Nepantla Environmentalism: Challenging Dominant Frameworks for Green Religion

Abstract

Scholarship on religious environmentalism and green religion in the United States has privileged the actions of progressive white activists who view nature through an Enlightenment framework. In response to a call in the 2015 JAAR’s roundtable on climate destabilization and religion to engage in discourse about “the myriad causes and myriad possible solutions to our environmental crisis,” this article examines religious environmentalism from a nondominant perspective. Based on ethnographic research among Latinx churchgoing Catholics in Los Angeles, I have identified a widespread ethic of living lightly on the earth, which I call nepantla environmentalism. It is grounded in an immanent, relational worldview in which God is present in the material and the human-nature boundary is porous. A focus on nepantla environmentalism calls attention to the raced and classed biases embedded in dominant understandings of green religion in the United States. It demonstrates that there are different ways of being a religious environmentalist.