Religious Values and Environmental Concern: Harmony and Detachment^*

Abstract

Objective. The thought that environmental concern is rooted in religious beliefs and values has been raised by many writers. Different claims have been made about whether the nature of this relationship is positive or negative, and empirical evidence is mixed. In line with research on attitudes and values, this study examines the hypothesis that unless religious values are mentally accessible, they will not affect judgments of environmental issues. Method. Two environmental issues, genetically modified crops and more traditional environmental issues, for example, air pollution from traffic, are chosen to represent accessibility and nonaccessibility, respectively. A two‐wave data set from a national survey is analyzed. Results. The findings support the suggestion that religious values will affect the judgment of environmental threats of the first, but not the second, issue. Conclusion. These findings suggest that situational cues partly determine which values embodied in religion will influence environmental attitudes.

Post-materialism, Religiosity, Political Orientation, Locus of Control and Concern for Global Warming: A Multilevel Analysis Across 40 Nations

“…Previous research has generally found that people with left-leaning orientation are more likely to be involved in pro-environmental actions (e.g. Blankenau et al 2008;Neumayer 2004;Strandbu and Skogen 2000;Biel and Nilsson 2005). In a similar vein, several authors have found that left-wing individuals, such as Democrats in the US and Labor party supporters in the UK or Australia, tend to accept climate change reality compared to right-wing individuals (e.g.…”

Understanding Environmental Worldview of Famagusta Residents and Its Determinants through Survey Research

“…According to these past studies mentioned above [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27], the existing evidence has not been a consistent result in explaining the relations between various socio-demographic characteristics and individual environmental concern [28]. However, a modest empirical data has been provided that women [19,21,[29][30][31], younger respondents [32][33][34], highly educated respondents [26,31] and respondents with higher income [27,35] are more likely to hold higher scores of environmental attitude.…”

“…The correlation between socio-demographic characteristics and environmental worldview has been investigated by many researchers since the 1970s. Within the socio-demographic characteristics, gender [16][17][18][19][20][21][22], age [23][24][25], education [20,23,24,26] and household income [20,23,27] are among the most examined ones as independent variables.…”

Different Understandings of Life as an Opportunity to Enrich the Debate About Synthetic Biology

“…Besides, as well as together with, these risk-related issues, concerns about the potential violation of the intrinsic value of modified organisms [3,37] and the unnaturalness of GM have often been expressed by the public [20,39]. Among academics and other experts too, these issues have caused controversy [22].…”