Lynn White had written about religion and it’s detriment to the environment and this was such a generalized suggestion that it makes it hard to refute, however his statements can be used to make a hypothesis that religiosity is negatively correlated with environmental concern. The topic is the relationship between religion and the environment. The researchers of this report (Eckberg and Blocker, who did not write the report) broke up the population into: being Jewish or Christian (as opposed to having no religious affiliation), being conservative Protestant, believing that religion is important, and believing in the literal interpretation of the Bible.
It is probably important to note that Eckberg and Blocker did not have a explanation to why religiosity and environmental concern would be negatively correlated since this report is an explanation by Greeley on why it is, using data in addition to the Eckberg and Blocker data from the General Social Survey from Davis and Smith.
The research question asked by Eckberg and Blocker was what people reported was their environmental concern as well as their religion. This was taking a survey of a random sample of people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They analyzed their data to see the correlations (using Pearson’s “r”) and displayed this in a table.
Greeley found that the those who saw the image of God as a Friend as opposed to a Judge and King were more likely to have a greater environmental concern. Though this did not seem to be lined up with religious beliefs which is what Eckberg and Blocker were focused on.
In this article, Greeley analyzes this further with visual representations of histograms to show the conclusions that were found by Eckberg, Blocker, Davis, and Smith.
This article seemed to be more of an analysis of what other people had found, which was useful in its own right, especially since, if you look at the report from Eckberg and Blocker, they do not say that the relationship lay with the images of God, but just found some correlations spuriously with different religions.