With the official release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, it’s clear that several strains of thought prominent in the United States will be particularly challenged by the document. That includes U.S. individualists who tend to support limited government and fewer environmental restrictions and those who perceive a strong conflict between science and religion.
The pope’s entire case for caring for “our common home,” as he puts it, is moral. And the precise moral worldview being articulated — what might be called communitarianism, the idea that we’re all in it together — deeply challenges an individualistic value system that research suggests is quite prevalent in the United States. In several places in the text, the pope explicitly critiques “individualism.”
At the same time, the document represents a mega-merger of religious faith and a vast amount of carefully researched scientific information — challenging the conflict-focused way that so many Americans have been conditioned to think about the relationship between science and religion.
In essence, the pope rolls science and faith into a comprehensive statement about our global, common responsibility to address the planet’s vulnerability.
Let’s take the two key points in turn:
American individualism. The United States, says Dutch social psychologist and intercultural researcher Geert Hofstede, is “one of the most Individualist … cultures in the world.” Individualism, as defined by Hofstede, is “a preference for a loosely knit social framework in which individuals are expected to take care of only themselves and their immediate families.”
There are many benefits to individualism in that it drives people to strive to succeed and allows them to choose their own paths and innovate to achieve their goals.
In the context of the pope’s encyclical, though, what matters is how such an outlook also helps to explain why we have such conflicts over collective environmental problems such as climate change. For instance, numerous studies have found strong links between manifestations of individualism — such as free market beliefs and libertarian values — and the denial of global warming or the perception that it isn’t a very serious problem.
That includes the research of Yale law professor Dan Kahan, whose “cultural cognition” model divides people’s moral values along two axes — one running from very hierarchical to very egalitarian and the other from very individualistic to very communitarian.
Kahan’s model maps possible worldviews using four quadrants, based on where they lie on the hierarchical-egalitarian and individualist-communitarian spectra then takes note of what kinds of issues people in the different quadrants tend to view as “high risk” and “low risk”:
In the context of U.S. politics, we’re used to watching hierarchical individualists (typically Republicans) and egalitarian communitarians (typically Democrats) clash along both moral axes. But the pope is a different blend from what we’re used to. “The Pope is hierarch communitarian,” Kahan says by e-mail. “No doubt about that.” In this analysis, Francis lies in the top right quadrant of Kahan’s diagram. Yes, he’s pro-life, but he’s also an environmental activist.
The communitarian side lies at the heart of the pope’s current environmental endeavor and his call to address a global, collective problem — global warming — and to focus, in particular, on how it harms those who are most vulnerable.
Francis is critiquing individualism — especially at its extremes.
Now on to science and religion seen in conflict. At the same time, from the Scopes Trial to the stem cell dilemma, we are also a country that has seen major discord between science and religion — and has, thus, been conditioned to see them as in conflict. It’s a perception shared by many religious believers and many atheists or nonbelievers.
While perceptions of conflict are especially focused on the teaching of evolution, they extend into matters of reproductive health and the environment.
Pope Francis is having none of that. “Science and religion, with their distinctive approaches to understanding reality, can enter into an intense dialogue fruitful for both,” Francis writes.
“The catechism of the church is very clear on that,” Catholic Ecology blog writer Bill Patenaude says. “Faith and reason are not opposed to one another. They are the two strands of the DNA of Catholic intellectual thought.”
In sum, here we have a leader of one of the world’s dominant faiths articulating — and coming soon to the United States to articulate further — a vision in which science and faith are partners in a communal quest to protect the vulnerable from the rampant profit motive and exploitation of Earth.
For U.S. individualists and science-religion battlers, that is serious cause for contemplation — which, perhaps most of all, is what Francis’ encyclical is asking of us.
