Bringing Environmental Issues into Church Life & Bringing Faith-based motivations into the Environmental movement: What role can faith play in addressing environmental problems?

Abstract

In recent years many people have started to see religious institutions as valuable actors in addressing environmental problems. However, beyond well-known statements by faith leaders, much remains understudied about how ‘ordinary believers’ engage with the often novel and polarised issue of environmental problems. Therefore, by building on existing research about postsecularity and ‘religion and the environment’ this thesis wants to understand how believers engage with the environment, both in the context of the church and within the wider society through collaboration with secular groups. Firstly, it will critique the approach that human geography scholarship has taken towards Habermas and his idea of postsecularity. Secondly, it seeks to understand how local churches relate and engage with the environment. Thirdly, it wants to understand how environmentally concerned Christians from a faith-based environmental group attempt to give environmental issues a more prominent place in church life and lastly, this thesis wants to understand how environmentally concerned Christians join secular groups on shared concerns about the planet. In its findings this thesis will be critical and point out the many struggles and difficulties that churches and environmentally concerned Christians face when they try to get involved with environmental issues. But it will also portray hopeful aspects such as the eco-church approach that one of the participating churches used and the strong faith-based motivations to address environmental problems that environmentally concerned Christians have. This thesis will also argue that religion/faith doesn’t make believers ‘green’ but if for example people have trust in science, have been raised in an environmentally minded household and are left wing than their religious belief can provide a deep and sincere faith-based commitment for protecting the environment. This thesis will also argue that many environmentally concerned Christians are involved in secular environmental groups and find many shared concerns with them but that secular environmental groups also have little attention for personal faith or even find it ‘irrelevant’. The implications of this will be discussed and there will also be attention for the ways in which Christian environmental ethics can ‘cross over’ to the wider green movement and the rest of society.