Engaging with Climate Grief, Guilt, and Anger in Religious Communities
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Dynamics of Climate Emotions
2.1. Guilt
2.2. Grief
2.3. Anger
2.4. Empathy and Care
3. Paradigm for Engaging with Climate Emotions
- Climate emotions can be linked with the well-being of members of the (religious) community. This is greatly impacted by the socio-ecological context. Some people already face much more dire consequences of the climate crisis.
- Climate emotions are related to ethical imperatives around climate issues. For example, guilt, anger, and sadness are all connected with issues related to responsibility and the losses that have already taken place.
3.1. Working with One’s Own Emotions
- What climate emotions do I recognize feeling? When and why?
- Are there bodily sensations that I find difficult to link with certain emotions? Who and what could help me in developing my skills of recognition and somatic methods?
- What kinds of attitudes do I have in relation to various emotions and climate emotions? Do I think that certain emotions are better than others? If so, which ones, and why? What could an emotion-positive attitude (Greenspan 2004) look like for me?
3.2. Exploring the Various Forms and Dynamics of Climate Emotions
- What climate emotions are often closely connected in my experiences? How do these emotions affect each other?
- When I think of people close to me, what about the same dynamics?
- Do I notice trajectories of climate emotions? Moving from a primary emotion to a secondary reactive one? Or just common cycles of emotions?
- When I or people close to me think of a certain climate emotion, what kind of intensity do they basically have in mind? Is there room for various levels of intensities?
3.3. Contextualizing Climate Emotions in the Community
- What kinds of factors impact the climate emotions of people I work or live with?
- What kinds of issues of climate (in)justice are present? Is there injustice about climate emotions themselves? (For the latter point, “emotional injustice” related to the climate crisis, see Verlie 2024).
- How have people’s experiences and their socio-economic status influenced the ways in which they experience climate emotions and react to them? (e.g., Crandon et al. 2022) Have they experienced direct impacts of climate change, including natural disasters intensified by global warming? (see Swain 2020; Ramsay and Manderson 2011; Chen et al. 2020).
3.4. Supporting Constructive Engagement with Climate Emotions Via Various Methods (e.g., Action, Rituals, Spiritual Practices)
- What do I think about “way of action” and “way of non-action” as possibilities for engaging with climate emotions? Does my spiritual community participate in both, or only one of these? What would be the possibilities?
- Are there current practices in my spiritual community that are helpful for engaging with climate emotions?
- How could existing practices be modified or adapted into new ones so that various climate emotions could be better engaged with?
4. Climate Guilt and Religious Communities
4.1. Challenges and Dynamics of Climate Guilt (and Shame)
Sergio buys a new phone and feels glad, but at the same time he remembers the carbon cost of the production of the phone and feels slightly guilty. He starts downloading new apps and suppresses the guilt.
Maria takes a flight after a while. On the plane, she feels both excitement about the travel and guilt for the climate emissions. She also remembers global inequity, and her flight guilt mingles with her guilt of being a part of the more affluent population who can travel. She makes a decision to pay more carbon offsets.
Lee and Huang watch a nature documentary about a coral reef, which is being destroyed by climate change. They feel shame about being part of a human race who has not been able to change its ways of life. Huang, a committed Christian, wonders whether God will forgive humanity for its ecological sins.
4.2. Tasks and Skills of Engaging with Climate Guilt and Shame
4.2.1. Working with One’s Own Climate Guilt and Shame
- How do I personally evaluate climate guilt? Do I think that it is useful? Are there differences between the usefulness of it in various situations? Are some forms of climate guilt more constructive than others?
- What about climate shame and these same questions?
- Do I personally feel ecological guilt and/or climate guilt? If so, when and in what forms?
- How do I react to ecological guilt and/or climate guilt? And how do I react to guilt-provoking situations in general?
- What coping methods do I personally prefer in relation to climate guilt and shame? How do my preferences for these methods affect my views about how others should respond to climate guilt and/or shame?
4.2.2. Exploring the Various Forms of Climate Guilt and Shame
- What kinds of issues evoke climate guilt and/or shame in the members of my community? And what levels of intensities do these various feelings have? How do people generally react to them?
