ACRE Blog
How to Ask Better Questions! or, Beyond “Is Religion Good for the Environment”?
Evan Berry, February 23, 2026
There are many ways that scholars of religion try to explain what it is they do, and such explanations often bump up against the trite distinction between “teaching religion vs. teaching about religion,” which is often erroneously related to the Supreme Court’s 1963 Schempp decision. I think this is a much messier issue than this distinction allows, and, in fact have made a career about trying to describe the messy ways that religion and non-religion can be found mixed together in cultural phenomena including especially environmental movements. Theorizing, describing, and critiquing this messiness is probably a valid way to characterize what animates the contemporary study of religion. Whether someone is “teaching religion” or “teaching about religion,” they are making active claims about what counts as “religion,” and are thus engaged in making religion. JZ Smith, may he remain in our minds always. If we are all, actively and always, as scholars of religion, involved in making religion, then what role do we play in invoking religion when we talk about environmental concerns? Do we imagine that there are some kind of discrete, specific things that are “religion” that either do or do not appear in environmental contestations? As attention to the constructed, colonial nature of the category ‘religion’ have percolated out from anthropologists and critical theorists within broader study of religion, it has become increasingly problematic for scholars to make arguments that situate religion as either “good” or “bad” in any kind of generic sense. That’s why it strikes me as interesting and problematic that there are still so many voices in the field of “religion and environment” who hold that environmental discourses, movements, debates, etc. would benefit from religion, if they just had more of it.
One of the best things that has been written about this problem is the introductory chapter of Anna Gade’s Muslim Environmentalisms. Asking better questions would involve having deeper, more widespread conversations about how the organizing principles of the contemporary study of religion are or are not sufficiently included in the theoretical and methodological work being done in the subfield of religion and environment. How are ecological matters themselves like religion? And where ecological questions are intelligible as expressions of religious impulses, what then do we make of the presence or absence of (explicitly) religious actors or ideas? I’ve written about these matters (it’s primarily what I write about), and could offer, with time and support, an annotated bibliography on this set of considerations. But to skip to the end, not showing my work, and suggesting what better questions we might ask, I would say:
Who gets to decide what counts as “religion” in discussions about the environment? And what does the position of such voices reveal about how meaning and moral norms are formulated in the Anthropocene?
How can we account for the presence of lots of different kinds of religious contributions to environmental matters, including forms of obstructionism, disgust, piety, solidarity, mourning, direct action, and ecological knowledge?
How are the very terms of ecological or climate-related conversations tied up with religion? How do people think about and relate to places, futures, or creatures through the religious aspects of human being?
Why, or perhaps more appropriately, when is ‘religion’ a helpful conceptual lens through which to think and talk about the environment?