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This paper explores the relationships between religion, environmental and other values and voluntary activities using the data from the 1990 European Values Surveys (EVS). Previous work on these data had suggested that environmental concern is much more influenced by demographic characteristics such as education and income than by religious values. The way in which religious identities and convictions and, particularly, interpretations of scriptural passages are related to environmental concerns is a controversial one. Various sources suggest that the relationship between religion and environmentalist views among the populations of advanced industrialist societies is unclear. The 1990 EVS provides the opportunity to explore some of these relationships. This paper examines, using path analysis, the strength of both an individual Roman Catholic identity and a Roman Catholic national context on environmental values and propensity to appropriate action in pursuit of environmental concerns. It shows whether Catholics have internalized a sense of stewardship, which is reflected in higher levels of environmental concerns, in contrast to Protestants who place greater emphasis on economic growth, production as an end rather than a means, and mastery over nature.

This article examines the marginalization of British Catholics active both in the Church and in the Labour movement. On the one hand such Catholics often have to face the traditional clerical suspicion of socialism with its imputed associations with militant atheism and Marxist materialism. On the other hand, within the Labour movement there have been suspicions of the resistance of Catholics to radical social change and their alleged reactionary positions in the matter of women's rights. Two Catholic Members of the Parliament have complained that though they received some support for their political involvement from individuals, in the main they did not feel they received support in the vocation from the institutional Church. Both testified to the political difficulties which they had and the pressures to which they had been subjected in attempts to amend abortion legislation. Such findings lend credence to the hypothesis that Catholics active both in the Church and in politics experience a sense of marginality in both institutional spheres. As such, Catholics grapple with the sometimes conflicting demands of the social worlds of the Catholic Church and the Labour movement and they experience psychological uncertainty.