Debates on the ecological crisis's existence, affect and history increase as the public becomes concerned with issues of climate change and overpopulation. In 1967, medieval historian Lynn White wrote a journal article that blamed Christianity for the ecological crisis due to religious axioms that endorsed the belief that humans are separate from, and more important than, the rest of nature. White argued that this belief was destructive and was linked to science and technology, which today enable widespread destruction through innovative equipment. He argued that because Christianity was to blame for the ecological crisis it was also responsible to solve it, through revising their problematic traditional beliefs on the human-nature relationship. White's thesis spurred Christian theologians to defend beliefs within their faith, typically by upholding traditional axioms or by criticizing White for misreading Biblical passages. However, many of the arguments against White's claims are shown in this thesis to fail to fully challenge his claims. Additionally, there is a current trend among certain Christian ecological theologians who argue for changes within traditional Christian teachings which indirectly supports White's charge against Christianity. This thesis argues that the combination of ineffective challenges to White's thesis and the indirect support currently found in Christian eco-theology, White's argument may have been inaccurately rejected. Further, this thesis calls for individual readers to reconsider their understanding of the human-nature relationship and to what degree their ecological values influence behavior.

Det har blivit allt vanligare att tala om miljöfrågor som en av vår tids stora ödesfrågor. Kopplingar mellan religiositet och miljöengagemang är många och i vårt aktuella samhällsklimat kan det vara lämpligt att undersöka ifall det föreligger signifikanta samband dem emellan. Hittills har den empirin som undersökt frågan gett mycket delade och omdebatterade meningar. Den här uppsatsen använder Durkheims definition av religion som en universell företeelse för att bidra med ytterligare ett intressant perspektiv. Sociologisk teori om hur individen beter sig på ett visst sätt enskilt och på ett annat i stunder av intensiv kollektiv gemenskap leder även till antagandet att religiositet kan påverka individuellt och kollektivt miljöengagemang på olika sätt.  Av den anledningen testas hypoteserna att religiositet har en positiv effekt på en individs nivå av miljövänligt beteende medan det har en negativ effekt på en individs benägenhet att delta i en kollektiv miljöaktion. Resultatet visar att det föreligger ett positivt samband mellan religiositet, mätt i frekvens av gudstjänstdeltagande, och miljövänligt beteende i vardagen, men inget signifikant samband med benägenhet att delta i en kollektiv miljöaktion. Studiens resultat tyder även på att kontrollvariablerna utbildningsnivå, kontinent och kön har ett bättre prediktionsvärde för miljöengagemang än religiositet har. Slutsatsen är emellertid att religiositet kan ha olika effekter på individuellt och kollektivt miljöengagemang.

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Since the advent of the environmental crisis, some writers have raised concerns with the moral influence of Christian scripture and interpretive traditions, such as the medieval book of nature, a hermeneutic in which nature and scripture are "read" in reference to one another. Scripture, they argue, has tended to stifle sacred relationships with nature as a non-human other. This thesis argues that such perspectives are reductive of the sacred quality of scripture. Environmental perspectives should be concerned with the desacralization of religious texts in addition to nature. Chapter one suggests that two questions surrounding the medieval book of nature's history can help us address ways that such perspectives reduce religious interpretation of sacred texts. The first question is the tension between manifestation and proclamation, or the question of how scripture and nature reveal sacred meanings. The second is the problem of evil, or the question of where evil and suffering come from. It also proposes that Shakespeare's As You Like It and religious philosophy, particularly Paul Ricoeur's writings, can help us address these problems and provide a contemporary religious perspective of the "book of nature." Drawing on scenes in the play in which nature is "read" as a book and Ricoeur's essay on "Manifestation and Proclamation," chapter two argues how manifestation often works interdependently with proclamation. Chapter three discusses how anthropocentric worldviews in which natural entities are exploited also distort interpretive relationships with scripture. Overcoming desacralization requires giving up desires to suppress contingencies, particularly suffering, in nature and in interpreting religious texts. Only as the characters in As You Like It accept contingencies are they able to engage hidden sources of hope, which is comparable to the need to let go of mastery in interpretation Ricoeur describes. Chapter four discusses problems with attempts to uncover the origins of the environmental crisis by discussing what Ricoeur writes about the problems with theodicy and Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of evil. Assumptions that specific human origins for evil can be blamed confirm deceptively human-centered worldviews and can mask valuable messages about how to morally respond to suffering that are taught in Judeo-Christian narratives.