From eco‐theology to eco‐skepticism: How American Latter‐day Saint environmental perspectives changed over time, and how they may change again

Modern American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints (aka LDS or Mormons) are among the most environmentally skeptical American groups, but it has not always been this way. The church has an exceptionally robust eco‐theology. In the 19th century, it espoused a strong “ethic of stewardship.” The review focuses on the story of how and why this shift from eco‐theology to eco‐skepticism occurred, shedding light on how theology, wider culture, and other forces can influence value creation, and how these changing values can transform the environmental attitudes and behaviors of an entire people. LDS eco‐theology shares some principles in common with some other Christian faiths, but also includes a number of unique or unusual beliefs and egalitarian/agrarian practices. In the early church (19th century), eco‐theology contributed to a value system which prioritized creation care. However, early LDS community land practices did not necessarily live up to these ideals and the local environment suffered serious consequences. Then, with an influx of external influences, including a growing population of non‐LDS frontiersmen, Latter‐day Saint values shifted away from creation care and egalitarianism and toward individualism and capitalism. Church leaders stopped regularly preaching about the earth's value, instead focusing on individual salvation. Environmental action antipathy and climate skepticism became the norm. This volte‐face demonstrates both how theology can influence values and actions, and the inverse.

In 1860 on a warm summer's day in Cache County Utah, Brigham Young, the second leader of the young Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stood before a congregation of newly arrived immigrant believers.He preached about the prophetic calling of their leaders, admonished them to work together, and offered a string of practical tips on settlement building.Finally, he landed on a topic he returned to repeatedly throughout his 40 years leading the church-the inherent value and doctrinal centrality of the natural world."You are here commencing anew.The soil, the air, the water are all pure and healthy.Do not suffer them to become polluted with wickedness" (Young, 1860).Over the course of his lifetime, Young joined his predecessor Joseph Smith in making the natural environment a central feature of early Latter-day Saint (Mormon) 1 theology (Alexander et al., 2008, p. 85), arguably giving the faith one of the most robust eco-theologies in the modern world (Handley, 2019).
Yet 150 years later, Latter-day Saints in the United States have become one of the least likely American faith groups to consider the environment a priority (Hunter & Toney, 2005;Olson-Hazboun et al., 2017;Peterson & Liu, 2008).They are also among the most likely faiths to embrace climate skepticism (Olson-Hazboun et al., 2017;Penrod, 2018).This review lays out the story of how this muscular eco-theology lost ground, giving place for eco-skepticism.In so doing, it unpacks the complex and iterative relationship between theology and culture, revealing how these shifting forces can continuously transform the way an entire people conceptualize the natural world.
The Church naturally lends itself to the exploration of these questions because it is a uniquely close-knit religious society with a powerful connection to a specific natural environment.Campbell, Green, and Monson call Mormons, "one of the most cohesive of any kind of group, whether defined in terms of race, ethnicity, or just about any other demographic characteristic" (Campbell et al., 2014, p. 78).In fact, they argue that Latter-day Saints can even be characterized as a pseudo-ethnicity, or, as they call it, an "ethno-religious" group (p.25).The church is also unusual because of its hyper-dependency on, and concentration in, a specific ecosystem-the high deserts, arid mountains, and salty plains of the American Intermountain West.As one scholar describes, "Alone among important post-Puritan American settlers, Mormons organized themselves into a political order that was simultaneously religious and geographic-territorial" (Feldman, 2015).In their isolated quasi-theocracy, the LDS lived a "salutary agrarian lifestyle" which contributed to the development of an unusually deep and rich eco-theology (Brown, 2011).Even now that the church has spread throughout the world, the heart of the faith continues to be in the traditional Mormon Cultural Region (Utah, Northern Arizona, and Southern Idaho), with most of its leadership and political power concentrated there.This relative homogeneity and concentration make the Church of Jesus Christ something of a natural experiment; fewer confounding factors obscure or complicate the narrative than might be found in a similar review for a more heterogeneous and geographically distributed faith.
This review begins by situating itself within the wider theoretical conversation, then proceeds with a discussion of methodology and a rough overview of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.It then dives into the data demonstrating that American LDS are currently among the least environmentally concerned, and most climate-skeptical religious groups in the United States.It juxtaposes these modern attitudes with what we know of Latter-day Saint ecotheology during its origin period in the 19th century.It further discusses how, in practice, this theology did not prevent (and may have contributed to) the decimation of the local environment.This is followed by an analysis of exogenous forces, including the completion of the intercontinental railway, the death of an era-defining leader, and the influx of non-Mormons to the Wasatch front, all of which contributed to a shift in the practices and values of Latter-day Saints.It discusses how these changes concurrently resulted in a new silence on environmental topics among church leaders and individual-level reinterpretations of LDS eco-theology.Finally, it concludes by assessing anecdotal evidence that the contemporary American church is in the midst of an eco-theological renaissance.

| THEORETICAL REVIEW
For the last nearly 60 years, papers focusing on the nexus of theology and ecological practice or values have stemmed from a seminal paper by Lynn White which stated that the Judeo-Christian worldview fundamentally asserts "rightful mastery over nature," and that it gives justifications to believers who treat the environment instrumentally, bending it to their will, come what may (White, 1967, p. 155).This thesis remains "the foundation, the jumping-off point, the lodestar" of nearly all academic analyses of the impact religious belief has on environmental attitudes and behaviors (LeVasseur & Peterson, 2016, p. 1).
