“‘Too Much”: Thinking with and Beyond Lynn White Jr.

The approaches I term “too much” are those that posit that certain religious ideas underpin the climate crisis. Given that the climate crisis emerges out of economic and environmental changes in Western nations whose populations have been and continue to be overwhelmingly Christian, these works typically consider the environmental attitudes Christianity encourages. Works in this vein are often all-encompassing in their narratives of what religions are and the work they do in the world, often penned by writers whose expertise lies beyond the study of religion. A foundational piece in this tradition is a six-page article by the historian Lynn White Jr. (1967) published in the journal Science and titled “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Appearing just five years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), it distilled a spirit prevalent in the wider academy and ecology movement that laid the blame for a wide array of social and cultural ills at the feet of Christianity, an attitude that would seep into the groundwater of the environmentalist movement. White’s article can be read as part of a longer genealogy of writings that considered the relationship between Christianity—especially its modern American variants—and environmental damage (Taylor 2016). White was the son of a Presbyterian minister and remained a practicing Christian throughout his life. His training was as a historian of medieval technology, a period and object of study that provided an idiosyncratic take on Christian theology. This interest is evident throughout the piece and underpins the aspects of White’s argument I suggest might be instructive to scholars today.

In his short essay, White sets out three important points that shaped later thinking. First, White (1967, 1205) suggests that ecological attitudes are “deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny—that is, by religion.” In this sense, White argues that the causes of climate change do not lie solely in material relations or technological change but are equally if not more significantly ideological or discursive in origin (Jenkins 2009). Second, White (1967, 1205) contends that there is something distinctive about the way that Judeo-Christian thought conceives of nature. Analyzing the narrative of creation laid out in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, he posits that “[m]an shares, in great measure, God’s transcendence over nature.” For White, the Christian narrative of creation is distinctive, configuring humans as both rulers over and exiles from an objectified vision of nature. Third, White argues that following the split between the Eastern and Western churches in the eleventh century, Western Christianity developed a uniquely rapacious attitude. “In its Western form,” he asserts, “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (White 1967, 1205). He concludes that “Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt” (White 1967, 1206) for mounting ecological destruction in the twentieth century. Overall, White’s account of religion is preeminently idealist and textualist, positing that Christian texts are the origin point of dangerous environmental attitudes and behaviors.

White’s article has elicited much criticism from those who view his “too much” approach as sweeping in both its understanding of religion in general and of Christian thought in particular. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1968) cautioned against assuming that doctrinal principles translate straightforwardly into worldly action, especially when it comes to environmental attitudes. He points out that not only do we often observe “glaring contradictions between professed ideal and actual practice,” but that individuals and institutions “are not always able to foresee all the consequences of their intended character and action” (Tuan 1968, 188). Theologians responded to White’s analysis by pointing out that he identifies hegemonic aspects of modern American Christianity and presents them as intrinsic to Western Christianity as a whole (McGrath 2002). The theologian Anna Peterson (2000) notes that White conflates original doctrine—that is, biblical texts—with “practical religion,” or how these texts are interpreted under evolving social, political, and economic conditions. Peterson concedes that while there exists an “ethic of transcendence” in certain strains of Christian theology—for instance, Gnosticism, Manicheanism, and the writings of figures like Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin—she stresses that this is a particular genealogy. Other traditions—notably Catholic theology and the writings of Thomas Aquinas—present a far less radical cleavage between humans and the material world. As such, White’s suggestion that the first few passages of Genesis or Western Christianity as a whole unambiguously produce an insurmountable cleavage between humans and nature neglects the breadth of Christian history and theological argument.

In recent years, a growing number of scholars have considered afresh the extent to which modern Western environmental attitudes are indebted to Christianity and examined more closely the traditions of Christian thinking out of which the most dangerous attitudes emerge, nuancing the period White focuses on. The historian Brad Gregory (2023), for instance, argues that post-Reformation theologies and colonial ideologies of extraction developed in parallel with one another. Gregory suggests that one of the distinctive features of post-Reformation Christianity—both Catholic and Protestant—was its rebranding of avarice, which had historically been considered a vice, as “self-interest,” a conception of human motivation that would come to underpin capitalist and consumerist logics. Gregory contends that this change in attitude towards personal accumulation required a novel interpretation of the New Testament. As he suggests, this departure gave rise to the view that religiosity and economic practices occur in distinct spheres and in this sense helped to legitimate the economic systems responsible for the climate crisis. At the same time, Gregory suggests that an ethic of transcendence is not so much intrinsic to Christianity as specific to Protestantism, particularly its emphasis on interior spiritual experience over and above the material world. For Gregory, these post-Reformation theological shifts are more central to modern environmental attitudes than an intrinsic and unchanging essence of Christianity.

