The Green MarketplaceApplying a Model of Church and Sect to the Environmental Movement

Introduction

In 1892, John Muir, along with 181 other conservationists, founded the Sierra Club—one of the first environmental organizations in the United States. Since that time, hundreds of other organizations have entered the environmental market and found plenty of willing members to join their ranks.¹ The growth of environmental organizations over the past century and the fervent beliefs many members hold have prompted some scholars to draw comparisons between environmentalism and secular religion. Catharine Albanese cites the religious overtones in Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Henry David Thoreau's writings and the effect their writings had on early conservationists like Muir (see also Robert Nelson).² Further, one study has found that participation in religious and environmental organizations are substitutes, instead of complements.³

In this article, I analyze whether the social structure of the environmental movement is very much like the social structure of religious groups in the United States and not whether environmentalism is a religion.⁴ To do this, I rely on the work by Laurence Iannaccone, who uses the rational choice approach to study religious behavior. In one of his papers, Iannaccone concludes by stating that while his model applies to religious groups, the underlying argument should apply to secular groups as well.⁵ This article tests whether his model applies to a secular group: the environmental movement. Specifically, I use the church-sect model of religion developed by Iannaccone. Iannaccone shows how utility maximizing individuals might rationally choose to join an extreme sect over a mainstream church, or vice versa. His approach leads to theoretical predictions about the characteristics of churches, sects, and groups in between. The same analytical framework Iannaccone uses to explain the characteristics of religious churches and sects can be used to explain the characteristics of mainstream and radical environmental groups. Using Iannaccone's approach, I undertake a theoretical and empirical examination of the environmental movement.

The next section introduces the four theoretical propositions from Iannaccone's church-sect paper and applies them to environmental organizations. The third section provides further evidence for the church-sect model by showing how the model accounts for differences in demographic characteristics and types of funding between mainstream and radical environmental groups. The fourth section provides the framework illustrating how individuals can undergo a conversion from a mainstream group to a radical environmental group or vice versa and describes how past schisms shape the current environmental landscape. Section 5 concludes.

Applying Iannaccone's Church-Sect Propositions to the Environmental Movement

The religious marketplace is a diverse and interesting mix of groups that span from mainstream churches to strict sects. Like the religious marketplace, the environmental marketplace has organizations or firms that range from mainstream to highly sectarian. The following propositions are taken from the church-sect model of Iannaccone and, when they are applied to environmental groups, result in similar conclusions.⁶ While sociologists rate religious institutions as either a church or a sect based on tension, "universalism, hierarchical structures," etc., economists prefer to rate religious groups based on a more direct and one-dimensional measure: the cost of non-group activities.⁷

Proposition 1: Church members adopt positions closer to societal norms while sect members find their optimal positions at extremes, either close to the societal norm or close to the sect norm.

Mainstream environmental organizations (or churches, to use the religious terminology) engage in activity that the typical American would find little to quarrel with. These groups encourage members to engage in low-cost activities such as writing letters or emails to members of Congress, signing petitions, participating in boycotts, or developing overall awareness of important environmental issues. Mainstream American society considers these activities to be part of a healthy representative system of government. Mainstream organizations typically pursue civic activities that American society encourages. When one joins a group such as the National Audubon Society, that person is demonstrating their passion for the environment in a socially acceptable way.

Sectarian groups reject the approach of mainstream groups because they think it accomplishes little in the way of worthwhile progress in...