An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Christopher Cotter (CTPI Duncan Forrester Fellow 2020-21):
Environmentalism and the Non-Religious: Some Preliminary Findings
Abstract:
In recent years, issues surrounding climate change and the broader impact of humanity upon the planetary ecosystem have risen in prominence in public, political, and academic discourse. Unsurprisingly, the same years have seen extensive attention to ecotheology, climate (in)justice, climate apocalypticism and more from within the broad church of public theology. Attention has been paid to the engagement – or lack thereof – with ecological concerns from within the world’s ‘religions’, ‘environmentalism’ has been dubbed a ‘new’ or ‘secular religion’ in some quarters, and ‘environmentalism’, ‘ethical veganism’ and other positions have found themselves considered alongside other ‘worldviews’ and ‘belief systems’ in legal cases, ‘religious education’ syllabi and more. However, comparatively little attention has been given to the entanglements between environmental concern and ostensibly ‘non-religious’ subject positions. My current project probes these entanglements in a UK context – particularly Scotland and Northern Ireland – and aims to provide a productive mapping of some of the ‘non-theistic’ environmental discourses at play, as well as potential avenues for fruitful conversation, collaboration, and equality across the ‘religion-related field’. Today’s paper introduces my critical approach to ‘non-religion’, before unpacking some of this abstract in more detail and presenting some nascent results from my interrogation of questionnaires and interviews conducted in 2019 and 2020.
Please contact iash@ed.ac.uk for a link to join the seminar.