Religion and Climate Change Indifference: Linking the Sacred to the Social
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study seeks to identify the influence of religion on indifference toward anthropogenic climate change. This influence is conceptualized by adapting Durkheim's classic sociological model where religion serves to integrate individuals into society using sacred beliefs. We test this theory by conceptualizing and estimating a path model where climate change indifference is regressed on religion and political ideology. The study data are five cross sections from the General Social Survey over 1993 to 2018, and the results indicate indirect and direct effects of religion on climate change indifference. Second, the effects vary across religious traditions and biblical belief sets, and in some cases are oppositional. The study results are discussed in terms of religious influences on salient social questions during prior periods of US history. Finally, we describe how indifference toward the threat of climate change results from a blending of politics and religion and reflects the specific concepts that integrate individuals into a community. These conceptions have become embedded within fundamental relationships concerning how individuals understand their existential connection to a community. Because religious concepts are socially influenced, and because communities are free to reinterpret belief systems, the current relation between religious belief and climate change indifference is subject to future revision and re-interpretation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".