These criticisms aside, I suggest there are germs in White’s argument of later approaches that are not so condemnatory or essentializing in their accounts of Christianity and think about it in relation to economic and technological change. Recent studies have identified the roots of environmental degradation in sources as varied as the colonization of the Americas, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the rise of capitalism—that is, the early modern and modern eras (Lewis and Maslin 2015; Moore 2017). Read generously, White’s expertise as a medieval historian helps to illuminate that there were complex developments taking place before the early modern period that shaped the emergence of modernity and its environmental effects in complex ways. White invokes the example of the invention in the seventh century of ploughs that could be pulled by oxen, arguing that this new technology not only led to greater exploitation of land but also gave rise to the dividing up of communally owned lands into private smallholdings. In this sense, White underlines that the emergence of modern ideologies of labor and private property have deep roots, particularly in relation to land and the commons. As literary scholar Eleanor Johnson (2023) has argued, people in the Middle Ages grappled with radical changes to their environments and developed a rich sense of “eco-systemic thought.” As Johnson shows, these conceptual systems were underpinned by biblical ideas about the “wasting” or emptying out of landscapes and were central to concepts of immoral types of behavior. In this sense, White was prescient in gesturing to the deeper roots of modernity and the complex intertwining of religious thought with economic and technological change, as well as its impact on later shifts to both climate and religion.

Engaging with White’s argument afresh offers both promise and caution. From one vantage point, White prefigures more nuanced arguments that locate shifts in technology and property relations—as well as the complex process of translating theological concepts into modern legal frameworks—as underway before the early modern period, perhaps as far back as the turn of the last millennium. These insights should encourage scholars to nuance the grand categories of “modernity,” “Christianity,” and “the West,” allowing us to unpick exactly what changes were underway, when, and where, and which have had the most devastating effects. From a more critical angle, however, White’s work cautions against striving to tell a single or homogenous story about either climate or religion. Traces of such narratives show up frequently, as scholars and critics often too freely condemn Christianity on account of decontextualized biblical passages or the ideologies of some contemporary Christians. The origins of the climate crisis are manifold and varied, and we ought to remain curious about how religion is folded into the layers of the present in complex ways.

“Too Little”: Disenchantment and the Secular Disciplines

In recent years, there has been a profusion of texts that go against the grain of earlier literature and instead frame the decline of religion as a key cause of the climate crisis. “Too little” approaches suggest that secular and modernist epistemologies are responsible for rendering the natural world a blank slate, stripping the world of wonder, and creating the political and philosophical foundations that have made increasingly destructive environmental practices possible. This literature extends and deepens one of the foundational ideas in modern social science: that Western modernity is characterized by disenchantment (Weber [1922] 2009). Such arguments are evident in the work of theologians and scholars of religion, who consider the disenchantment of nature a distinctive feature of the West and often express hope for the revival of enchanted systems of thought (Eliade 1957; McGrath 2002; Nasr 1968; Taylor 2010). Similar arguments have been articulated by philosophers and critics who are, at least ostensibly, secular authors. Many of these figures have been central to the emergence of new fields like post-humanism, neo-vitalism, and new materialism, which collectively signal a revival of interest in extra-human agencies (Bubandt 2018). While these perspectives offer a return to thinking about religion in largely secular disciplines, at times they risk reproducing tropes about disenchantment that obscure the nuances of the role of “religion” in forging planetary change.