Woodrum and Wilkomir identified three "stages" of post -White scholarship (Woodrum & Wolkomir, 1997, p. 223).The first wave identified not only a significant negative correlation between Judeo-Christian beliefs and environmental behaviors (Guth et al., 1995;Kanagy & Willits, 1993), but also that more conservative faiths, including Baptists and Mormons, were among the most likely to hold these beliefs (Hand & Van Liere, 1984).The second wave concluded that it was not just political affiliations but particular religious beliefs, including biblical literalism and fundamentalism, which predict disinterest in environmental protection (Eckberg & Blocker, 1989;Greeley, 1993;Olson-Hazboun et al., 2017).Finally, the third wave further complicated this relationship by demonstrating a positive association between religious belief and pro-environmental attitudes when fundamentalism and political ideology are controlled (Dekker et al., 1997;Klineberg et al., 1998;Koehrsen, 2015;Koehrsen et al., 2019;Woodrum & Wolkomir, 1997).This wave particularly emphasizes the central role of shared values in developing environmental attitudes and behaviors.I would argue that a potential fourth analytical stage has since emerged wherein multifaceted analyses are used to assess how religion interplays with other potential influencers, such as race, gender, and age, in determining environmental attitudes (Arbuckle, 2017;Arbuckle & Konisky, 2015;Ecklund et al., 2017;Peifer et al., 2016).This review aligns most strongly with that third literary wave because it focuses specifically on the role of shared values in the formation of ecological attitudes and behaviors.
The idea that cultural values are deeply informed by shared theology has had an even longer and wider academic literature than that spawned by Lynn White's thesis, and is often grounded in the work of Max Weber.Weber's seminal work "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" theorized that the European turn toward capitalism (and other, related modern ideas) emerged directly from the values taught by Protestant theology (Weber, 1930).Weber's thesis, although assailed vigorously across the decades, remains convincing enough to continue to dominate discussions on the impact of theology in society (Campbell, 2006).It has given rise to a subfield of empirical research, much of which finds evidence to support Weber's assertion (Basedau et al., 2018;Ciftci, 2022;Jones, 1997).As becomes evident in the historical analysis below, Weber's ideas also hold water in this review; Latter-day Saint ecological attitudes have sometimes been informed by deeply held shared values, which in turn were informed by theology.
That is, however, only half the story.As we will see, although Latter-day Saint attitudes toward the environment were sometimes the product of theology and theological narratives, latterly the path of influence was reversed-wider culture reshaped Latter-day Saint values which then informed the interpretation of theology.The bidirectional influence across behaviors, values, and theology is much less regularly discussed in the literature, with only a handful of major thinkers exploring how, and when, culture shapes theology rather than the other way around (Hitlin & Piliavin, 2004;Thornton et al., 2012).In particular, German-American philosopher Paul Tillich addressed this question in his expansive pre-Whitean text (Saroglou & Cohen, 2013;Tillich, 1959).By using the story of Latter-day Saints as a case study for the power of cultural values to transform both behavior and theological interpretation, this review is taking a step toward filling this gap.It also addresses the paucity of literature on this topic around faiths outside of mainstream Christianity (Haluza-DeLay, 2014;Hulme, 2016).

| METHODOLOGY
Initial literature searches were conducted from November 2021-May 2022 online.I began by searching on Google Scholar with various combinations of key terms including "LDS," "Latter-day Saint," "Mormon," "Church of Jesus Christ," "Ecotheology," "Environment," "Environmentalism," "Climate Change," and "Stewardship."Through this method, I found a small corpus of prominent, frequently cited, or search engine-optimized publications on this topic.I mined these publications for their citations, then conducted searches for newer publications that had themselves cited these and the other sources.However, many of the key resources I found referenced in these papers were only locally published and were not readily available in the original either online or in print in the United Kingdom (incl.Handley, 2020;Handley et al., 2006;Nibley, 1972;Williams et al., 1998).
I therefore traveled to Utah for in-person library research.There I found print versions of these publications as well as new sources from the Church History Library, the university libraries at Brigham Young University and Southern Utah University, and from local scholars of church history and theology.I am a member of the LDS faith myself and an alumna of Brigham Young University.This made accessing these documents easier than it likely would be for a nonconnected researcher, particularly at BYU where my alumni status fast-tracked my access to some rare documents.It should be noted that this available literature suffers from some serious gaps, particularly in that almost everything available focuses nearly exclusively on Latter-day Saints in the Mormon Cultural Region.This excludes a considerable portion of the LDS population.Therefore, any conclusions reached pertain only to this region.

| INTRODUCTION TO THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is, in many ways, a radically different faith from other forms of Christianity, so much so that many Christians do not regard it as part of Christianity at all (Jackson, 2000).The Church considers itself a "restored" rather than a "reformed" faith.According to the LDS, in 1820, a farm boy in New York named Joseph Smith was chosen by God to restore the original church of Christ which had been lost after the death of the original apostles.An angel gave him a sacred text, the Book of Mormon, left by ancient Christians in America for a future prophet to find.Smith translated and canonized this book along with the Bible.He later established a religion based on the principles of the Book of Mormon and the revelations he stated he received from God, Jesus Christ, and an assortment of angels.The restored church is characterized by a modern prophet, a quorum of 12 modern apostles, and belief in continuing revelation from God to the church on earth (Ludlow, 1992).As Joseph Smith and subsequent prophets developed this revelatory theology, they combined it in a book called the Doctrine and Covenants and canonized it, along with a short text called the Pearl of Great Price, with the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon.These texts serve as the theological basis of the church.
