RT Article
T1 Distortive Assumptions in the Literature on White’s Thesis: Toward Theologically Sensitive Measures of Dominion and Stewardship Ideology
JF Journal of psychology and theology
VO 51
IS 1
SP 102
OP 121
A1 Brown, Caleb
A1 Volk, Fred
A1 Wallsgrove, Richard
LA English
PB Sage Publishing
YR 2023
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1835663044
AB Since Lynn White’s 1967 discussion of Christianity and environmentalism, numerous quantitative sociological studies have attempted to assess whether White’s historical claim is born out in Christians’ current perspectives. These studies do so in large part by assessing Christians’ dominion and stewardship tendencies, about which they make two assumptions: (1) dominion ideology is inherently anti-environmental and (2) dominion and stewardship ideologies are opposed.Many Christians reject these assumptions, a fact we demonstrate by surveying Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and North American Evangelical sources. Each of these discourses, in clear contradistinction to the quantitative sociological literature, portray dominion as leading to self-sacrificial stewardship of creation, all of which is considered intrinsically valuable.Taking a 2015 study of Christians in Nigeria as a case-study, we demonstrate that this conflict between a) the perspectives assumed in the quantitative literature and b) the perspectives held by many Christians leads to a forced and distortive portrayal of these Christians’ dominion and stewardship perspectives. Finally, we propose ways of measuring dominion and stewardship perspectives that, while not devoid of assumptions, are flexible enough for Christians to register a variety of competing understandings of these concepts.
K1 theologically oriented articles
K1 psychology of religion
K1 philosophical integration
K1 measurement/assessment of religion/spirituality
K1 Fundamentalism
DO 10.1177/00916471211068044