Mobilizing communities for environmental sustainability often involves engaging with religious values and beliefs, which can exert powerful influences on the attitudes, norms, and behaviors of the majority of people worldwide. Christianity is the largest world religion and, in some contexts, has also been among the most skeptical of climate and environmental concerns. A popular explanation for this skepticism focuses on eschatological views (i.e., end time beliefs) and posits that if the earth is going to be destroyed someday, there is little point in conserving it now. Empirical evidence is lacking, however, on the extent to which such beliefs actually influence environmental attitudes. We surveyed Christian undergraduate students in the US (N = 1520) and found that belief in the imminent return of Jesus Christ was not significantly associated with variables tested regarding biodiversity loss or climate change. Furthermore, a plurality responded that the earth will be renewed at the end (43%), not destroyed (24%), and beliefs about the fate of the earth were generally not related to attitudinal measures—except for a slim minority of respondents with strongest views that the earth will be destroyed—but were significantly associated with political ideology and literalist views of Scripture. These findings suggest that end time views may not be a major obstacle—at least among younger American Christians—to promoting socio-ecological sustainability.

This essay explores the ways that Marxian categories of alienation, labor, and class can strengthen critiques of human exploitation of other animals. Marxist insights are valuable in particular because they point our attention to the structural dimensions of oppression, which are not always theorized explicitly in mainstream animal ethics. Thinking about animals as a class, with common interests and common suffering, enables us to see suffering and exploitation as results of a larger system, not particular acts of cruelty. This structural analysis can strengthen animal ethics, which often focuses on the qualities of individual animals that give them value and the human actions that cause animal suffering. Thus, even though Marx does not directly address animals at length, or even especially positively, a zoological reading of his work illuminates the ways and reasons animals experience alienation and the ways that humans might help to liberate them.

The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America - April 2016

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