Church leadership plays a central role in the production of theology and practice in the faith (Quinn, 1997).The most senior leaders are not seen merely as theologians, interpreters, or guides, as religious leaders are often seen in other faiths, but rather as "prophets, seers, and revelators" (Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, 2023).The words of these leaders are considered continuing revelation with similar effect to canonized scripture.Believers hold that revelation continues even now, largely in the form of talks at church-wide, internationally broadcast, semi-annual events called "General Conference" (Petersen et al., 2018).
Though the church was originally founded in New York in 1830, over several decades, a myriad of push and pull factors (e.g., widespread persecution, Zionism, and eschatological impulses) saw the church under Joseph Smith migrate across North America to build a city called Nauvoo, Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi river (Reeve, 2015).There, Smith was killed and the faith broke into schismatic groups (Carter & Smith, 1969).The largest of these was led by Brigham Young.He took his followers across the wide expanse of the Midwest and beyond the US border to the shores of the Great Salt Lake-a dry, mountainous landscape in the Intermountain West, now Utah.The church then colonized the entire region, sweeping down to the terracotta deserts of Arizona and up to the snowy expanses of Idaho.The modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is still headquartered in Salt Lake (Reeve, 2015).This review exclusively focuses on this sect.

| LDS CLIMATE SKEPTICISM STATS
Due to the small size of the Church of Jesus Christ relative to the overall American population (>2%), the majority of studies on the relationship between religious belief and climate skepticism have not disaggregated for Latter-day Saints (Haltinner & Sarathchandra, 2022).However, the minority of studies which do account for them consistently demonstrate a strong correlation between climate skepticism, environmental non-prioritization, and LDS church membership (Brehm & Eisenhauer, 2006;Haltinner & Sarathchandra, 2022;Hand & Van Liere, 1984;Olson-Hazboun et al., 2017;Peifer et al., 2016;Riess, 2019).As such, Latter-day Saints join Evangelicals as one of the most climate skeptical American religious groups (Carr et al., 2012;Eckberg & Blocker, 1989;Hayhoe et al., 2019;Lowe et al., 2022;Veldman, 2019;Veldman et al., 2021;Wilkinson, 2012;Zaleha & Szasz, 2015).As one Latter-day Saint writer expressed, this strong internal environmental antipathy has resulted in many non-Mormon environmentalists perceiving the church as "an enemy of nature," and that "a Mormon Ecologist [is] an oxymoron" (Peck, 2006, p. 98).
The data also demonstrates that this antipathy is politically informed (Studer & Burge, 2018).Latter-day Saints are the most likely American religious group to self-identify as conservative (Campbell et al., 2014, p. 80), and political ideology is the second best predictor of climate skepticism in the United States (after pro-environmental attitudes) (McCright et al., 2016).In many ways, the story of how Latter-day Saints became climate skeptics is the same as the story of how it turned toward conservatism and away from progressivism; both hinge on the decades-long shift in values.The available data does make clear, however, that political ideology does not account for the entirety of American LDS environmental attitudes, suggesting that even without explicitly "political" conformity, Latter-day Saints often share deeper values prioritization processes (Penrod, 2018;Peterson & Liu, 2008).More research must be done to clarify to what extent LDS religious affiliation has impact beyond political correlation.

| EARLY LDS ECOTHEOLOGY AND ECOLOGICAL VALUES
As many scholars have noted (Foltz, 2000;Hedges, 2006;Mayfield, 1998;Metge, 2006;Montague-Judd, 2006;Osborn, 2006;Peck, 2006;Williams et al., 1998), in the earliest era of the church (from 1830 to 1877), leaders including Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Parley P. Pratt regularly conveyed pro-environmental messages over the pulpit as an "important aspect of the church's core teachings" (Alexander et al., 2008, p. 85).These leaders, "urged members to care for the land, for animals, for plants, and for the earth" (Handley, 2001, pp. 223-224).Various chapters of the Doctrine and Covenants proclaim a clear environmental ethos in which the earth is meant to be used "with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion" (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981a, 59:20).If people pollute the earth, God promises retribution (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981a, 103:14).These texts are clear that people will ultimately be judged for how they treat the earth (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981a, 104:13).Even a key ceremony written in this period for the temple heavily emphasizes the story of creation, suggesting the earth's deep importance to salvation (Tolley, 2021).
The church holds several eco-theological principles in common with other Christian faiths, including belief in the sacredness of the earth (Horrell et al., 2008;Simkins, 2016); the principle of stewardship, particularly over the environment (Jenkins et al., 2018;Leary et al., 2016); and the belief that God requires Christians to care for the poor (Brown, 2011;Galli, 2006;Harris, 2006;Tolley, 2021;Waite, 2019).However, early leaders expanded far beyond this common Christian eco-theology.One of their most striking innovations was what Brown calls the "vitalism" principle.Other non-Christian traditions have their own version of a vitalistic belief (variously called chi, aether, mana, etc.), and, though each differs in their specific interpretations, they are united in a basic idea: that an all-pervasive life-force animates or en-spirits the world and everything in it (Brown, 2011).In the Church of Jesus Christ, the vital force is known as intelligence (ibid).As Brigham Young poetically described it, "There is life in all matter, throughout the vast extent of all the eternities; it is in the rock, the sand, the dust, in water, air, the gases, and, in short, in every description and organization of matter" (Young, 1856, p. 227).In essence, everything in the universe has some form of life-animals, plants, and even planet earth (Alexander, 2019).This is seen most vividly in the Book of Moses of the Pearl of Great Price where earth itself speaks, having a conversation with Moses about its sorrow over the wickedness of mankind (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981b, 7:48).Some contend that these scriptures are meant to be read metaphorically, and not as indicative that the earth is sentient.However, historical evidence makes clear that early church leaders largely believed the earth was truly alive (Tolley, 2021).
