When looking at the recent rise in environmental activism an often-neglected factor is the role played by religious environmental groups. From eco-churches to interdenominational and multi-faith organisations, religious environmental groups have played a key organisational role within the environmental movement in the UK and beyond. But how can policy makers better understand and support religious environmentalism? We spoke to Jeremy Kidwell from the University of Birmingham about his research into the politics of religious environmentalism.

What are the most common pitfalls you see policymakers falling into when trying to understand religious environmentalism?

Many people in a governance context, particularly international governance, approach major religious organisations assuming there’s a clear top-down flow to decision-making. People will approach Christian environmental organisations and assume that if you can get to their religious leaders, then they’ll just disseminate the information for you. In reality things are more complicated.

One example I point to is Laudato Si, an encyclical [Papal statement] from Pope Francis which was published in 2015. This was really exciting because it was the first official statement of a position toward papal environmental activism. However, some research by Pew conducted before and after the encyclical was released, indicates that Roman Catholics weren’t necessarily changing their environmental behaviours in response to the article and many had never read or even heard of it. Sometimes people in larger organizations assume that if you can get to senior figures within a religion, you’ll be successful in having an impact, when this isn’t necessarily the case.

Mapping the field of religious environmental politics article.

If this high-level work is not as effective as it’s perceived to be, what are the implications for how and if people choose to work with religious groups when supporting the environmental movement?

I think people could assume based on what I’ve just said that if worshippers aren’t paying attention to their leaders, what’s the point of engaging with religious environmental organisations? That would be a real disappointment because there’s a unique opportunity we miss when we don’t have effective engagement. In the UK, of all different types of environmental groups operating at the sub-national level, the most numerous are these religious environmental groups. Yes, religious environmental groups are more complicated than some might expect but given the scale of the role they play there is huge potential for nuanced engagement and we really are already working in similarly nuanced ways with other demographic groups.

You write about the complexity and variety of how religious groups are structured. What do these structures look like, and what examples are there of effective engagement that capitalises on this complexity?

In the article, I develop four categories for understanding local engagement which underlines the many iterations this kind of mobilisation can take: from the lone individual who’s doing good work but is a bit isolated to the large local groups which have all kinds of different participation in them. This reflects the fact that local branches of religious environmental organisations vary in the structure and size of groups and in the dynamic of their relationship to parent organisations.

In terms of positive examples of operationalizing this complexity, a great example can be seen in the work of Eco-Congregation Scotland as a large multi-denominational organisation. Eco-Congregation Scotland realised that there were many different environmental groups across their networks that weren’t necessarily coordinating with each other at local and regional levels. In response, they actively developed regional networks between their local groups, forming collections of units that were better able to practically support each other and coordinate their activities. So there are opportunities for working in a lateral way across groups but sometimes that needs an outsider to come in and make those connections.

How does this mid- and local-level coordination look when carried out by explicitly multi-faith organisations?

That’s a big question. On a local level I’ve been to many gatherings where you’ve got people who are mobilized because of their religion, but it’s not uniform in terms of what religion each person is from. You have people from all different faiths all hanging out together talking about why their faith is relevant.

One area where you see this is in the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement. For the People’s Climate March in New York religious groups marched in relatively separate blocks, with different songs and posters. XR is much messier. They tried to create a faith bridge at the most recent London demonstration, which was going to be a focal point for all the people of faith, to bring that aspect of their environmentalism forward, but one of the problems with this was that people felt a little uncomfortable trying to contain the ‘religious’ aspect in just one place. I think part of the ongoing learning there is that religion is more prevalent than we expect and the everyday expression of it can confound our stereotypes.

If these networks are often porous and focused around pockets of shared organisational culture, how do you see tensions between organisational levels playing out and what are the lessons for policymakers?

One of the classic case studies that you could look at would be the divestment movement. Look at religious environmental divestment campaigns within denominations, like the Church of Scotland for example, which just completely fizzle when you get to big synod meetings. You may have huge support at the grassroots for divestment but when you get to the bureaucratic meeting with the standard elected leadership, there is a real lack of interest or even obstruction for sometimes arbitrary and unanticipated reasons.

This partly explains why this model I’m trying to develop is important. For large organizations like Greenpeace or the WWF I think there are real opportunities to create campaigns that connect with local churches. Our first reflex might be to try direct market campaigns to the individuals (in the basis of their religion), you might say ‘we know that there are a bunch of individuals that all go to church, could we find a campaign that would connect with those people on the level of their church belonging?’. An organisation like Christian Aid has done an excellent job of mobilising people at these intermediate organisational levels. I think these opportunities are there for effective campaigns that are being missed when policymakers focus either on the senior hierarchy or individuals in isolation of their various forms of belonging.

Isn’t there a risk of alienating the senior religious and bureaucratic leadership of the organisations you’re working with?

Even if you’re a big organization, you don’t want to burn your bridges. As I discuss in my article, within international relations there’s an appreciation of the fact that we’re not often dealing with easily defined political units. Elinor Ostrom refers to this in what she calls polycentric reality; that we’re not just working with a nation state but a whole interlinked web of different policies and actors vying for significance. It’s the same with religious environmentalism. We need to take the knowledge that we have of the complexities of political action and use it in the context of religion by working on multiple levels simultaneously.

I also think there’s a need, at the highest levels organizationally, to start comparing playbooks. The landscape is complex, and no single NGO or government unit can connect with everyone effectively. In any given area there might be different organizations with specific denominational and organisational knowledge that can succeed best supporting different parts of the religious environmental network. If we can divide up the landscape and tackle it in different ways, I think that could lead to some really effective work, particularly working with conservatives who are currently not highly engaged by the movement.

You mention the difficulties sometimes encountered when engaging with more conservative religious groups. What does this look like in practice?

Here’s another area where stereotypes can impair effective engagement. To give one example, during research I did with a religious environmental movement, I noticed when we were discussing their footprint of local groups that they didn’t have any groups in a particular local area. When I asked why, the answer was that the region was traditionally conservative and that they just aren’t interested in environmental activism (that wasn’t the actual wording). I thought this was interesting so I made a trip over and did some interviews.

I found that the reason that groups hadn’t joined the network wasn’t because of opposition to environmentalism, but simply because no one had invited them to join. I think we operate in a political context where stereotypes about ostensibly conservative religious groups get tacitly mobilized in a way that produces the lack of engagement they predict. The big lesson for the environmental movement from this, is that we should try to talk to people who we think are a lost cause. There are tonnes of unexpected opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Jeremy Kidwell is Senior Lecturer in Theological Ethics at the University of Birmingham.

His recent article ‘Mapping the field of religious environmental politics’, was published in the March 2020 issue of International Affairs. It formed part of a section of articles on ‘Engaging religions and religious studies in international affairs’, guest-edited by Katherine Brown. Read the article online here.

Joseph Hills is the Editorial Assistant for International Affairs.