Faith as a driver of climate commitment

Uppsala University

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"We believe in Life before death" sign at a climate demonstration i Cape Town, May 2023

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Credit: Sofia Oreland, Uppsala University

The climate crisis is not just a physical reality, but is also an existential challenge. A doctoral thesis in theology presents a new picture of climate activists: those who are motivated by their faith and who believe that religious faith and suffering in the world cannot be separated. The study is based on interviews with activists in Sweden and South Africa, from pastors and priests to grassroots activists, churchwardens, lobbyists and climate strikers.

Doctoral thesis

Despite global scientific consensus that rapid and far-reaching societal changes are needed to address the climate crisis, solutions are slow to come in the political and societal arenas. The gap between insight and action has caused increasing numbers of researchers to take an interest in factors other than the technical and scientific. What role do world views, value systems, norms and cultural ideas have to play in ongoing climate efforts?

An existential challenge

“The climate crisis is not just a physical reality, but is also an existential challenge,” says Sofia Oreland. “How are people to live, hope and act in times that are marked by the consequences of climate change? In my research on climate activists, I see that the combination of climate science and religious faith can be particularly fruitful for them. The science gives knowledge about the extent of the crisis, while faith contributes meaning, hope for the future and motivation to act.”

In a new doctoral thesis, Oreland has explored the constructive and motivating role that religious faith can play in the climate transition and in managing consequences of the climate crisis that are already with us.

Spirituality gives hope and motivation

The thesis is based on qualitative interviews with a total of 21 faith-based climate activists in Sweden and South Africa. They range from pastors and priests to grassroots activists, churchwardens, lobbyists and climate strikers. Christian activists are in the majority, but in the South African context, Muslims and interreligious activists have also been interviewed, as well as activists belonging to the Khoisan indigenous people. The participants have been chosen because of their public advocacy of more vigorous climate policies, and because of the way they have reflected on the relationship between their climate activism and their religious faith.

The thesis shows how religious faith can complement climate science. While the science often gives rise to climate anxiety and worry about the future, spirituality and faith offer hope, meaning and motivation for continued action. 

Gap between standpoints and practical opportunities

Several of the Swedish activists in the study are members of the Church of Sweden or the Uniting Church in Sweden (Equmeniakyrkan), for example. They perceive a gap between the churches’ theological standpoints on the climate issue and the possibility of pursuing climate action in their congregation. This makes it easier to pursue a commitment to climate issues in secular networks than in Christian congregations. Climate activism becomes an important arena for finding a new direction that creates opportunities for a more sustainable life, not just in terms of lifestyle choices but also in relation to nature, other people and God. Here faith becomes a key resource for daring to change direction. 

As Oreland describes it, the South African activists have more extensive access to historical and organisational resources. In particular, the inheritance from faith-based anti-apartheid activism offers well-trodden paths that current climate activists can follow. Church networks and environmental organisations also provide better opportunities for political advocacy in the South African context. 

Religious faith and suffering in the world are bound up together

The thesis shows that it is above all the experience of a spiritual relationship with God, other people, nature and past generations that gives strength and direction to the climate commitment. A sense of relationship is more important than specific theological doctrines. Having said that, the activists are united by a central theological imperative: religious faith and suffering in the world cannot be separated. Being a believer therefore also means being committed to climate issues.

“The activists stand on a foundation of climate science, but it is their religious faith that offers both existential and practical tools in the age of climate crisis: hope beyond the often gloomy forecasts of the science, narratives of meaning and responsibility that make it possible to continue to act despite fear and uncertainty,” says Oreland.

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Method of Research

Case study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Pathfinding amid climate catastrophe: Faith-based activists in South Africa and Sweden

 

"Your voice has power" Demonstration in Cape Town, May 2023

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Sofia Orehed, Uppsala University

 

Contemplation and political protest were combined during the Pilgrim's Walk for Future, which went from Vadstena, Sweden, to the UN climate negotiations in Glasgow in 2021.  

The St. Birgitta pilgrimage routes to/from Vadstena is very famous. Saint Birgitta worked for peace and reconciliation in Europe and founded the Bridgettine Order. She had great care for the poor, and her spiritual revelations have had a significant impact on Christianity. After her death, pilgrims have journeyed to the Monastery Church in Vadstena, where her relics are preserved.

https://stbirgittaways.com/the-story-of-st.-birgitta

Sofia Oreland, PhD Theology, Department of Theology, Uppsala University, 

Credit

Mikael Wallerstedt/Uppsala University

Kashmir: Belonging, Conditional

Zahid Sultan , Anusreeta Dutta | 

17 Feb 2026

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What it means to live as a permanent suspect.