The idea of a sentient earth automatically de-objectifies nature.No longer is the human-nature relationship treated as a subject-object affair where mankind uses the earth solely for its own gain.Rather, it becomes a subject-subject relationship with give and take on both sides, and the implicit acknowledgment of the rights of both parties to have their basic needs met.As a living, sentient being, the earth is also explicitly, theologically acknowledged as having its own unique purpose, unconnected to humanity.Brigham Young stated, "all forms of life were to multiply in their sphere and element and have joy therein" (qtd. in Harris, 2006, p. 77).Joy for God's creations lies not solely in its service to mankind, but in perpetuating the future of all the non-human species on and within the earth (Handley, 2016).As such, the worth of all these creatures and beings is intrinsic, not simply instrumental.
Of course, the environment also did have instrumental value to the early members, all of whom depended on the land to survive.One perhaps surprising form of oft-emphasized utility was simple-natural beauty.Latter-day Saint scripture, particularly the Doctrine and Covenants, rhapsodizes on the beauty of the natural world and its power to "please the eye" and "gladden the heart" (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981a, D&C 59:20; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981b, Moses 3:9; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981a, D&C 59:18-20).Often, as Handley points out, beauty is listed at the start of descriptions of purposes of creation itself (Handley et al., 2006).Natural beauty was lauded over the pulpit repeatedly for decades (Waite, 2019).Early Latterday Saint villages became renowned the West over for profusions of flowers and fruit trees.When American naturalist John Muir passed through Salt Lake City in 1877, he said, "Most of the houses are veiled with trees, as if set down in the midst of one grand orchard … the gardens are laid out with great simplicity, indicating love for flowers by people comparatively poor … nowhere have I seen them in greater perfection" (qtd. in Waite, 2019, p. 128).For early Latter-day Saints, dahlias and redwoods, the moon and profusion of stars-all of God's creations are not beautiful by chance, but by design.
In a particularly unusual theological twist, this doctrine of beauty was also deeply eschatological.The early LDS church was messianic and millenarian (also known among theologians as pre-millennial), constantly emphasizing the proximity of a violent apocalypse, Christ's subsequent return, then a period of 1000 years in which Christ would reign in peace over an edenic earth before the final showdown with Satan and his minions (Underwood, 2017).But, as early Latter-day Saints perceived it, the millennium needed help to arrive-it was the job of mankind to improve the world so it would be ready for Christ's arrival.Brigham Young described this melioristic belief this way, "it is our duty … to redeem the earth … until it shall become like the Garden of Eden" (Young, 1866, p. 3).On another occasion, he stated, "We are … determined to have a heaven here, and are going to make it ourselves, by the help of God and his angels" (Young, 1860, p. 293).In essence, saints were taught to "cleanse and beautify a 'cursed earth'" (Flores, 1983, p. 327).
This project of beautification and improvement tied the early church deeply to the earth and its welfare (Underwood, 2017), eschewing the environmental fatalism, and consequent ambivalence, that characterizes so many millenarian faiths (Barker & Bearce, 2013;Guth et al., 1995;Robbins & Palmer, 2013).Thus, early LDS eschatology, in spite of its focus on "the world spiraling down to a cataclysmic conclusion" (Underwood, 2017, p. 87), had no theological support for shrugging in the face of ecological mismanagement.Rather, they had a direct, prophetic admonition to beautify the earth to help it accomplish its teleology.As Brown succinctly states, "Stewardship for Young was framed in an eschatological vision that assumed goodness in creation and a moral duty to work toward our mutual exaltation" (Brown, 2011, p. 73).
Other LDS doctrines-such as the belief that humans like Adam were co-creators of the earth (Tolley, 2021), the belief in an extreme form of materiality which holds that even spirits are made of matter (Blair, 2021;Handley, 2016;Tolley, 2021), a long emphasis on the importance of agriculture to the spiritual well-being of Latter-day Saints (Godfrey & Rogers, 2019;Tolley, 2021;Waite, 2019), and a focus on humanity's obligation to the coming generations (Firmage, 2010;Gowans & Cafaro, 2003;Handley, 2016;Mayfield, 1998;Peck, 2006)-all support the strength of this eco-theology.As such, some scholars perceive LDS eco-theology as exceptionally, if not uniquely, robust (Bryner, 2010;Handley, 2019).As Latter-day Saint eco-critic George Handley describes it, "There are scarcely any religious traditions with so many explicit revelations and teachings about the centrality of our careful stewardship of material resources" (Handley, 2019, p. 259).
