Effects of Climate on Religion

As will be the case with many of my inital posts -- this essay is in response to a question posed to me by my ministry-training teacher. The question was:

Does climate affect people’s beliefs? Why or why not? Please explain your answer in a short essay.

My initial reaction to this question is this: duh! But, alas, I shall try to find a more eloquent way to say “duh” for the purposes of my essay. I am also working under the assumption that climate means the weather of the geographical region. If it means something else, I can rewrite this according to those parameters.

Climate is one of the many factors that affect people when they are in the process of discovering their system of beliefs. For the purposes of this paper, climate is defined as: “a region of earth having particular meteorological conditions” (“climate”). The most important way that climate affects beliefs is in their formation, and the next factor influenced by climate is the practice of beliefs.

According to my 4^th realm notes about why we study myth in conjunction with religion, the definition of religion is “set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe” (Notes). In the time when the major religion traditions where being established, climate was a driving factor in existence. If, say, it was suddenly cold in Greece for four months, this could mean death of crops, animals, and a large chunk of the human population. Following my definition of religion, it would make sense for the people of Greece to turn to their local agricultural goddess (or perhaps create her so that she is there to blame) and offer her something in exchanged for improved weather conditions. The types of gods in general would be influenced by the climate of the people creating a set of beliefs. If a person lived in Norway where it is dark for half of the year, then it would make sense for them to have a goddess of winter and off the hunt (Skadi) because half of the year their lives would depend upon hunting food in wintry conditions.

Modern living provides for modern conveniences these days and climate is simply something to be worked around, but weather and climate still influence the way that people choose to practice systems of belief. Climate these days needs to include which modern conveniences are available to the practioner. Many people, regardless of their path or religions, make some attempt to preserve the traditions of their belief system. If a modern American pagan chooses to follow a Norse tradition, then they might still honor Skadi in winter, but their methods and timing might change; they might sacrifice a chocolate goat to her instead of a living one and it might be in a different month when winter personally affects them. At the most basic level, if a person wishes to hold ritual for the purpose of honoring a particular god or holiday, they must then take the weather into account.

Climate has a clear and obvious affect on formation and modern practice of beliefs. Weather is too much of an influencing factor to be ignored when creating/discovering beliefs if one is to believe that myth and religion address “how we see and interact with the world and how we interact with deity”. Personally, I believe that belief systems would be very different if they were to be created today – looking at Gaiman’s book American Gods give support to this.