KASHMIR IS INDIA'S GAZA

File Photo

I am a Kashmiri Muslim. That sentence alone now carries a burden that it did not always carry in this country. It no longer simply names a place or a faith; it marks a condition -- one of explanation, suspicion, and permanent audition. Every time I step outside the Valley, I am reminded that my citizenship is not assumed. It is examined. It is tested. It is sometimes demanded in the language of slogans, sometimes in the language of threats, and often in silence that waits for me to falter.

For Kashmiri students, artisans, and those who leave home only to earn a living, this is no longer exceptional. It is routine. You are stopped at stations, questioned about identity documents no one else is asked to show, warned about how you should speak, what you should avoid saying, and increasingly, what you must say. Patriotism is no longer inferred from conduct or civic belonging; it is extracted through performance. Chanting has become a substitute for citizenship. Refusal is treated not as choice, but as provocation.

The demand to chant slogans like “Jai Shri Ram” or “Vande Mataram” is rarely framed as violence by those who impose it. It is presented as something lighter -- a gesture, a courtesy, a harmless affirmation. But anyone who has lived at the receiving end knows better. This is not about affection for the nation. It is about power. It is about who gets to decide the terms on which ‘belonging’ is granted. When refusal is followed by threats, beatings, or public humiliation, the real meaning of the demand becomes unmistakable, which is obedience masquerading as patriotism.

“Vande Mataram” occupies a particular place in this discourse. Its defenders insist that it is merely a national song, emptied of context and history. But history does not empty itself so easily. The song emerges from Anand Math, a novel that does not hide its hostility toward Muslims. The Muslim figure in that novel is not a fellow inhabitant of the land but an obstacle to be overcome, an enemy to be defeated. This is not an incidental detail; it is the moral architecture of the text. To ask Muslims to sing this song without acknowledging that inheritance, is to demand amnesia. To insist upon it as proof of loyalty is to ask for something more disturbing -- consent for one’s own symbolic erasure.

Read Also: Identity Issue to Fore: The Vande Mataram Row

For a Kashmiri Muslim, this demand does not arrive in abstraction. It arrives in railway compartments, on streets, near hostels, in workplaces. It arrives backed by numbers, by menace, by the confidence that nothing will happen to those who enforce it. The violence that follows refusal is not spontaneous. It is enabled. It rests on the knowledge that the system will look away, that complaints may dissolve, that accountability is unlikely. This confidence is itself political. It tells us that some forms of violence are now socially legible as acts of “national discipline”.

We have heard enough stories, and seen enough individually, to know that this is not paranoia. Students are cornered and told to chant or leave. Artisans are abused while carrying their goods. Workers are warned that employment comes with conditions that extend beyond labour. Each incident may look small in isolation, but together, these form a pattern -- one in which Kashmiri Muslims are reminded, repeatedly, that they inhabit public space on sufferance.

What is most corrosive is not only the physical risk, but the moral calculation it forces upon Kashmiris. You begin to ask yourself questions no citizen should have to ask. Is silence safer than refusal? Is compliance temporary protection? Will asserting dignity cost more than it preserves? This is how coercion works: it turns conscience into a liability. It teaches you that integrity is expensive, and that safety is conditional. Over time, this produces not loyalty, but exhaustion.

This is not nationalism as shared political commitment, but as surveillance. It does not ask what you contribute, how you live, or whether you respect the law. It asks whether you can be made to say what you are told to say. Symbols become instruments of discipline, not expressions of belonging. In this arrangement, the Kashmiri Muslim is made to feel not a citizen among others, but a permanent suspect -- tolerated when compliant, punished when resistant.

What this kind of regime ultimately destroys is trust -- between citizens, in institutions, in the idea that law, not sentiment, governs public life. When mobs feel authorised to test loyalty, and institutions fail to intervene, the constitutional promise quietly retreats. Rights remain on paper, but their availability becomes uneven. You learn, quickly, that some grievances travel further than others.

The psychological cost of this is cumulative. You begin to move differently. You lower your voice. You avoid certain conversations. You rehearse answers. Identity becomes something to manage rather than inhabit. For students, this bleeds into classrooms where certain questions feel dangerous. For workers, it enters the workplace where silence becomes a strategy. For families, it becomes a constant worry -- about safety.