- Are there people in my community who do not feel any climate guilt even if they should? Are there people who practice climate disavowal or even denial, and what could be the relation of dynamics of guilt and shame to that?
- Are there people in my community who are feeling overly strong burdens of eco-guilt or shame? How much do these people over-individualize structural problems? What are the psychological and spiritual needs generated by this?
4.2.3. Contextualizing Climate Guilt and Shame
- What kinds of factors impact the various forms of climate guilt and shame in the community and people’s reactions to these feelings? For example, how are different backgrounds and professions related to this?
- When analyzed from the point of view of ethics and socio-political analysis, how much climate guilt and/or shame is relevant to be felt by the various members of my community?
- What needs do people have behind their climate emotions, and how could these be engaged with?
4.2.4. Supporting Constructive Engagement with Climate Guilt and Shame
- Speaking about the complexities of climate guilt, culpability, and responsibility (for guidelines, see Bryan 2024; Oziewicz 2024). Simply speaking from the heart about this complexity and implicity can help (see the reflections in Ward 2020). Naturally, in the long run, actions of reparation are needed too. Talking directly about psychosocial phenomena such as “the double bind of sustainable consumption,” “the hippie-hypocrite paradox,” and “scapegoat ecology” can help people to react to them more constructively.
- Providing opportunities for confessing climate guilt (cf. “ecological sins”), but avoiding problematic uses of the word “we” (Oziewicz 2024; Mihai and Thaler 2023). Religious communities often use a very universalizing “we” in ecological confessions: a typical example is “we have laid waste the good earth you have made” (The Anglican Church of Australia n.d.). Who exactly is this “we” when it is known that 71 percent of the climate emissions since 1988 have been produced by only 100 companies? (Riley 2017) Confessions should use language that recognizes culpability but also situates it in the global context (Malcolm 2020b).
- Using symbolic, material objects to help people engage with climate guilt and shame. Powell (Powell 2019) has analyzed an interesting example of this. The California-based Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries employs ecological shame and climate shame creatively in its spiritual practice and leadership. The leaders of this organization make these feelings manifest materially: for example, they have used as an altar a burned tree stump from wildfires made more intense by climate change. They also explicitly link climate shame with the whole collective, including the leaders. Powell argues that these kinds of methods help the members of the community both to encounter difficult emotions and to increase their moral motivation for ecological action.
- Bringing out the connections between climate grief and guilt (see also Prade-Weiss 2021); talking about how guilt and shame can prevent grieving; pointing out that ecological confessions can include both guilt and grief—grieving the wrongdoings; and discussing the reasons for moral outrage in climate matters, in addition to guilt and grief.
- Many of the things above are, to use terms from Greenspan, “ways of non-action.” Ecological guilt and shame can be engaged with by various kinds of action, either implicitly or explicitly. The motivation to engage in public witness can be linked with counteremotions of climate guilt and shame: pointing out that it is honorable to do our part.
5. Climate Grief and Religious Communities
5.1. Principles of Environmental Commemoration
5.2. Tasks and Skills of Engaging with Climate Grief
5.2.1. Working with One’s Own Climate Grief
- What is my general attitude towards grief and sadness?
- Have I experienced sadness or grief in relation to environmental changes? If so, what kind?
- Am I using coping methods in relation to climate grief or sadness? If so, what kind? Are there benefits and challenges in the usage of these methods?
5.2.2. Exploring the Various Forms of Climate Sadness and Grief
- What kinds of climate change-related loss and grief do people in my religious community experience?
- What forms of loss and grief are difficult for me to encounter and why? Do I have some special strengths in encountering some of them?
- Are there spiritual losses interconnected with ecological losses?
5.2.3. Contextualizing Climate Grief and Sadness
- What are the wider stories behind climate grief and sadness of the members of the community?
- What kinds of factors shape people’s feelings and their reactions to these feelings?
5.2.4. Supporting Constructive Engagement with Climate Sadness and Grief
- Helping the religious community to develop a grief-positive attitude (Greenspan 2004): understanding the important functions of grief and being aware of possible depression and “complicated grief” (Pihkala 2024d; Comtesse et al. 2021).
