The Religion Counts team looks at at attitudes towards the environment by religious affiliation and practice. 03/07/2024

In a previous briefing paper in the Religion Counts series, we have explored views on some of the most important issues facing the UK at this time. For the past year and a half, the economy, the NHS and immigration – all three of which are discussed in our paper – have ranked highest among all issues. However, another very important question that is competing for fourth place with housing and crime, has been the environment. This briefing paper will be looking at attitudes towards the environment by religious affiliation and practice.

Other previous briefing in this series have looked at turnout, voting intention, civic engagement, social and political values, and national identities and Scottish independence. In all previous papers, we have found that religion – and particularly religious practice – played a role in shaping opinion. We will now look into the importance of religion in defining views on the environment. To do this, we have selected three themes in the British Election Study (BES): burden of environmental protection on the economy, environment budget priorities, and the need for further measures.

The analysis in the article integrates data from waves 23 and 25 of the BES. All the data presented here, unless otherwise specified, are predicted values which were estimated through a series of regressions, in which age, gender, education, religious affiliation, and church attendance were used as independent variables. More information is available in the notes on the data below.

People in the UK are less willing to sacrifice economic growth for environmental protection today than they were five years ago. And only a slim majority of Britons believe that not enough is being done to protect the environment. Of all religious groups, Christians are the least environmentally friendly demographic. However, there is also a clear ‘practice effect’: practising Christians are significantly more environmentally conscious than non–practising Christians. This ‘practice effect’ shows that frequent churchgoers are more likely to engage in eco–friendly behaviour.

The environment versus the economy

The environment and climate change have taken a surprisingly back seat in this General Election campaign. While this is disheartening for the many people who care about the environment, this secondary position is not entirely surprising. Since the ‘climate emergency’ was declared in 2019, the UK government has had to manage Brexit, the Covid–19 pandemic, the impact of the war in Ukraine and the cost of living crisis.

Given the recent economic pressures on the UK public, we decided to look in the first instance into the public’s willingness to change their lifestyle and pay more for the sake of the environment.

The BES uses a ten–point scale to assess to what degree people think the economy or the environment should have priority. This longitudinal analysis comparing five waves of the BES (2015, 2016, 2019, 2022, 2023) uses weighted, descriptive statistics but does not explicitly control for other variables. The scale goes from –5 (‘The economy has priority’) to +5 (‘The environment has priority’). 

Willingness to spend public money on environmental protection is down

Although the magnitude of variation is small, the data shows that Christians have been more protective of the economy than other people in the UK. It also shows that public attitudes on this question have fluctuated considerably over the past nine years, and are now on a downward trend. Whereas in 2015 there was some agreement that economic considerations should give way to environmental – with Muslims and ‘other’ religious Britons in particular tending to be more pro–environment – the following four years see a significant increase in environmental concern, peaking in 2019. Since then, the pro–environmental trend has reversed, and all groups are less willing than they were to pay an economic cost for protecting the environment. Nevertheless, if the population average was slightly more pro–economy in 2015, it is now slightly more pro–environment overall.

The spike in environmental sentiment in 2019 can be explained by several factors, as can the return to something close to a status quo ante since then. 2019 was, according to the UN Foundation, “the year the world began to wake up to climate emergency”. The Word of the Year in 2019, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was “climate emergency”. It was also the year of Greta Thunberg: she was TIME’s Person of the Year, spoke at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (although she ultimately did not win it). In short, climate change was very much on everyone’s mind, as were the devastating images of burning forests and predictions of flooded coastlines. As a result, the public was prepared to make economic sacrifices to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

But as noted above, the UK has since then faced a number of national crises. Consequently, the priorities of the British public have shifted. And as more immediate concerns have taken over the daily lives of the British people, the environment has fallen down the priority list of issues needing to be addressed, and so has the willingness to spend public money on environmental protection. In short, short–term crisis management politics has prevailed over longer term climate and environment issues.

Christians are the least environmentally friendly

We now take a closer look at the views of the UK population in the latest wave of the BES. In this section, we show predicted values that control for age, gender, and education.

As Christians in the UK are, on average, older than the general population, we immediately notice that some of their pro–economic sentiment is due to age; controlling for demographic variables shows a greater willingness among Christians to trade immediate economic growth for protecting the environment. However, Christian groups are still most protective of the economy and least likely to embrace sacrificing economic growth for environmental protection. Among Christians, Roman Catholics and Anglicans are closely clustered around the mid–point of the scale; ‘Other’ Christians are slightly more environment–friendly. The ‘Other’ religious are the only religious group to be more environment–friendly than the population average.

The non–religious are more environmentally friendly than the population average. More surprisingly, they are overtaken by the ‘Other’ religious by a considerable margin. This group includes a sizeable Hindu population, as well as Buddhists and Sikhs, who by virtue of their respective faith traditions have a particular attachment to the environment. This is not to say that this concern is absent from orthodox Christian teaching. However, some of the religious traditions mentioned above invest the environment with a sacred character, a living spirit, that may be absent from many Christian worldviews.