And yet, what is often misunderstood is that refusal still happens. Quietly, unevenly, without heroism. Many Kashmiri Muslims continue to refuse these demands not because they seek confrontation, but because something in them resists being rewritten. This refusal is not loud. It does not announce itself. But it carries moral weight precisely because of its cost. It says: I will not celebrate a story that erases me. I will not perform loyalty by denying my own history.

This is where the deeper failure of the current moment lies. A democracy confident in itself does not require ritualised affirmation. It does not fear silence. It does not punish refusal. The insistence on compelled speech signals not unity, but anxiety -- about difference, about memory, about narratives that do not align neatly with power. Nationalism that must be enforced through fear has already confessed its weakness.

For Kashmiri Muslims, the question is no longer abstract: what does it mean to belong to a nation that demands gratitude for humiliation? What does loyalty mean when it requires forgetting? These are not ideological provocations. These are questions that arise naturally when citizenship is experienced as conditional, when dignity must be bargained for, and when history is treated as an inconvenience rather than a shared inheritance.

If the nation insists that patriotism can only be expressed in one voice, through one set of symbols, then it is not building solidarity -- it is narrowing itself. A political community that cannot accommodate refusal will eventually criminalise memory. And when memory becomes suspect, justice follows.

We refuse such demands because we take the idea of citizenship seriously. Because we believe that belonging cannot be coerced, that loyalty cannot be beaten into someone, and that dignity cannot be conditional. To say this as a Kashmiri Muslim today is to accept risk. But it is also to insist that the nation must be larger than its loudest slogans.

Patriotism does not live in chants extracted under threat. It lives in the ordinary, difficult work of living together without forcing each other into moral submission. Until that truth is reclaimed, every forced slogan will speak less about love for the nation and more about fear of those who refuse to disappear.

Zahid Sultan is Kashmir-based independent researcher. Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist and climate researcher. The views are personal.

 

Cricket: Imperial Afterlife of the Gentlemen's Game

Faizaan Bhat | 17 Feb 2026

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The game today is shaped by the same forces that birthed it—class hierarchy, racial exclusion, and capitalist extraction.

Image Courtesy: freeimageslive

“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know.”

— C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary

The latest ICC T20 World Cup has been among the most acrimonious in recent memory, largely shaped by India–Pakistan tensions and the geopolitics that shadow their encounters. Cricket, however, has not suddenly become political. It always has been.

Steeped in a long history of colonialism, class hierarchy, race, and capital, the game continues to carry its imperial inheritance into the present. While today’s players are more representative of the middle class, meaningful representation from the most underprivileged sections remains rare—hardly surprising given cricket’s deep colonial and elitist foundations.

Cricket is not merely a sport; it is a social institution shaped by power. Its history is inseparable from class hegemony, capitalism, racism, and resistance. It has functioned as a tool of colonial discipline, a site of class struggle, a medium of political subjectivity, and, at times, a weapon of the weak.

Cricket originated in Britain and was consciously used to transmit bourgeois morality and nationalist ideology, both among the English working class and across the empire. As historian Cecil Headlam famously wrote, British colonisation followed a pattern: first the hunter, missionary, and merchant; then the soldier and politician; and finally, cricket. Former England captain Douglas Jardine went further, calling cricket “the greatest asset of the empire.”

A striking example of this fusion of power and sport was Lord Harris. As Governor of Bombay, Harris oversaw colonial administration in India; upon returning to Britain, he became president of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). He captained Kent, served as vice-captain of England, and chaired the meeting that formed the Imperial Cricket Conference.

Harris embodied the imperial elite—simultaneously a colonial ruler, politician, and cricketing authority—using the game to pacify colonial subjects while facilitating extraction and exploitation for British aristocratic and bourgeois interests.

The social origins of cricket further reveal its class character. Though played in England as early as the 16th century, it was patronised by aristocracy and gentry. While peasants played informal versions tied to agricultural calendars, the nobility formalised and controlled the sport. Geoffrey Moorhouse, in The Best Loved Game, notes that few images are as deeply embedded in English imagination as village cricket—yet even village cricket was structured around hierarchy.

Cricket clubs were founded by and for gentlemen. The MCC institutionalised class divisions by distinguishing between amateurs (gentlemen) and professionals (paid players), a rule that persisted until 1962. A 1956–63 cricket industry report itself admitted that county cricket was widely criticised as a preserve of snobbery, with committees drawn from an insular elite.