- Framing climate grief as a religious issue (e.g., Malcolm 2020a) and understanding its spiritual dimensions (e.g., Weller 2015).
- Providing help in naming and recognizing various forms of climate grief and sadness.
- Exploring various terms that might help people of different ages to engage with climate loss and grief. For example, older people may find concepts such as “climate grief” unfamiliar, even when they feel related loss (Dennis and Stock 2023).
- Helping people to observe dynamics of their loss and grief experiences and providing information about how to engage with these dynamics. For example, observing possible dynamics of ambiguous loss and engaging with counseling literature about how to deal with ambiguous loss (e.g., Boss 2022).
- Providing psychoeducation about the need for grieving, rest, and action in the context of climate grief (see the process model offered by Pihkala 2022b). If action is the only channel for grieving, there is a significant risk for complications in the long run (e.g., Hickman 2023).
- Engaging with both past and anticipated losses with spiritual practices such as liturgy, laments, prayers, and memorials (e.g., Hessel-Robinson 2012; Lambelet 2020; Bauman 2014). Furthermore, it would be marvelous if transitional losses (Pihkala 2024d; Rosemary Randall 2009) could also be engaged with.
- Exploring possible rituals for climate grief with “ritual creativity” (for the idea, see Grimes 2013; for applying it to ecological grief, see Weller 2015; T. Johnson 2017).
- In rituals: paying tribute to what has been, perhaps by letting go of something, and orienting towards something new. The frameworks of re-learning the world (Attig 2015) and meaning reconstruction (Neimeyer 2019; Neimeyer and Burke 2015; Neimeyer 2016, 2022) offer insights for this.
- Offering at least information about peer groups and facilitated sessions where climate grief and sadness can be safely discussed, such as The Good Grief Network (Schmidt 2023; Good Grief Network 2021) and The Work that Reconnects (Macy and Brown 2014; Work That Reconnects Network 2024). Consider organizing “Climate Cafés,” “Climate circles,” or other safe spaces for this (Broad 2024).
- Way of action: channeling climate grief into climate action with the help of climate anger or determination (Salamon 2020; Kelsey 2020). Please note, however, that it may not be safe to be vulnerable with climate grief in a public space, and safe spaces for climate mourning are needed in addition to integrations of grief and action (for discussion, see Skrimshire 2019; Brewster 2020; de Massol de Rebetz 2020).
6. Climate Anger and Religious Communities
6.1. Varieties of Climate Anger
- Lisa watches in astonishment as the prime minister of her country disavows climate change in his speech. She is filled with moral outrage and enrolls in an Extinction Rebellion street blockade next week.
- Max is a member at a church council meeting where energy options are discussed. He feels growing annoyance and anger when listening to another member who speaks on behalf of continuing to use coal instead of investing in renewables. Max almost lashes out at the man in his own speech but manages to practice mindfulness and tones his message into non-violent communication, searching for ways to make a better decision together. His anger keeps burning in the form of determination inside him.
6.2. Tasks and Skills of Engaging with Climate Anger
6.2.1. Working with One’s Own Climate Anger
- How do I evaluate anger and rage in general? Do I think of them mainly as vices, or do I see some virtue in them?
- How do my own personal history and my temperament affect my views about anger and its varieties?
- Have I personally felt moral outrage in relation to climate change? If so, when? Where did these feelings lead me?
- How do I react to various forms of eco-anger or climate rage among people I encounter?
- How does my religious and cultural background affect my attitude towards (climate) anger?
6.2.2. Exploring the Various Forms of Climate Anger
- Which kinds of eco-anger or climate rage exist in my community? What are the objects and intensities? You can consult the MindWorks anger guide (Flothmann 2023) (Figure 3) for quick reference. Are there people who suffer from restricted anger?
- How do people in my community usually react to (climate) anger? Do they differentiate between various kinds of anger and anger responses? Are there people who react to climate issues with problematic or even toxic forms of anger?