The philosopher Bruno Latour (1993) has long been a critic of modernist tropes that view nature and culture as separate domains, which assume humans (subjects) impose meaning and seek to manipulate inert matter (objects). Recently, Latour (2017, 2) has examined how such perspectives shape environmental behaviors, describing the climate crisis as a problem that is “at once mythical, scientific, political, and probably religious as well.” Faced with this crisis, he argues, we need to radically reappraise the tenets of Enlightenment thought, particularly its rationalism, worldliness, and secularity. Latour (2017, 152) suggests that this requires a new attentiveness to “that to which others cling,” which in his view is the ultimate essence of what it means to be religious. In his words, “One of the great enigmas of Western history is not that ‘there are still people naïve enough to believe in animism,’ but that many people still hold the rather naïve belief in a supposedly deanimated ‘material world’” (Latour 2017, 70). Responding to White’s argument, Latour contends that the climate crisis is not the result of something intrinsic to Western Christianity but rather that Christian theology has reflected changes occurring in European thought more broadly. In his words, “Sometime between the thirteenth century and the eighteenth, [religion] lost its initial vocation by becoming Gnostic, before passing the torch to the superficially irreligious forms of counter-religion” (Latour 2017, 210). If Gnostics view the material world as flawed, fallen, and detached from the divine, then Latour suggests that secularism (which he glosses as “superficially irreligious forms of counter-religion”) is not so much a departure from but an extension of Gnostic attitudes. More strikingly, Latour turns to the classical Greek figure of the goddess Gaia to conjure an image of the Earth not as inert but as volatile, capricious, and alive. In his words, “Gaia is an injunction to rematerialize our belonging to the world, by obliging us to re-examine the parasitic relations of Gnosticism to the counter-religions” (Latour 2017, 219). Put simply, Latour’s recent work seeks to demonstrate as false any radical separation between humans and the Earth while beginning the work of imagining an alternative ontological scheme.

Latour is just one among a wide array of philosophers, social theorists, and environmentalists authoring similarly emphatic climate treatises in quasi-theological registers. Figures like Timothy Morton (2010), Amitav Ghosh (2016), and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) have suggested that disenchantment is a crucial piece for understanding the climate crisis, while the writings of Jane Bennett (2001), Donna Haraway (2016), Bronislaw Szerszynski (2017), and Anna Tsing (2017) lay out their own visions for an enchanted metaphysics. Haraway’s (2016, 9) work, for instance, is suffused with concepts drawn from Indigenous cosmologies, and she describes her idiom of the “Chthulucene” as signifying an epoch that is “neither sacred nor secular; this earthly worlding is thoroughly terran, muddled, and mortal.” In a distinct vein, Morton’s work seeks to render visible the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world by abolishing the idea of “nature.” In the process, he conjures his own philosophical scheme that strives to describe “interconnectedness in the fullest and deepest sense” (Morton 2010, 7). These works percolate with religious idioms, dialects, and sensibilities, bringing with them lines of argument that not long ago would have been alien to secular social theory and readily disparaged as mystical or romantic.

While these figures frequently gesture to enchantment as a means of departing from strictly secular frameworks, at times they risk reproducing problematic dimensions of tropes about disenchantment, which I gather into three areas of concern. First, they risk reproducing ideas about the temporality of modernity and the people who fall inside and outside this vast category. The environmental movement has long invoked romanticized images of non-Western peoples and often framed Indigenous people in particular as closer to nature (Krech 1999). Such projects often function, in the words of Birgit Meyer (2012, 88), to “deny coevalness” by depicting non-Western peoples as “bearing resemblance to the still enchanted pre-Reformation period.” In places, post-humanist, neo-vitalist, and new materialist scholars similarly draw Indigenous concepts and categories for inspiration that can present Indigenous people through a nostalgic lens that reinscribes longstanding forms of epistemic and representational violence (Todd 2016). Moreover, these kinds of perspectives not only rehash old stereotypes but often, in the words of Jessica Cattelino (2017, 133), “contribute to the longstanding and consequential problem of collapsing indigenous peoples into nature . . . [that] associates indigeneity with stasis in ways that devalue indigenous cultural change as cultural loss.” The reality is that for colonized populations, climate change and environmental destruction are far from recent experiences. Neshnabé critic Kyle Whyte (2018) points out that for Indigenous people in the Americas, the climate apocalypse—with its attendant fears of dispossession, forced relocation, and human extinction—came long ago. Indigenous histories and cultures are not relics of an earlier epoch but instead underscore the deep historical roots of the climate crisis as well as Indigenous resilience in responding to its many violences.

