CHRISTIANITY, ENVIRONMENTALISM, AND THE THEORETICAL PROBLEM OF FUNDAMENTALISM

Previous studies of the relationship between religion and environmenta lism have suffered the lack of measures of religious beliefs or of env ironmental attitudes and behaviors, or samples that were not clearly r epresentative or sufficiently large. We address these problems using d ata from the 1993 General Social Survey, which has over 40 measures of environmental attitudes and actions, as well as a large number of mea sures of religious membership, belief, and participation and other bac kground measures. We focus on 10 indexes of environmentalism and 3 ind exes of religiosity. Our findings give some support to the thesis of L ynn White that Christian theology has an ''antienvironmental'' effect, and they do not support the contention that it has a ''stewardship'' effect. There are, however, complications. We do find evidence of a '' proenvironmental'' effect of religious participation. Further, the neg ative effect of Christian ''theology'' seems to be largely an effect o f fundamentalism or sectarianism. While this could be theologically or iented, it might also be an offshoot of conflict between religious con servatives and liberals.