- How do I react to the various kinds of anger and anger reactions that people express, and why? What could be constructive ways forward?
6.2.3. Contextualizing Climate Anger
6.2.4. Supporting Constructive Engagement with Climate Anger
- Providing a religious framing of anger as a virtue and not just a vice, while warning about the unethical potentials in anger: in other words, raising up the importance of constructive anger or “Lordean rage” (Bergman 2023; Cherry 2021). There are resources in various religions for these interpretations. For example, in a Christian context, Chase (Chase 2011a, 2011b) connects the story of Jesus getting angry in the temple with the need for moral outrage in relation to environmental issues (for Buddhist resources, see McRae 2018).
- Practicing lament, which can include both grief, guilt, and/or moral outrage. Many ancient laments speak on behalf of the oppressed, asking how long they have to suffer. Climate lament offers powerful possibilities to engage with many climate emotions at the same time (e.g., Brocker 2016; Malcolm 2020b).
- The simplest way to provide events that help channel climate anger is the way of action. This connection can and perhaps should be voiced: working for structural change and against injustices is a way of manifesting constructive climate anger (e.g., Moe-Lobeda 2013; A. E. Johnson and Wilkinson 2020). For example, demonstrations offer possibilities to vent anger out somatically (e.g., Landmann and Naumann 2024). As regards the way of non-action and rituals, it is worth asking the following: Could there be ritualistic, symbolic events that help in engaging constructively with anger? It is easy to think of such events and practices for guilt and grief, but what could they be like for anger? (For discussion, see Rebecca Randall 2023).
7. Conclusions
Funding
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
1 | There is growing recognition in both research and public discussion that the affective dimensions of climate crisis need more attention (e.g., Brosch and Sauter 2023; Cunsolo et al. 2020; Voşki et al. 2023). However, there is still great variation about the levels of this recognition in different contexts and discourses, and there are often social disputes about climate emotions. That was to be expected, because both the topics of (a) emotions in culture and (b) the climate crisis are so loaded. Feeling rules and emotion norms are a major part in power dynamics related to the climate crisis (e.g., Neckel and Hasenfratz 2021; González-Hidalgo and Zografos 2020). Some feelings and emotions have been suppressed or repressed by powerful social actors, and other feelings have been endorsed as normatively correct responses to the crisis (for normativity of climate emotions, see Mosquera and Jylhä 2022). For example, it is typical that climate grief has been suppressed or disenfranchised (Pihkala 2024d). Scholarship in affect theory and cultural politics of emotion has rightly criticized the normative uses of power in relation to “climate affect” (e.g., Verlie 2022). |
2 | There are also religious communities that distance themselves from any engagement with environmental and/or climate issues, and these are not discussed here, except for mentioning the possibility that such distancing can also be a negative coping method in relation to climate guilt and anxiety (Pihkala 2024e). |
3 | A methodological note about concepts: The choice of which concepts to use is a challenging one in relation to climate emotions/affect/feelings. In this article, the choice is made to use the concept “emotion” as a general term, reflecting common tendencies in related research (for discussion, see Pihkala 2022c; Hamilton 2020). However, it should be noted that sadness, guilt, and anger include manifestations that are well captured by affect theories (Gregg and Seigworth 2010) and by the use of the concept of feeling: there are both conscious and unconscious instances of them, and temporally both short and long manifestations of them. In scholarship, often the wording “climate emotions” is used as a general term for the whole field that others call “climate affect” or “climate feelings” (Pihkala 2022c; Hamilton 2020, 2022). There are important questions to be addressed in relation to theories and uses of concepts, but for the purpose of this article, the most significant fact is that there are indeed various kinds of manifestations of these emotions. |
4 | |
