceived as synonymous with the Earth in being capable of being victimized by extraction and consumption (chapter 2); and the use of religious symbols and themes in environmental discourse in India that “has the effect of mobilizing majoritarian constituencies with exclusionary social and political effects” (chapter 3: 90).
Section II features articles covering the need for alternative (including religious) ontologies to confront secular narratives of fear and insecurity related to climate change (chapter 4) and for caution regarding oversimplifying the influence of religious beliefs and ideas, with case studies on Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, and climate denialism among white American evangelicals, at the expense of “the material, political, economic, and social dimensions of how religion comes to matter in environmental contestation” (chapter 5: 123).
Section III concludes the volume, covering topics including but not limited to the contradictory religious influences on the issue of water pollution in India (chapter 6), the use of sentient landscapes by “poor mestizos” in Peru to hold humans accountable for the degradation of nature (chapter 7), the consideration of vulnerability as a theological bridge concept between theological and scientific or policy-based approaches to address climate change (chapter 8), and the potentially intersecting roles of religion and citizen and civic diplomacy in conversations on creating and sustaining successful examples of climate diplomacy. A conclusion article follows the three sections of the text, offering reflections on the complexity and inconsistency of religious influence on climate policy as well as a recommendation to recognize the importance of religion as a partner in political conversations around issues related to climate change and the construction of new climate legislation.
Taken together, these essays provide clear demonstrations of the ways in which religious belief and practice are major social determinants, at the local, regional, and national levels, in the creation of environmental policy. The overarching themes emphasized in Climate Politics and the Power of Religion make it clear that global justice is an important and vital issue for a thorough discourse on climate change. However, while climate change is a global issue affecting us all, it must be understood in local, regional, and national contexts if we are to understand how religion and other cultural expressions affect, and may subsequently successfully address and mitigate, the negative effects of global climate change. Furthermore, the ways in which religion and religious communities interact and integrate within various cultural contexts belie any attempts that we may make to hold conclusively to any preconceived notions about how the relationship between religion and climate change will be manifest in any particular setting. As a result, this collection of essays marks an important expansion of scholarship related to the complex and complicated relationship between religion, climate change, and the political decisions that result from their engagement. Additionally, it highlights the importance of including religion as a potentially significant contributor to conversations on climate change in social scientific discourse, and the influence of politics in discussions involving the relationship between religion and the environment. It will also serve as an important contribution to the field of religion and ecology as well as to the broader field of religious studies through its focus on the diverse case studies included and the unique, unpredictable, and often contradictory roles that religion plays in political decision-making related to climate change in a diversity of contexts, many of which have, to this point, received limited attention in the academic scholarship on the cultural influence of religion.
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[Review length: 949 words • Review posted on May 24, 2023]