Practicing Christians are more environmentally friendly than non–practising Christians

Frequent religious practice emerges as an important variable. While all never–practising Christians are close to each other on the pro–economic side of the scale, the opposite is true for frequently–practising Christians. The effect is also proportional: each incremental increase in frequency of practice correlates with a willingness to pay a higher economic price for environmental protection. Weekly–practising Anglicans and ‘Other’ Christians hold a view comparable to the national average. Among Christians, this effect is weakest – though still substantial – for Roman Catholics.

Exactly the same dynamic is observed among the ‘Other’ religions and, to some extent, among Muslims. The observed ‘practice effect’ is especially significant for the former.

The environment budget

Downstream from the question of how policy makers manage the trade–offs between environment and economic growth comes the question of how the government should spend its environment budget.

In this second section, we look at which investments Britons believe the government should prioritise under its environment budget. The BES asked respondents how the government should spend its environmental budget by giving them the option of spending more, the same, or less on a list of environmental policies. We have ranked the policies by the proportion of the population who think the government should spend ‘a bit more’ or ‘much more’ on them.

Slowing down carbon emissions is not a priority for Britons

Apart from Muslims, there is widespread agreement that the UK’s environmental budget should focus on investment in flood defences and solar energy farms. Muslims are not in agreement on what investment priorities should be. For ‘Other’ religions the top three includes protecting Britain’s historic forests and woodlands.

The general goal of ‘slowing carbon emissions’ is not particularly well supported. It ranks between protecting Britain’s historic forests and woodlands and keeping Britain’s countryside clean and tidy. Rather, the public in general are more supportive of concrete measures.

The consensus (across all groups) is that the UK’s top priority should be to invest in flood defences. The data does not tell us why this is, but we can make an educated guess: regular flooding events in the UK have increased pressure on government to invest further in flood defences. Melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels are also commonly cited as the main consequences of rising global temperatures. There is an implicit expectation that governments should invest in resilience measures alongside focusing on the long term potential causes of such flood events.

Measures to protect the environment

We have looked at the extent to which environmental protection should be a burden on the economy, and the investment priorities for the environment budget. We now look at how adequate they believe the government’s action have been regarding environmental protection.

The BES asks respondents whether they thought “that measures to protect the environment have gone too far or not far enough?”. We have counted respondents from five waves of the BES (2014, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2023) who think that government measures have not gone far enough. The figures presented in this section use weighted, descriptive statistics that do not control for demographic variables. (Note that the years differ from those used in the previous analysis due to data availability.)

Environmental awareness is up overall among all religious groups

Over the past decade, the share of the population believing that measures to protect the environment have not gone far enough has increased by more than a third, from 40% in 2014 to 54% in 2023. But this is down from 60% in 2019, when the belief that more needs to be done to protect the environment peaked in the UK. So, while numbers have been falling over the past 5 years, they are still up from 2014.

Whereas in 2014, the view that not enough was being done for the environment was a minority view among all groups, nine years later, a majority of non–religious (59%) and ‘Other’ religious (52%) now hold this view. Even among Christians and Muslims, for whom this is not the majority view, the share believing that not enough is being done to protect the environment has increased (by a third for Christians, from 36% in 2014 to 49% today, and by two thirds for Muslims, from 23% in 2014 to 39% today).

It is worth reflecting that this is fairly strong support for a more environmental stance. The non–religious peaked at 63%, the ‘Other’ religious at 59%, Christians at 57%, and Muslims at 51% in 2019.

Just as the willingness to sacrifice economic growth for the sake of the environment has fallen since 2019, so too has the belief that more needs to be done for the environment. The fact that we can measure this downward trend on two variables underlines the correctness of our observation.

Nevertheless, the marked overall increase between 2014 and 2023 is notable. The same forces behind Britons’ greater willingness to sacrifice economic growth for the environment discussed above are likely to be responsible for their overall growing belief that more needs to be done to protect the environment. We should also not underestimate the fact that successive Conservative governments over the past decade have made a number of environmental promises to the British public (such as their ‘net zero’ target), but have subsequently failed to deliver on some of them. The public’s growing belief that more needs to be done may therefore also reflect their growing conviction that the incumbent government’s action in this area has been inadequate.

Only slim majority of Christians think more needs to be done to protect the environment

We now take a closer look at the views of the UK’s religious population in the latest wave of the BES. In this section, we show predicted values that control for age, gender, and education.

Compared with the descriptive data above, we see that controlling for demographic variables has a significant effect on some groups, particularly Muslims and ‘Other’ religious believers. In other words, the strikingly lower level of belief among Muslims that more needs to be done to protect the environment appears to be largely due to demographics. That said, they remain below the UK average.

On the other hand, Christians are not particularly affected by the control for demographic variables. This would suggest that their relatively lower – i.e., below average – belief in the need for more action to protect the environment is not due to the higher average age or level of education of the group, but to something else.