This early eco-theology, though powerful, does not necessarily elevate the natural world to equal or near-equal terms with humanity.Like many Christian faiths, Latter-day Saint theology is anthropocentric (Handley, 2001;Handley, 2016;Hedges, 2006;Peck, 2006).Genesis famously states that Adam and Eve have "dominion" over the earth, an assertion that White cites as key evidence of Christianity's inescapable human-focus (White, 1967).Latterday Saint theology not only includes an acceptance of this dominion argument (Arnold, 1998;Studer & Burge, 2018), it adds to it with the LDS-specific belief in the "Plan of Salvation."The Plan of Salvation is the Latterday Saint belief about how humankind was created, what our purpose is, and where we are going after this life.According to it, earth was formed to allow human spirits to come to it to gain bodies and to be tested to see whether they will adhere to God's laws (Lund, 1992).As LDS scholar Jason M. Brown states, "When we [Latter-day Saints] do talk about the earth, we do it in strictly anthropocentric terms for its role in the plan of salvation (Brown, 2011, p. 80)." However, this doctrine is nuanced, and, in conjunction with several of the above principles, has often been understood in a way that supports environmentalism rather than occluding it.Famed LDS theologian and scholar Hugh Nibley states that dominion was never intended to mean exploitative control, but rather service and care (Nibley, 1972).Handley (2016), Hedges (2006), and England (1998) also all assert that though supporting mankind is clearly a primary purpose for creation, it is not the only purpose-anthropocentrism is "tempered" by the fact that all creation is alive and has goals beyond supporting human life (Handley, 2016, p. 98).Tempered anthropocentrism is directly invoked in D&C, "Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man ….And it pleaseth God that he hath given all these things unto man; for unto this end were they made to be used, with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion" (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981a, 59:18-20;Brown, 2011).Here, we see that though the earth was created for humankind, it was not given to people to exploit, destroy, or even to force creation to do what would harm it.
These same church leaders sought to operationalize these ecological values through an unusual, even radical, societal innovation.In 1832, Joseph Smith declared that he had received a revelation which dictated a new form of governance and communitarian living known as "the United Order."The United Order sought to enact "the Law of Consecration," or the law that requires members of the LDS Church to dedicate everything they owned and all they were to the good of the LDS Church.It was, in essence, an experiment into living in an egalitarian society where possessions, talents, and so on, were shared mutually among members of the community (Israelsen, 1992).Its primary goal was to create an "everlasting order for the benefit of my church, and for the salvation of men until I [the Lord] come" (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981a, D&C 104:1).
The United Order saw mankind and nature as deeply intertwined and living in harmony with each other.The management of natural resources was a holy duty of the church rather than of commerce or secular government (Flores, 1983).Sacredness pervaded the land (Firmage, 2010), and spirituality infused every action.As Arrington explains, "… the construction of water ditches was as much a part of the Mormon religion as water baptism" (1958, p. 26).This radical egalitarian experiment was at odds with the individualistic ethos that otherwise pervaded the American West (Stegner, 2003).As Flores states, the early church had in the United Order "the democratic and communal impulses valued by environmentalists, and the centralization and support necessary to carry out a land ethic program" (Flores, 1983, p. 336).
The United Order emphasized stewardship and "sustainable agriculture" (Foltz, 2000).Lauded LDS author Terry Tempest Williams once described it thus: We had an ethic of stewardship once.It is in the muscularity of our history, evident in Brigham Young's meticulous blueprint for the Salt Lake Valley carefully laid out through a pragmatic vision.He preached sustainable agriculture and dreamed a United Order while allotting time in LDS general conference for talks on appropriate farming practices and community vitality in harmony with the land (Williams et al., 1998, p. IX).
However, theology's power to shape cultural values and behaviors has its limits, as is evident in what happened next.The high-minded and spiritually driven values behind these communities proved difficult for members to maintain across time, and the original United Order did not last.Hundreds of other United Orders bloomed and died across the United States and Northern Mexico between 1832 and 1893 (Israelsen, 1992).The failure of the United Orders also echoed a contemporaneous, human-caused environmental disaster.
When LDS pioneers first arrived in the Great Basin, they found a landscape swathed in tall grasses, run through with enough water to support a settlement, and blessed with bounteously forested mountains (Blair, 2021).Brigham Young regular admonitions to treat these resources with care were, at first, successful (Brown, 2011)."Agricultural yields were adequate and even abundant in many locations, crop variety increased, and pure air and water invigorated the Saints' spirits" (Kelson, 2006, p. 90).This success was widely lauded, particularly by scholars and travelers who were astonished by the irrigation system the Saints developed which, at the time, was a great wonder of environmental engineering (Atwood, 1929;Frehner, 2019;Rogers, 1998;Tanner & Mitchell, 2002).However, the pioneers quickly overgrazed the landscape (Nichols, 2019;Smart, 1998), hunted many predator species to regional endangerment (Hedges, 2006), and logged the mountain tops until they were barren (Kelson, 2006).As a result of overgrazing and over-logging, the watershed collapsed and the new pioneer villages were devastated by floods and mudslides for the next 50 years (Kelson, 2006).
