Sherkat, D. E., Ellison, C. G. (2007). Structuring the religion-environment connection: Identifying religious influences on environmental concern and activism. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 46(1), 71-85.

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This article is a newer view on the original idea of Lynn White’s that religiosity is a factor in environmental degradation. The topic of this reading is religiosity and how it is related to environmental views.

The article starts off by summarizing the past finds of other research projects. Basically, there have been a few research projects that have found that religiosity has a positive correlation with environmental views, while other projects found there to be no relation. Sherkat and Ellison have noted though that past research projects have often not taken into account the complexities within the religious realm. They believe that more research into social movements may clear this up.

They also introduce the concept that religion and environmentalism may be connected by saying that environmental views are almost like a religion in themselves, which almost invites overlap between religious views and environmental views.

For this research paper, Sherkat and Ellison analyzed data from the 1993 General Social Survey. They analyzed environmental actions of individuals, political environmental activism of individuals, beliefs in the seriousness of environmental problems, religious beliefs, Individual willingness-to-sacrifice for the environment, and political conservatism as well as some demographic data.

To analyze this data, Sherkat and Ellison compared the means of different groups and looked for correlations.

The results of this study found that conservative Protestants were less likely to make personal sacrifices for nature and had lower levels of private environmental action. However there is a positive correlation between church-going and environmental stewardship views.  They seem to believe that political views are more likely to shape environmental views and not necessarily religion.

This article was actually very useful for me because they analyzed data they did not collect, but that was from the General Social Survey, which is what I was going to do.