5 | Various concepts and theories can be utilized to understand interconnections between emotions. Emotion philosopher Rinofner-Kreidl (Rinofner-Kreidl 2016) uses the concept of “interlaced emotions” to point out that emotions may be intimately interconnected (see also McLaren 2010). The context of her discussion is, relevantly to this article, grief. For trajectories between emotions, an approach called Emotion-Focused Therapy (Elliott and Greenberg 2021) often utilizes a distinction between primary emotions and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are the first reactions to a situation, and secondary reactive emotions may be generated in response to that situation or to the primary emotion (Elliott and Greenberg 2021, pp. 35–36). For example, a person may first feel anger, but because of social conditioning, she may feel that she should not be angry and ends up feeling shame because of her anger. For example in Finland, women have often been socialized into being ashamed of their anger, and this has impacted people’s climate emotions (for a case example, see Leukumaavaara 2019). There may be various kinds of primary and secondary emotion dynamics in relation to climate matters, and it is important to try to observe these. |
6 | The RAIN method was originally named by Michele McDonald, but it has been made famous by another Buddhist meditation teacher: psychologist and author Tara Brach. Originally, the last phase, “N,” stood for “non-identification,” but Brach wanted to give more emphasis on compassion and remove confusion about what non-identification actually meant (Brach 2019, pp. 246–47). The RAIN method has become rather well-known, and it has been proposed to be used for climate emotions by several authors (Ray 2020; Salamon 2020). Psychotherapist and author Miriam Greenspan wrote an influential book about “dark emotions” in 2004, already then discussing how environmental issues cause distress and various emotions (Greenspan 2004). Currently, her work is much less known than Brach’s and RAIN, but it has influenced contemporary eco-emotion research (e.g., Pihkala 2018). |
7 | The highly nuanced model of various valences developed by scholars Bellocchi and Turner (Bellocchi and Turner 2019) is very useful in this regard, for it helps in realizing the many ways in which valence can be attributed. Possible grounds for evaluating valences include, for example, ethical views, pleasure or displeasure when feeling the emotion, the role of the emotion in relation to reaching some practical goal, and the social consequences related to either avoidance or manifestation of the emotion. Awareness of these kinds of factors aids in understanding the dynamics of people’s emotional responses and their attitudes about those. For example, there are people who valence climate guilt as very valuable and people who valence it as something unjust, and many psychosocial, cultural, and political dynamics influence these evaluations (Aaltola 2021; Fredericks 2021). |
8 | |
9 | Measures of religious coping, such as the RCOPE (e.g., Pargament et al. 2000), can be used to explore variations in reactions to climate guilt, but as Pihkala (Pihkala 2024e) argues, these measures need critical adaptation when applied to eco-emotions. |
10 | Fredericks (2021) engages in an in-depth discussion of when and how it would be ethical to evoke environmental guilt and/or shame (see also Jacquet 2015; Aaltola 2021). She also provides useful distinctions about individual and collective types of ecological guilt and shame, since these can be felt in various forms: individuals about themselves, individuals about other individuals in their group or about the group as a whole, or the group about the whole group (see esp. chapter 3 and tables 3.5. and 3.6 in her book). |
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RAIN (Brach 2019) | Seven Steps of Emotional Alchemy (Greenspan 2004) |
---|---|
Recognize | 1. Intention: Focusing your spiritual will |
Allow | 2. Affirmation: Developing an emotion-positive attitude |
Investigate | 3. Bodily sensation: Sensing, soothing, and naming emotions |
Nurture | 4. Contextualization: Telling a wider story |
5. The way of non-action: Befriending what hurts | |
6. The way of action: Social action and spiritual service | |
7. Transformation: The way of surrender (flow) |
Task |
---|
1. Working with one’s own emotions 2. Exploring the various forms and dynamics of climate emotions 3. Contextualizing climate emotions in the community 4. Supporting constructive engagement with climate emotions via various methods (e.g., action, rituals, spiritual practices) |
Multispecies Justice |
Responsibility |
Pluralism |
Dynamism |
Anticlosure |
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Pihkala, P. Engaging with Climate Grief, Guilt, and Anger in Religious Communities. Religions 2024, 15, 1052. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091052
Pihkala P. Engaging with Climate Grief, Guilt, and Anger in Religious Communities. Religions. 2024; 15(9):1052. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091052
Chicago/Turabian StylePihkala, Panu. 2024. "Engaging with Climate Grief, Guilt, and Anger in Religious Communities" Religions 15, no. 9: 1052. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091052