Occasionally, historians blame these failures on the early Saints' melioristic eco-theology, or at least how it was understood and applied, because this improving impulse sometimes resulted in a blind belief that through hard work, the land could be transformed into an entirely different ecosystem (Cannon, 2019;Handley et al., 2006).Latter-day Saints were taught that with God's help, the "desert shall bloom as a rose" (Atwood, 1929).This ignored the inherent aridity of the landscape, positing that a way could be found to take a dry and fragile environment and turn it into a Western version of New England (Handley et al., 2006).However, other scholars point to other wider forces at play.Although many Latter-day Saints were accomplished agriculturists in their home landscapes, in these Western deserts, they were out of their depth."It seems that without an empirical understanding of how mountain land worked-and despite Mormon mythology to the contrary-even practical stewardship of the Mormon variety was unable to [succeed]" (Flores, 1983, p. 336).The land could not bear the pressures of the growing population that relied so heavily on resource intensive industries to survive, very unlike the small, largely migratory populations of Native Americans who had managed the landscape for generations (Flores, 1983).As discussed in depth below, wider Western values also came to play a key role, resulting in a "great grabbing game" where settlers of all stripes, including Mormons, sought to take as much as they could from the land before it could be stripped by someone else (Nibley, 1972, p. 95).
Church leaders recognized these failures and sought to remedy them, though with little success (Brown, 2011).In 1865, apostle Orson Hyde took to the pulpit to reaffirm that such mistreatment of the land has "not profit in this, neither is it pleasing in the sight of God … that we should continue a course like unto this" (qtd. in Flores, 1983, p. 332).However, the environmental damage continued, relatively unabated, for decades; in the 1930s, government research documented the extent of "negative environmental impact … and proposed permanently removing some farms from cultivation" (Cannon, 2019, p. 122).Though amendments to land management in the 1930s helped restore and preserve many of the over-logged forests (ibid), serious environmental consequences of environmental exploitation continue to haunt Utah to this day.The threat of mass arsenic poisoning from the dusty mining residue laying on the drying lakebed of the Great Salt Lake is the most contemporaneous, and potentially catastrophic, example (Osborne, 2023).

| A SHIFT IN VALUES
Though the environment strained under the weight of these practices, Latter-day Saints adapted and ultimately succeeded in building stable human communities.By 1900 they "had provided a livelihood in this relatively inhospitable region for half a million people" (Tanner & Mitchell, 2002).However, by then, the culture had radically changed.The agrarian, egalitarian values that had animated Mormon communities during the 30-year period of Youngian leadership (1847-1877) fell increasingly out of fashion (Flores, 1983;Kelson, 2006) and the church began to, "Americanize" (Larson, 1970;Mazur, 1999;Yorgason, 2002).Several factors contributed to this.First, Latter-day Saints had to compete for scarce resources with the non-Mormons arriving on the new intercontinental railway.Consequently, "LDS faithful shifted their production efforts to supply growing demand from extra-local consumers, [and] they became inextricably entwined in the larger emerging market economy" (Dant, 2019, p. 28).Soon, prominent groups like the Godbeite organization of Mormon Businessmen stopped advocating for egalitarianism all together (Flores, 1983).Then, the death of Brigham Young meant the last great advocate for the "old order" had passed away (ibid, p. 331), leaving space for new ideas to take firm root under his more "market-friendly" successor, John Taylor (Fluham, 2015, p. 585;Garrett, 2005).The US government also played a significant role, seeking to make Utah a state, and therefore investing considerable resources into encouraging Latter-day Saint conformity with American norms and values (Larson, 1970).It was during this time that the United Orders saw their final collapse (Fluham, 2015).Western American values of individualism, capitalism, and self-interest seeped into the church, so that by 1885 the "salutary environmental theology" which had so long held sway in the church had been "forgotten" (Alexander, 2019, p. 40).
As eco-theology disappeared, Mormon values shifted.Yorgason identifies a major transformation of what he calls the "moral order" during this period of Americanization (Yorgason, 2002).The most obvious changes included a transformation in gender roles, national identity, and economy (leaders began to laud efforts to gain individual rather than collective wealth) (Yorgason, 2002, pp. 449-450).These shifts had serious ramifications for the way church members conceptualized the land, as it made natural resources "a matter of competition rather than planning" (Flores, 1983, p. 331).Now, the church was part of "American consumer culture," (Godfrey & Rogers, 2019, p. 7) and the earth, by consequence, was a thing to be consumed.In effect, for the first time, the values espoused by the church matched up with the practices on the ground.Where before the church had attempted to stymie the tendency toward resource exploitation and capitalism, it now largely accepted these practices as reasonable individual expression.
As the 20th century ground on, the American LDS deepening embrace of these new attitudes was sped along by one of the most contentious, and defining, conflicts in the modern American West.Most Western American states are rife with federal/public lands (Merrill, 2002).Some of this land is accessible for public use, and disagreements over how and when it is accessible have been a feature of Western life for centuries (Carstensen, 1963).Latter-day Saints have been active participants in many of these conflicts, including the famed Sagebrush Rebellions of the 1970s and 1980s (Brehm & Eisenhauer, 2006), conflicts over the building of national monuments in the 1990s (Smart, 1998), and a violent takeover of a National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 which was led by church member Ammon Bundy (Quammen, 2020).As Handley explains, these federal environmental interventions only heightened the governmental distrust already latent due to decades of government-sanctioned persecution of Latter-day Saint polygamous practices (Handley, 2016).