Second, while these texts ostensibly depart from secular thinking, they often reproduce it in complex ways. The anthropologist Mayanthi Fernando (2022) has pointed out that there remains such a deeply secular bias in the academy that few disciplines are able to grapple seriously with either the God of monotheistic traditions or the gods and spirits of other faiths. Fernando points out that when scholars in post-humanist studies are drawn to what might at first glance appear to be specters of “religion,” they most frequently invoke examples from those associated with “animism.” In her view, animism is an easier bedfellow for secular writers than religion, in the sense that it is more easily romanticized as Other (see Wilkinson 2017). In Fernando’s (2022, 568) words, “By delimiting nonhumans to lifeforms conventionally understood as ‘nature,’ and by anchoring ‘nature’ in a materialist epistemology and ontology, much of this work also reproduces the separation between natural (coded real) and supernatural (illusory) that was equally integral to secularity.” In this sense, Fernando (2022, 568) argues that much of this work ought to be read not so much as a break from the past but as “an extension of secularity.”

Third, these texts gesture to a knot of problems that arise from debates about “disenchantment.” In its original formulation, Weber’s concept not only told a story about the decline of religion under modernity but also captured a sense of longing for a premodern past many secular moderns share. While abundant work has complicated totalizing narratives about the disenchantment of modernity (Josephson-Storm 2017), it remains a powerful trope animating much contemporary writing. Enchantment is a famously elusive concept that groups together various secular understandings of religion with ideas about magic, spirits, the unseen, and the illusory. It is in this sense that Courtney Bender (2020) describes enchantment as a “closed-loop language game” and catch-all term for secular perceptions of “excess.” At the same time, narratives of disenchantment often work to produce the reality they describe, in Bender’s (2020) words, replaying “a set of modern claims about epochs, moods, structures, secularities that are made real within [the same] network of ideas.” While Bender’s critique is not directed at climate writing per se, it underlines the complexities of a straightforward narrative of disenchantment leading to environmental destruction. Enchantment and disenchantment are concepts so elastic they often produce narratives that fail to reflect the specificities of particular times, places, and philosophies.

Figurations of religion and climate emanating from various corners of contemporary social thought illustrate that the metaphysical implications of climate change are working themselves out in a multitude of contexts, some of which lead us back to religion via unexpected routes. Taken together, these works represent important critiques of modernist thinking as it pertains to the Earth and matter, gesturing to an overdue focus on the material aspects of discursive and conceptual schema. At times, however, they risk reproducing reified stories about disenchantment that reintroduce various modernist tropes. In place of these approaches, I suggest we would be better served by a more subtle vocabulary for describing the sacred and the enchanted on the one hand and the secular and the modern on the other. One means of doing this is to historicize and interrogate what we understand religion to be and the complex processes through which this category emerged—not only discursively but as part of the changes that worked to remake the Earth and its ecologies. At the same time, this story must be sensitive to the ways this history played out in many locales, cumulatively leading to change on a planetary scale.

Beyond Disenchantment

In recent years, various authors have sought to understand the precise mechanisms that led to the contemporary moment of climatic crisis, particularly the role of capitalist and colonial extractive practices. The most illuminating works in this vein examine the multiple and interlocking genealogies that have led to the present and interrogate how religious ideas and ideas about religion were quite literally etched into local landscapes and ecosystems, and how these new landscapes in turn shaped religious thought. This work explores how the emergence of the category of religion was articulated against ideas about nature, materiality, humans, and landscapes, a story that has always been local and specific even as it has ultimately had planetary consequences. In emphasizing the local in the context of climate studies, I take inspiration from the reparative and decolonial method laid out by Anja Kanngieser and Zoe Todd (2020), which approaches environmental histories as always situated in local contexts and argues that place, land, and knowledge are always intertwined. The works I discuss in this section demonstrate that religion has fed into and been shaped by the political and material forces that have sought to produce wealth, accumulate power, and reshape society through extractive practices. I contend that understanding how religion both shaped and was shaped by these processes helps to deepen our understanding of the metaphysical stakes of the current moment, and ultimately our understanding of contemporary religion’s many genealogies.

