Where Conversations Happen and Values Emerge

Clingerman and Veldman explain how conversations spur religious action on climate change. In the weeks before the 2021 COP26 climate summit in Glasgow Scotland, religious leaders including Pope Francis, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby issued a statement arguing that faith communities have moral and theological reasons - what they call a "spiritual commission" - to combat climate change. As scholars who study how faith commitments influence environmental attitudes and behaviors, they suggest conceptualizing religion as fluid, dynamic, and embodied: religions are places where conversations happen and values emerge. Seeing religions in this way, rather than as a set of reified beliefs or rituals, reframes the question of how society finds solutions for complex environmental problems. Religious people must be able to see themselves in conversations about climate change. In the absence of discussion of religion and religious values in relation to climate change, many of them will not.