Many of these newly embraced values inherently aligned with what ultimately became the American conservative platform-individualism, government mistrust, capitalism, and traditional gender roles.In the early period of Utah settlement, Latter-day Saints did not belong to any particular US political tradition (Feldman, 2015).They were, in their egalitarian and communitarian practices, a progressive movement more akin to modern socialism than conservatism.After statehood, Latter-day Saints willfully adopted both American political parties, arguably doing so to demonstrate that they were not so cohesive a group as to constitute a political threat (Feldman, 2015).Yet, a succession of increasingly conservative religious leaders reinforced the centrality of conservative values, among them Heber J. Grant (1882Grant ( -1918) ) who avidly opposed the New Deal and David O. McKay (1951McKay ( -1970) ) who presided over a period of businessification and professionalization of the church (Fluham, 2015;Prince & Wright, 2005).Then, in the late 1970s, a new phenomenon arose in the United States which is now loosely termed the rise of the religious right.The movement focused on key tenets of American conservatism-it "emphasized traditional family values, championed freemarket economics, and advocated a hardline foreign policy approach to the Soviet Union" (McVicar, 2016).Although this movement was dominated by white Evangelicals, it also included mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Latterday Saints (McVicar, 2016).Under the guidance of church President Ezra Taft Benson (1985Benson ( -1994)), a strident advocate of the movement and former presidential candidate whose running mate was a renowned southern segregationist, Latter-day Saints joined the Republican Party en masse (Bergera et al., 2019).Ultimately, this resulted in American Latter-day Saints being "the most heavily Republican-leaning religious group in the United States" with 70% of American church members belonging to the party (Lipka, 2016).
The rise of the religious right corresponds with a political division over the environment.While it was Republican president Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), within decades, the EPA became a frequent target for Republican claims of government overreach due to its practice of enforcing sweeping national policies.These expansive policies countered the small-government priorities of the market liberalism embraced by the American right (Antonio & Brulle, 2011).Climate change denialism, initially promoted by oil companies, soon became wedded to the Republican party (Oreskes & Conway, 2011).The strength of this relationship is typified by the prevalence of right-of-center LDS politicians in the last 100 years, many of whom, though certainly not all, have avidly opposed environmentally focused policies (Foltz, 2000).
Republicans, and particularly the Latter-day Saints among their cohort, also rejected the environmentalist movement on moral grounds because it had become increasingly anti-natalist (Foltz, 2000;Peck, 2006)."Church members responded with general horror at the idea of population control," (Waite, 2019, p. 131).LDS theology of a pre-existence, or a place where pre-embodied spirits lived with God, suggests that there are people waiting to be born so they can get a body, learn, and return to God as a more advanced creature (ibid).To restrict their access to earth was perceived as morally repugnant.
The support the environmentalist movement had from the scientific community was equally unconvincing.As with many American Christian faiths (Branch, 2020), The Church of Jesus Christ has a long history of embracing, rejecting, and debating anti-scientism (Simpson, 2016).Modern science is not always openly accepted, especially when it clashes with religious precepts.These views make space for motivated reasoning when church members consider scientific claims.When evidence arises that suggests the need for action in contravention to the beliefs of the individual (such as population control), they may reject that science by tying it to the unreliability or politicization of science (Bugden, 2022).
It is notable, however, that the move away from an actively preached ecotheology (as discussed below) significantly predated this 1970s era melding of Mormonism and the Republican party.While American politics played an indisputable role in LDS environmental perspectives, it was in the form of strengthening pre-existing associations rather than manufacturing new ones.This suggests that it is the values Latter-day Saints hold, rather than the political tribe they adhere to, which plays the most critical role in determining environmental beliefs and practices.

| THE MARGINALIZATION OF ECOTHEOLOGY
All these extra-religious changes soon seeped into the theology and its interpretation.The early twentieth century saw the doctrine of individual salvation gain influence, while the doctrine of collective redemption on a sanctified earth diminished (Fluham, 2015).The church ceased striving to reinstate the United Order at all and instead began to predict it to return only at the millennium itself.As Fluham states, "With socioeconomic equality pushed ever toward the millennium, questions of social or economic justice and civil rights could be pushed to the margins as well," (Fluham, 2015, p. 557).By implication, questions of environmental justice could be marginalized too.As Thomas Alexander argues, by the early twentieth century, "in place of an environmental theology was an emphasis on restoration, atonement, and Zion building" (Alexander, 2019, p. 44).These three doctrines reference the church, the individual, and the church community, respectively-they do not have much, if any, explicit connection to the earth itself, particularly not with the modern redefinition of Zion from a physical location to "the pure in heart" (Gardner, 2002).
Thus, although in theory the eco-theology developed by Smith and Young continued to have doctrinal authority, in practice these wider cultural changes superseded their influence.This is the inversion of Weber and White's theses.No longer did theology create the predominant cultural values around the environment.Instead, wider cultural values began to inform theology, or at least theological exegesis and interpretation.Paul Tillich theorized about this inverted flow in 1959 (Saroglou & Cohen, 2013;Tillich, 1959), suggesting that cultural values have many cascading influences on other elements of society, including religion.The history of the Latter-day Saint movement demonstrates that the flow of influence can, and will, invert depending on the particular confluence of cultural, theological, and physical phenomena in a given period.