Recent work in the environmental humanities has sought to understand histories of extraction most closely associated with the climate crisis, particularly coal and oil (Barak 2020). The philosopher Mohamed Meziane (2024) has argued that these forms of extraction are closely linked to struggles over religion and the power of religious institutions, particularly in the sites where the industrial revolution began. In Britain, much of the land that held coal deposits was owned by abbeys and monasteries prior to the English Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. Meziane shows that although coal extraction previously occurred on an artisanal scale, following the expropriation of these coal-rich lands by the state—which arose from the English crown’s desire to undermine the church as a rival power base—governmental institutions had new incentives to make these lands financially productive by extracting, selling, and burning ever great quantities of coal. At the same time, coal extraction on a large scale was made possible by changing metaphysical understandings of the subterranean. As Michael Northcott (2013, 55) has described, the sulphureous fumes given off by coal deposits in England had long been associated with demons, and as such, mining itself was widely considered an ‘immoral’ activity. The expansion of coal mining therefore required undermining these fears by characterizing them as premodern forms of superstition. Meziane (2024, 165) takes up this theme, arguing that “[t]he fossil economy implied a profane readability of the underground world, liberated from all ‘superstition.’” For Northcott (2013, 80), coal extraction therefore both was made possible by and further propelled understandings that physical matter—and by extension, the Earth itself—was “dead, insensible, and lacking in consciousness or purposiveness.” Reading Meziane and Northcott together, it is evident that religion both as metaphysical orientation and as a political-economic force made the expansion of coal mining possible. These changes emerged out of struggles rooted in genealogies of religion specific to the early modern period in England, the birthplace of large-scale coal mining, nuancing linear and homogenizing narratives of disenchantment. At the same time, these works demonstrate how ideas about religion were physically inscribed into early modern landscapes and raise questions about how these material and landscape practices might have subsequently informed the development of religious ideas.

These shifts in political thought and economic practice that occurred in distinct European settings had profound consequences in many colonial contexts. European empires were fueled by the extraction of raw commodities, and as they expanded globally, they engaged in projects to dispel local beliefs about the Earth and resignify matter (Ghosh 2021). The development and articulation of religion in colonial contexts was dialectically intertwined with destructive environmental practices, both facilitating and producing theologies that functioned to further strip the world in ways that were specific to different moments and contexts (Vasko 2022). As the historian Faizah Zakaria (2023) has argued, we should not think of climate change as originating out of any one set of religious ideas but rather that religions in their specific, modernist guises developed alongside rapacious commercial, political, and environmental attitudes. Writing of the context of Sumatra, Zakaria shows that before colonization, longstanding forms of “traditionalist” Islam had been accommodating to local metaphysical schemes, allowing for coexistence with philosophies that viewed the forest and landscapes as alive with agencies. In contrast, ascendant “modernist” schools of theology—both Christian and Islamic—insisted on a more radical monotheism and were closely associated with colonial economic and political interests. In her words, “Theological articles of faith in a specific religion did not affect environmental change as much as the ways in which these principles were discontinuously reconfigured when landscapes, like societies, were dislocated” (Zakaria 2023, 4). In colonial contexts like Sumatra, then, the extraction of commodities and the reforming of landscapes worked to fuel the development of ever more anthropocentric ideologies, which in turn fed into evolving theological paradigms. These ideas would come to shape how people interacted with their ecologies and the moral stakes of doing so, ultimately working to fundamentally remake local landscapes and ecologies.

Such an approach to the localized intersections between climate and religion is helpful in understanding more recent religious and environmental changes and their planetary consequences. If coal ignited the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, oil propelled twentieth century capitalism. The historian Darren Dochuk (2019) has revealed the complex intertwinement of American Christianity and oil exploration and discovery. Early “oil hunting” had a deeply spiritual bent, with itinerant preachers and prophets using divine inspiration to identify potential new oil fields. At the same time, the way oil came to fuel America’s economic and geopolitical hegemony lent itself to the notion that the country’s imperial project was God-ordained. In this sense, religious ideas were inscribed into many landscapes in the United States—with the oil rig becoming an intrinsic landscape feature in many places—while also working to forge an ideology that propelled oil expansion globally.

