God and Country: America in Red and Blue

Chapter 8. RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Chapter 8 RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT 147 It might seem that issues of environmental protection, dependent as they are on hard scientific evidence and analysis, would be relatively unaffected by religiously rooted paradigms. And that is arguably the case; debates over environmental policy tend to be conducted within a largely Enlightenment framework. As a number of studies confirm, however, that does not mean that our religious worldviews do not affect our environmental policy preferences. While it is true that technical analyses of the nature and extent of environmental problems are unlikely to implicate embedded attitudes, the significance of the natural world and the degree of importance a culture assigns to its protection, the balance it strikes between resource conservation and economic productivity , or between individual and state responsibilities, are powerfully influenced by culture, as is the depth of a society’s commitment to preservation of the natural ecosystem. The influence of national religious cultures on “green politics and policies” was the focus of a 2001 study by David Vogel, at the University of California at Berkeley. Vogel surveyed the environmental policies of rich nations, dividing them into light green and dark green based upon differences in their commitments to environmental protection ; he found that “much of public support for environmentalism is linked to values and preferences which have little or nothing to do with the actual physical scope or magnitude of environmental problems.” After examining the cultural differences involved, he found a striking correlation between Protestantism and dark green environmentalism. (For purposes of his classification of countries, he notes that he considered all Americans to be Protestant.) Vogel is careful to note that correlation is not necessarily causation, and that “explicitly religious beliefs have not made an important contribution to the growth of contemporary public concern about the environment” (25). He speculates that these national differences grow out of Protestantism’s apocalyptic vision and its “pervasive sense of moralism.” There is within Protestantism, a religion which emerged as a reaction to the sensuous gratification-seeking behavior of the Medieval Church, a deep suspicion of self-indulgence and excessive consumption and a strong bias in favor of self-discipline. . . . For both Protestantism and dark green environmentalism, the ordinary person bears some responsibility for the fate of the world. The Protestant concept of stewardship finds its contemporary expression in an environmental politics which makes each person responsible for both nature and fate of the earth. Hence the relatively high salience of environmental issues in dark green countries and the high level of public interest in both nature protection and the global dimensions of environmental protection. (28–29) Daniel Sarewitz, an environmental scientist, has concluded that the influence of value paradigms on those engaged in environmental science is inescapable, that scientific knowledge is not—and cannot be—independent of political context, but is rather “coproduced by scientists and the society within which they are embedded.” After noting that even scientists who reach opposite conclusions on a question “share the oldfashioned idea that scientific facts build the appropriate foundation for knowing how to act in the world,” he raises the obvious issue: how do we account for the wide, even radical, differences in supposedly science -based views? Is it because categorizing something as a problem 148 / God and Country demands a preexisting framework or paradigm that recognizes such things as problems? (2004) It cannot be reiterated too often that the relationships between our religiously rooted cultural assumptions and our policy preferences are complex and nonlinear. Most contemporary American worldviews result from an ongoing and dynamic synthesis of basic Enlightenment and Puritan attitudes that have been enriched (or polluted, depending upon one’s point of view) by successive waves of immigration, the pervasiveness of national culture, science, and technology, and accelerated globalization—by what Robert Bellah has called the “enormously powerful common culture in America . . . carried predominantly by the market and the state and by their agencies of socialization: television and education” (2002, 13). So it should not surprise us that—with one exception—American public attitudes about environmental protection are unrelated to their formal religious commitments. A number of studies have found that religious variables are “weak predictors” of environmental policy preferences (Boyd 1999; Hayes and Marangudakis 2000). The single exception is religious fundamentalists, who consistently express less support for measures to protect the environment (Tarakeshwar et al. 2000; Kohut et al. 2000). CONFLICTING ENVIRONMENTAL WORLDVIEWS Richard Hughes has defined American...