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The Relationship Between Religious Persuasion and Climate Change Attitudes in Australia

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The Relationship Between Religious Persuasion and Climate Change Attitudes in Australia The Relationship between Religious Persuasion and Climate Change Attitudes in Australia Mark Morrisona,b, Roderick Duncanb,c, Kevin Partona,b and Chris Sherleya a School of Management and Marketing, Charles Sturt University b Institute for Land, Water and Society, Charles Sturt University c School of Accounting and Finance, Charles Sturt University Contributed paper prepared for presentation at the 57th AARES Annual Conference, Sydney, New South Wales, 5th-8th February, 2013 © Copyright 2013 by Authors’ names. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non- commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. ii The Relationship between Religious Persuasion and Climate Change Attitudes in Australia Mark Morrisona,b, Roderick Duncanb,c, Kevin Partona,b and Chris Sherleya a School of Management and Marketing, Charles Sturt University b Institute for Land, Water and Society, Charles Sturt University c School of Accounting and Finance, Charles Sturt University Abstract Previous research has demonstrated that religious persuasion can have an impact on environmental attitudes, however less research of this kind has focused on the relationship between religious persuasion and climate change attitudes. Using a survey of 1,927 Australians we examined links between membership of five religious groupings and climate change attitudes, as well as membership of climate change household segments that differ in their acceptance of human induced climate change and the need for policy responses. Differences were found across religious groups in terms of their belief in human induced climate change, consensus among scientists, their own efficacy and the need for policy responses. Using ordinal regression, some of these differences were shown to be due to sociodemographic factors, knowledge, environmental attitude or political conservatism. However, significant effects due to religious persuasion remained, and they range from medium to large in size. Options for responding to these effects are discussed. Keywords: religion, climate change, segmentation, political support Introduction Views on climate change and policy relating to climate change in the Australian population are extremely diverse. In forming their views, people are influenced by many factors, including both situational variables and their own socio-economic and socio-political status. In this paper we focus on religious persuasion as a potential determinant of attitudes to climate change and climate change policy. Research conducted, principally in the United States (US) and Europe, has indicated that religious persuasion is a key factor to take into account in developing climate change policy and designing messages about policy. In the US, a number of studies have revealed that there is a conservative Christianity effect, under which those who have a strong literal interpretation of the bible have a lower concern about the environment and a stronger belief in their own efficacy in controlling outcomes (eg Guth et al. 1995; Hand and van Liere 1984). This effect has a considerable influence when measuring the overall level of denial of climate change and the perceived need for policy. The literature reveals that there are important differences between countries in the influence religious persuasion has on ways of looking at climate change issues (Tjernstron and Tietenberg 2008). This fact points to a need to consider the religious issues in their 1 particular country context. There has been little attention given to these issues in Australia, and consequently one objective of the current paper is to examine how religious make-up affects attitudes to climate change and climate change policy. We conducted an online survey of 1,927 Australians, designed to identify household segments based on the methodology developed by Maibach et al. (2011) as well as highlight differences in Australia between different religious groups. We examine responses across five religious groupings (Atheist/Agnostic/No Religion, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian Non- Literalists and Christian Literalists). We find substantive effects on climate change beliefs based on religious persuasion. For two of the religious groupings (Atheist/Agnostic/No Religion and Jewish) the differences in beliefs can be explained by either sociodemographics, environmental attitudes, knowledge or political persuasion), however for two of the other groupings (Buddhist and Christian Literalists) the effects cannot be explained by these variables alone. Review of the Literature Previous research has cast the relationship between culture and attitudes to climate change from various perspectives, ranging from theoretical to pragmatic. From a theoretical point of view, based on an examination of teachings of nine major religions, Posas (2007) argued strongly that religions from Bahá’í to Buddism and from Islam to Christianity should be able to influence their members to bring an ethical dimension to the climate change issue. This discussion permits an approach to the debate that is based on stewardship and is other-person centred, and he expects that actions by these religious groups will enable climate change policy to move forward more rapidly. Posas concludes that there could be a much greater role for religion in the future in solving the climate crisis. In contrast, despite there now being a significant body of evidence, empirical research on the relationship between religion and environmental research is divided on this central issue. This branch of the research has its root in White’s (1967) contention that there is a link between a Judeo-Christian perspective and a desire for dominion over nature. This perspective has its basis in Genesis 1:26, ‘Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”’. The empirical work has looked more closely within Christianity to show that there are distinctly different Christian perspectives (Hand and van Liere 1984). Even within Christian circles there are opposing themes of “anthropomorphic dominance” and “stewardship of nature”. Hand and van Liere (1984) showed that in the US, members of denominations such as Baptists and Mormons were more likely to adhere to the first, while Episcopalians and Methodists the second. Moreover, it is these world views that seem to determine whether an individual would support environmental policy. In an extension of this research, Greeley (1993) examined Christian liberalism in the US more closely and discovered that support for spending on the environment correlates with a gracious image of God and with being Catholic, and that a rigid political and religious view is related to a lack of environmental concern. However, he found no significant difference between Judeo-Christians in general and other religions on environmental concern. Greeley (1993) and Kanagy and Nelson (1995) also pointed to the problem of focusing only on religious variables as explanations for degree of environmental concern. Their studies 2 showed that you could obtain significant results on the relationship between Christian perspective and dominion over nature if you excluded other controlling factors, but as soon as you included cultural, social and demographic influences, these other factors became better explanators than the different Christian beliefs. In other words, there is a complex relationship between religious persuasion, socio-demographics and environmental concern, and taking into account this complexity leads to the conclusion that “religious individuals – even those identified as conservative – are no less likely than non-religious individuals to identify themselves as environmentalists” (Kanagy and Nelson 1995, p. 43.) Hence, Greeley (1993) and Kanagy and Nelson (1995) effectively conclude that the association between a Christian perspective and dominion over nature is spurious. It is merely a reflection of political conservatism, or some other socio-demographic variable (Wolkomir et al. 1997; Boyd 1999). However, a thorn remained in the side of this position. One consistent result from US studies is in accord with White’s thesis, and shows that those adhering more closely to a literal biblical viewpoint are less likely to support pro-environmental action (Guth et al. 1995). In addition, Guth et al. (1995) showed that US “secularists” generally support environmental policy, while Catholics are in the middle ground between the above extremes. These results support the contention that a more appropriate conclusion is that religious factors are indirectly causal rather than spurious. Similar results were discovered more recently by Truelove and Joireman (2009), who developed two scales: a Christian orthodoxy scale, and a biblical literal scale. Their thesis was that there could be either a “social-altruistic” effect that would have Christians supportive of environmental policy, or a “lower-knowledge-of-the-biosphere” effect that would produce the reverse effect. Then, from survey results, they discovered that Christian orthodoxy and biblical literalism were inversely associated with all measures of environmental behaviour, and that the lower-knowledge-of-the-biosphere effect was dominant. This result again supports the idea that we need to take into account mediating variables (in this case altruism and knowledge)
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