Conceptualising God in Nature: Empirically Testing Conceptions of God-Nature Overlap in Dialogue with Christian Ecotheology

Christian theology has been critiqued from an ecological perspective for desacralising the natural world. This desacralisation, it is proposed, leads to a conceptual separation between God and nature, which ultimately devalues the natural world, leading to exploitative environmental attitudes. In response, some Christian ecotheologians have advocated for the notion that God permeates the natural world. In keeping with the ‘Greening of Religion’ hypothesis, we provide empirical scrutiny of the intuition that conceptions of God/Nature overlap relate to environmentalism. In two studies, we found only two significant correlations between differing conceptualisations of God/Nature overlap and several published scales on pro-environmental attitudes and intentions. This null result calls into question the long-standing notion that conceptualising God as overlapping with Nature inevitably leads to pro-environmentalism. Instead, consistent with previous literature, we conclude that conceptualising the Self as psychologically close to Nature is a far more robust positive predictor of environmentalism.