Frequency of practice matters significantly for Christians

Of all religious groups, Christians’ views on the adequacy of government action to protect the environment vary most with frequent attendance. Christians who attend church weekly are more likely to think that measures to protect the environment have not gone far enough (55%) than those who never attend church (49%). This is particularly true of Anglicans and ‘Other’ Christians. The ‘practice effect’ is not significant for Roman Catholics.

However, among the British population as a whole, those who never attend religious services of any kind – a category that includes the non–religious – in the UK (59%) are more likely to think that not enough is being done to protect the environment than those of all faiths who attend services regularly (53%).

Conclusion

We know that the environment is an important issue for voters of all kinds, including the religious. However, questions around cost of living and livelihood have clearly reasserted themselves during the 2019–24 Parliament. Nor it is not yet clear that voters are resolved on how to manage trade–offs between environment and economic growth. In spite of the formal positions of Christian churches on the importance of environmental protection, it is clear that Christians in particular are more likely than the rest of the population to back the economy over environment.

That said, we can clearly see the now familiar ‘practice effect’, where regular religious practice pushes respondents in what might be called a ‘progressive’ direction. Regular practising Christians – indeed, those from any faith who are regularly practicing – are more likely to say that we need more action to protect the environment, compared to their non–practising counterparts. Politicians that want to pursue an environmental agenda could attempt to weave religious communities into a broad coalition supporting climate and environmental action.

Notes on the data

Both the 23rd and 25th waves of the BES data were collected by YouGov from a representative internet panel using an online sample. Unless otherwise stated, all the figures in this briefing paper are standardised predictions estimated from a series of regressions using age, gender, education, religious affiliation, and church attendance as independent variables. Figures are weighted and variables are coded so as to be consistent with previous Theos research on religious voting patterns. Descriptive data are available for consultation on request.

This paper explores the British public’s attitudes to the environment through three different dimensions: environment budget priorities, the burden of environmental protection on the economy, and the need for further measures.

The first part of the paper looked at the UK public’s willingness to trade economic growth for environmental protection. For this, it used the BES question: “Some believe that protecting the environment should have priority even if that reduces economic growth. Others believe that economic growth should have priority even if that hinders protecting the environment. What is your opinion?” Respondents could use a value between 0 (The economy has priority) and 10 (The environment has priority). We changed the scale to –5 to +5; it is more intuitive as negative points indicate economy–friendly answers whereas positive points indicate environment–friendly scores.

Data for the linear analysis in this section looking at the evolution of public attitudes between May 2015 and May 2023 uses descriptive data from waves 4, 7, 16, 23, and 25 of the BES internet panel. All figures are weighted respective to their own waves of collection and percentages are rounded to the nearest unit. Our focussed cross–sectional analysis of the latest available data displays standardised predictions that control for demographic variables.

The second part of the paper looking at environment budget priorities used the BES question “The government spends money on many different things to preserve the environment. Do you think the government should spend more, less or about the same share of its environment budget on each of the following?” Respondents were offered five response options (“Spend much less of its budget”, “Spend a bit less of its budget”, “Spend about the same as now”, “Spend a bit more of its budget”, and “Spend much more of its budget”) for seven distinct environmental investment areas. We dichotomized responses for each budget item at ‘More’ (incl. “A bit more” and “Much more”) vs. all other responses (including “Don’t know”). Investment areas were then ranked in a table by share of the population believing each of these areas need more investment.

The third and last part of the paper looks at the British public’s opinions on the adequacy of government measures regarding environmental protection. It looks at the BES question: “Do you think that measures to protect the environment have gone too far or not far enough?” The response options for this question utilise a 5–point Likert scale: “Not gone nearly far enough”, “Not gone far enough”, “About right”, “Gone too far”, and “Gone much too far”. We dichotomised responses at ‘Not gone (nearly) far enough’ (merging two response options) vs. all other answers (including “Don’t know”).

Unlike for the first part of the paper, data for the linear analysis in this section looks at the evolution of public attitudes between May 2014 and May 2023 and uses descriptive data from waves 2, 7, 14, 18, and 25 of the BES internet panel. All figures are weighted respective to their own waves of collection and percentages are rounded to the nearest unit. The focussed cross–sectional analysis of the latest available data displays standardised predictions that control for demographic variables.

On Theos’ ‘Religion Counts’ series

This blog is part of a larger body of work including briefing papers and articles exploring the impact of religion on voting patterns in the UK.

The first briefing paper: Do the religious vote? which examines whether voters from different religions backgrounds are more or less likely to vote.

The second briefing paper: Who do the religious vote for? looks at data on party preference – which parties are people from various religious backgrounds likely to vote for?

The third briefing paper: Do the religious feel like they can make a difference? which explores political efficacy, social trust, and political trust amongst religious participants.

The fourth briefing paper: Economic and Social Values which maps the economic and social attitudes of religious groups in Britain.  

The fifth briefing paper: What do the religious think about key election issues? which breaks down how religious people in Britain feel about the most important issues facing the UK.

The sixth briefing paper: National Identity and Scottish Independenceexplores what religious people think about national identity.

Learn more about our Religion Counts work here.

Could you help uncover the impact faith can make in this election year by giving to our Religion Counts election appeal?