With time, these changes in value contributed to church leaders becoming nearly silent on questions of ecotheology until very recently (Brown, 2011;Handley, 2001;Menning, 2006;Peck, 2006).After Joseph F. Smith, a Latter-day Saint prophet leader who died in 1918, six other church presidents came and went before another spoke explicitly about the environment (Church leaders statements on environment, 2023).Presidents Spencer W. Kimball and Ezra Taft Benson, their successive leadership stretching from 1973 to 1994, did speak about the importance of stewardship and protecting creation, but this has been the exception to the non-communicative norm (ibid).Modern church curriculum does not discuss environmental stewardship in more but the most general of terms, resulting in a similar silence in Sunday schools and over the pulpit in congregations worldwide (Brown, 2011;Menning, 2006).As one church member and biologist stated: If there was a relationship between nature, the church, or some sort of environmental ethic it was never discussed by the members that I knew, either at our Church meetings or outside ….It's protection, its value, and its fragility were never mentioned.It was there, much as the air we breathed, unnoticed and not reflected upon, and used as needed (Peck, 2006).Furthermore, as Handley describes in an article discussing this phenomenon, the "dearth of any formal teaching on [the environment] from any official church venues," has allowed "a culture of anti-environmentalism to continue unchallenged in many Mormon communities throughout the Intermountain West" (Handley, 2001).
In the absence of robust guidance from leaders, members formed their own opinions (Foltz, 2000;Watts, 1998).One long-term, ethnographic study of congregations in Northern Arizona found that some members do not see the environment as a religious question at all, and they often struggle to cite a single theological principle pertaining to it (Menning, 2006).However, when members do identify theological principles, they often interpret them differently than in the 19th century (Guth et al., 1995;Sonntag, 2019).Among these is an embrace of the eschatological argument common among other climate skeptical Christians (Barker & Bearce, 2013;Guth et al., 1995;Robbins & Palmer, 2013).Where before, eschatological fatalism was staved off by the melioristic teachings of Brigham Young, these teachings have fallen into relative obscurity (Flores, 1983, p. 335).Many modern American Latter-day Saints now see the earth as temporally (though not spiritually) doomed; it is on a path toward inevitable destruction during the millennium, and is, therefore, impossible to save (Sonntag, 2019).This may contribute to the general environmental antipathy of American Latter-day Saints, however, more work must be done to prove this connection.Further work should also be undertaken to understand how modern Latter-day Saints in the US and abroad theologize their environmental beliefs, if they do at all.

| A CHANGE IN DIRECTION?
Numerous LDS ecotheologians have pointed to anecdotal evidence of a shift in Latter-day Saint thinking around the environment and ecology over the two decades or so (Brown, 2011;Haltinner & Sarathchandra, 2022;Handley, 2016;Harris, 2006;Kelson, 2006).As Handley states, "Mormon environmentalism is no longer an oxymoron.This is not due to new teachings but because there has been a resurgent interest in Mormon doctrines of the creation that were first published in the early-19th century" (Handley, 2016).The LDS Church and its leadership have been more open about the environment in the last decade than they have been in the last half century.This is evident in recent talks given by a couple of General Authorities to local or regional audiences (Nash, 2013;Snow, 2018), the release of two official web pages on stewardship (Handley, 2016), and even a church-wide talk emphasizing stewardship and environmental responsibility given at the October 2022 General Conference by a senior leader, Presiding Bishop, Gérald Caussé (2022).It is possible that these changes presage a wider movement among American Latter-day Saints toward a broad acceptance and understanding of their inherited eco-theology and its implications for the moral order.As is evident in the extraordinary path the American LDS have followed in bending from active to passive ecotheology over less than a century, things have changed once and they may change again.
However, what scant contemporary statistical evidence exists urges caution in making any sweeping predictions of change.A large-scale survey in 2019 of American Latter-day Saints found that the environment ranks at or near the bottom of serious concerns for church members of every generation of active members surveyed, while it ranked often significantly higher for ex-Mormons (Riess).More research needs to be done to uncover to what degree these first church-wide steps toward a more active environmental ethic are influencing church members.

| CONCLUSION
This review has sought to piece together what the historical, academic, and exegetical writings suggest about the story of Latter-day Saint eco-theology and ecological practices over the last 150 years.In particular, it shows how the robust early LDS eco-theology shaped a values system that emphasized creation care.When put into practice, these principles did not translate well and the local ecology suffered serious damage.Then, with the introduction of a series of exogenous forces, LDS values and practices shifted to embrace the capitalistic and exploitative practices redolent in the American West.This, in turn, encouraged a shift in the way the environment was theologized, if it was theologized at all.The modern culture, theology, and politics of American Latter-day Saints are now largely averse to scientific claims about the climate and environmental action.
This case study demonstrates the inextricable, iterative relationship among theology, values, and practices, particularly when it comes to environmental beliefs and behaviors.It supports both Weber's (1930) andTillich's theses (1959)-that theology influences cultural values, and that cultural values influence theology.It further demonstrates the real world ecological consequences of these conceptual conversations, consequences which are sometimes devastating.
Latter-day Saint environmentalism is a chronically under-researched branch of Mormon studies (Godfrey & Rogers, 2019;Handley, 2016;Rudy, 2006).Future research can tackle this issue from any number of angles.We need to know more about contemporary LDS positions on the environment, both within and outside of the Mormon Cultural Region, and certainly internationally.Much more should be written about how and whether Latter-day Saints seek to theologize their environmental beliefs, or if they see their environmental beliefs as being originally derived from theology.Historians should also study first-hand accounts of how early Latter-day Saints thought about their relationship with the environment to confirm whether their personal beliefs agree with the edicts passed down from the pulpits.By building the corpus of literature focusing on LDS ecotheology and ecological practices, scholars will not only add to Mormon Studies, but to our larger understanding of how religion can contribute to either the protection or devastation of our common home.