Race and caste were equally entrenched. Black cricketer Johnny Mullagh was once ordered to eat his lunch in a kitchen by an opposing captain. In India, Dalit cricketer Palwankar Baloo was forced by his Brahmin teammates to eat outside the ground. Charlie Parker, son of a labourer who took 4,278 first-class wickets, played just one international match—an exclusion rooted in class. Australian fast bowler Jack Marsh was barred from travelling with his team because of his colour; journalist J.C. Davis remarked he would have been the world’s best bowler had he been white.

Nowhere was cricket’s political potential more dramatically reworked than in the West Indies. Born out of slavery, cricket became a site where the colonised confronted the coloniser on ostensibly equal terms. It allowed the subaltern to assert dignity against empire.

As C.L.R. James described it, cricket became a “weapon of the weak.” Stuart Hall recalled James’s observation that the British believed the empire rested on the playing field—and losing signalled imperial decline.

West Indies’ dominance of world cricket in the 1970s and 1980s was inseparable from its anti-colonial confidence. Yet even here, contradictions persisted: despite Black players dominating the team, the first Black captain, Frank Worrell, was appointed only in 1960, on the eve of independence.

Since the 1980s, West Indies cricket has declined alongside neoliberal restructuring and regional economic hardship. Historian Hilary Beckles identifies three phases—colonial, nationalist, and globalist—the last marking the erosion of collective identity under global capital. Sunil Narine’s career, prioritising IPL, BPL, and CPL contracts over national duty, exemplifies this shift.

In the Indian subcontinent, cricket occupies an exceptional cultural position. Under colonial rule, it remained an exclusive European preserve for decades. Indian clubs emerged late: Aligarh Muslim University’s club in 1879, Parsi Gymkhana in 1887, and Hindu Gymkhana in 1894.

Colonial administrators such as Lord Harris and Lord Willingdon organised tournaments, while princes patronised the game to signal loyalty and collaboration.

Indian rulers used cricket strategically. Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala not only financed the 1911 All-India tour of England but also employed cricketers as State officials. That tour itself was a political gesture, organised shortly after the assassination of a British official in London, to project peace and imperial harmony.

Cricketing dynasties followed: Ranjitsinhji, whose fame earned him a throne, openly opposed Indian independence; Nawab Pataudi played for both England and India, as did his son.

Yet, many Indian cricketers lived in poverty. C.K. Nayudu, India’s first great cricketing hero, struggled to marry off his daughters. After Independence, princely patronage gave way to state and corporate sponsorship: Air India, railways, banks, and cement companies employed cricketers, not out of benevolence but for advertising and legitimacy.

The decisive transformation came with television and neoliberal capitalism. Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the late 1970s shattered old structures by paying players handsomely, introducing night matches and coloured clothing, and turning cricket into a media spectacle. Cricket became a global commodity.

Today, India dominates world cricket, reflecting the shift of capitalist power from West to East. The Indian Premier League is the sport’s most lucrative product. Scholars like Arjun Appadurai describe Indian cricket as a complex hybrid of colonial inheritance, princely power, bureaucratic mobility, and commercial professionalism. Prashant Kidambi argues Indians were drawn to cricket precisely because it embodied the allure of colonial modernity.

India–Pakistan cricket, meanwhile, mirrors post-Partition trauma and State rivalry. What once functioned as diplomacy has increasingly become a theatre of aggressive nationalism. Elections, media, and capital weaponise cricketing encounters. Pakistan’s exclusion from revenue flows within the ICC system reflects India’s institutional dominance.

Corruption is the logical endpoint of this system. Former cricketers have described the IPL as dehumanising; former anti-corruption chief Neeraj Kumar documents systemic fixing and scams. Cricket historian Boria Majumdar argues modern Indian cricket reflects the deeper contradictions of Indian capitalism itself.

As Appadurai observes, cricket in India offers something to everyone: bureaucrats manipulate nationalism, entrepreneurs monetise sentiment, and the working class gains a fleeting sense of belonging. Yet this shared excitement masks enduring inequalities.

Cricket’s money, power, and cultural reach ultimately reveal its imperial afterlife. The game remains shaped by the same forces that birthed it—class hierarchy, racial exclusion, and capitalist extraction—long after the empire itself formally ended.

The writer is an independent researcher based in Jammu. An engineer by training from N.I.T Srinagar, he is interested in South Asian history, politics, Islam and cricket. The views are personal.