From Hermeneutic Roots to Neurocognitive Reach: Charting the Methodological Landscape of Religious Environmentalism

ABSTRACT

Religion, long considered a domain of the metaphysical and moral guidance, has increasingly become a subject of ecological reflection and activism. From climate change to biodiversity loss, religious communities are increasingly engaging with ecological issues. Using an exploratory approach, this paper provides an overview of the dynamic and rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field of religious environmentalism through three core lenses: hermeneutic interpretation of sacred texts, social scientific analysis of religiously motivated environmental attitudes and behaviours, and psychological inquiry into cognitive frameworks and moral emotions that shape environmental concern. We illustrate the distinct insights and limitations of each approach in understanding religious engagement with ecological issues. We additionally look at the adoption of existing experimental approaches and propose a neuroscientific outlook to enrich existing conceptual and methodological frameworks, offering new pathways for exploring the complex interface between religious values and ecological actions. We conclude by conceptualising an integrative methodological framework that allows for different interdisciplinary methods such as bidirectional sequential exploratory design, convergent parallel design or nested design to be applied depending on the objectives of research. The integrated framework is proposed as an epistemic tool for researchers in religion and ecology to expand their methodologies to contribute to a more robust and comprehensive understanding of the complex topic of religious environmentalism. In addition to the scientific third‐person objective approaches captured by the integrated framework, the case is made for future research to embrace the first‐person subjective approach to better capture the full range of individual experiences and ontologies that motivate religious environmental consciousness.