To this day, a close affiliation between oil interests and certain strains of American Christianity remains strong. The sociologist Robin Veldman (2019) troubles the popular trope that climate skepticism among conservative evangelicals emerges out of what she terms the “end-time apathy hypothesis”—that is, that signs of the decline of the material world are taken by many evangelicals as welcome signs of the apocalypse and the coming of a new world. Veldman nuances this analysis by showing that many evangelicals have a limited understanding of climate change or deny its existence altogether. Instead, she argues, climate skepticism is better understood as a political ideology that emerges out the evangelical “sense of embattlement with secular culture” (Veldman 2019, 8), which has been central to the tradition for over a century and key to its appeal in the early twenty-first century. This is a key fault line for political polarization in the United States, with conservative evangelicals and secular liberals polarized about the proper place of religion in political and economic life. As climate change has come to be viewed as a paradigmatically liberal concern, and evangelical identity coalesced more strongly around social and theological conservatism, climate skepticism has become one among an array of decisive issues. In a moment when climate skepticism and oil interests appear ascendant, ideas about religion—including an eschewal of secular liberalism—are leaving traces in the planet’s atmosphere as well as in countless local ecologies impacted by the extraction of oil, gas, and other raw commodities. Similarly, the material interests underpinning oil feed into novel theological paradigms and justificatory regimes that underly fundamentalist evangelicalism.

These works underline that the historical processes that led to contemporary climate change were worked out and articulated in and through the ongoing violences of colonization, which etched new metaphysical orders into the Earth by designating the proper object of reverence and how ecologies ought to be approached, always in locally specific ways. By dwelling on these intertwined histories of climate and religion, it becomes apparent that religion cannot be approached as a stable object whose contents are always already known and pregiven. Contemporary understandings of religion are therefore indebted to the extractive and destructive practices that fueled the climate crisis, and shifting understandings of the religious have literally been imprinted into landscapes around the globe.

Conclusion

For a long time, stories about the role of religion in the climate crisis have tended to invoke two contrasting specters—too much of this type of religion, too little of that. Both of these narratives produce romanticized vignettes of the right kinds of religion, which, it is hoped, might offer total redemption. Recalling the work of Lynn White Jr. reminds us that we ought to think about the relationship between religion, climate, and modernity as many faceted, with multiple genealogies that can be traced, often to unexpected origins. At the same time, while interest in religious language and tropes has risen as philosophers and critics have sought to reimagine how we might reset our relations with the planet, we must remain cautious about uncritically reproducing secular understandings and tropes about disenchantment. What we may take from the diverse strands of post-humanist, neo-vitalist, and new materialist thought, however, is a renewed attention to the ways that the ideal and the material are always intertwined with and inform one another, pushing us to complicate any easy bifurcation between idealist and materialist understandings of religion.

In any dialogue between climate studies and religion, we ought to remain attentive to the ways the construction of the category of religion itself—as well as efforts to purify it—has been central to producing the landscapes we inhabit. Modernist and colonial ideas about religion sought to purify religious life of its “primitive” components and demarcate legitimate sites and forms of religious practice, in the process severing the spiritual ties people had with particular places and materialities. In the same vein, we ought to engage critically with those categories that are dependent upon the semantics of religion for their form, meaning, and content. This includes not only secularism but also those categories emerge through their contrast with religion: superstition, paganism, animism, enchantment, science, nature, to mention a few.

I have suggested that studying climate and religion today ought to involve examining the effects of how ideas about religion and religious ideas have transformed over time, been etched into the surface of the Earth, and manifested in a wide variety of local ways. Both religious ideas and ideas about religion have worked to remake local landscapes and ecologies while cumulatively contributing to climatic change on a planetary scale. It is not any one set of fixed tenets or principles that have led to this moment then but the complex, shifting, and mutually propulsive intertwining of religious ideas—and ideas about religion—with economic, political, and colonial interests, which in turn have created the conditions for new theologies. It is the landscapes made by colonial modernity that provide settings in which novel theological interpretations have been—and might be—articulated. In these landscapes, rigid boundaries between humanity and non-humanity have been naturalized, many parts of the landscape rendered inaccessible, and the heavy exploitation of natural resources normalized. The promise is that while these are the parameters of contemporary reality, they are also the context for and object of novel critiques too. A critical dialogue with climate studies then promises to shed new light on religion, giving us a fuller sense of both its shifting meanings and its endlessly shifting role in constructing the worlds we inhabit.