Religious Literacy Belongs in the Climate Justice Classroom: HDS Alum and Educator Empowers Students by Bringing RPL Frameworks to Life

“Part of our work around solving or responding to the environmental crisis we're facing is understanding the assumptions and the stories that we carry into it,” says Lara Freeman, religious studies teacher at Westtown School outside Philadelphia. Freeman, MTS ‘06, is a former student of Religion and Public Life (RPL) Associate Dean for Religion and Public Life Diane L. Moore and has long incorporated into her classroom the religious literacy method advocated by RPL. 

This year, Freeman was inspired by RPL’s religious literacy and climate resources for educators and is adapting and expanding her environmental justice course to incorporate RPL’s learning tools. This is the fourth iteration of Freeman’s course and demonstrates the collaborative potential between educators and RPL in which RPL and educators learn from each other, building, refining, and improving teaching materials based on mutual expertise.

Central to Freeman’s work is the RPL approach to religion, resting on the assumption that religion is a powerful dimension of the broader human experience. She says, “I focus on ways religion is embedded in assumptions and stories about climate,” a framework that allows her to demonstrate how religious literacy belongs in the environmental justice classroom. 

Staff at RPL who have long worked with educators to incorporate religious literacy into their classrooms began introducing the idea that this framework can be a powerful way into difficult conversations about topics like history, power, and justice. It can introduce new imaginative possibilities and pathways to action that students may not find in a STEM classroom, where climate education is largely concentrated.  

“At this school,” Freeman explains, “many of the students take environmental science, and so they have a lot of scientific narratives. You don't often feel like you can change the trajectory.”  

But Freeman is determined to offer her students new ways to interrogate their narratives about climate because many of them carry dire climate narratives that evoke deeper questions of an existential nature.  

“They carry a story of lacking agency,” she says. “There’s a lot of hopelessness, anxiety, and a feeling that there's nothing we can do.”  

In response, Freeman turned to the Religious Literacy and Climate Justice module, one example of RPL’s work available to educators. The self-paced module looks at the role of religion and religious literacy in the “deep stories” told about climate and explores how examination of those stories can promote critical reflection on power, structural peace, and violence in climate conversations. Asking participants to examine their own narratives about climate change, the module introduces case studies that explore the ways in which religious histories have shaped individual and public narratives about climate and our responses to it.  

While engaging with the module, Freeman realized how important it was for students to be able to name and articulate their own narratives about climate.  

“Undoing that apocalyptic narrative at the beginning is incredibly important . . . Even though the students had been using apocalyptic language in our discussions, they didn't see it in their own personal story,” Freeman says.  

In the next iteration of her class, she plans to have students write down their stories at the beginning of the course. Then, she will help her students uncover ways religion informs, impacts, and imbricates narratives about climate.  

“I try to help students move much further along in noticing the stories they carry,” Freeman explains. “I challenge them to think about whether those are our best stories, if they are creating the world we intend to create, or if we need to rethink some of those dynamics.” 

For Freeman, this means helping students interrogate the way climate change itself is framed. One such re-framing, which comes from the module’s resources, comes from the work of Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, who articulates climate change as a part of a larger story of colonization and the genocide of human lives. For Freeman’s students, reading Ghosh shifted their understanding of the problem we are facing and showed that discourse around climate change need not be limited to techno-scientific explanations.   

Freeman feels that Ghosh also shows how the narratives we carry about climate often come with religiously embedded worldviews. She has found that deep story to be particularly useful in helping students realize one of RPL’s principles of religious literacy: religion is embedded in all aspects of culture.  

Deep story, a phrase coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, describes the emotionally-rooted "feels-as-if" stories that we all tell ourselves to explain our world. For Freeman, “deep story has given my students a way to look for the stories people tell and be active in looking for potential alternatives.”

One of the deep stories about climate that Freeman examined with her students concerns the longstanding entwinement of Christianity and the oil industry in the United States. Using the primary and secondary resources from the Religious Literacy and Climate Justice module, Freeman’s students explored diverse Christian understandings of oil—from visions of oil as a tool to build wealth in the name of Christ to visions of oil as a powerful substance that mimics the mightiness of the divine.  

“It's a moment in the course where the students see how a deep religious story could inform how a whole oil empire is shaped,” she says.

More broadly though, Freeman has found that exposing students to examples of deep stories is an entryway to get students to reflect on their own stories of climate.

“This year I actually had a student ask if we could include a creative piece about where they are from in the class, so I’m taking it up a notch and asking them to record and reflect on their story of place,” she says. “When we start asking analytical questions about our own story . . .  we start finding ourselves in our own deep narratives and we can be more truthful about what we wrote down.”

Freeman hopes that these tools can help students realize that they have agency around climate narratives by complementing deep story analysis with other resources from the RPL module, such as Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, that focuses on cultivating resilience.  

“I think the students really have appreciated that set of readings because it turned toward imagining how they could be part of this movement and not be overwhelmed,” Freeman says.   

While RPL can provide frameworks, resources, and invitations to thought partnership, Freeman shows that the most skillful and imaginative work happens as these materials are brought to life by educators in their particular learning communities.

For example, as the course continues to unfold, Freeman hopes to continue to empower student agency through a local community action project, offering her students ways to think about how they can change their individual carbon footprint and also engage with other people to work towards systemic change.

"By mid-course, they see the injustice and are hungry to know what they can do," Freemans says. "They are earnestly asking, 'How can I be involved? How can I make changes? How do I join with other people?' So, the students took all the frameworks in the course and began rethinking both the school’s and their own response to climate change to create personal plans to apply what they’d learned in our own community.”

Freeman continues, “It was neat to have them have an experience thinking about structural change and being creators. I think it was a powerful experience for a lot of them. There are a lot of great ideas out there that open up possibilities for a world that's more just, and we can all play a part in that.”

Next year, Freeman wants to take that experience a step further by giving her students the opportunity to actually interact with an organization in the community.

“One of the country’s largest waste-to-energy incinerators is about 20 minutes from here, and an organized community group has been working since the ‘90s to shut down the incinerator and keep out other dirty industry.” Freeman says. “They are really open to working with us, and I think it’s an opportunity for the students to experience what agency feels like and how to support an organization that’s already doing tremendous work.”

“I really love this work,” She continues. “I really love thinking about this course, and I'm so grateful to the partnership with RPL because it's helped me keep leaning into making it better. I'm really excited to continue developing the course and am grateful to my students for trying it out, asking good questions, and challenging me.” 

by Elsa Kunz, MTS '23, RPL Graduate Assistant