How does environmental consciousness permeate the definition of morality among religious elites in Kuwait? Since the start of the “Islamic Awakening” throughout the Muslim world in the late 1970s, religious leaders have communicated their definition of a moral society through the social causes and policy agendas for which they advocate. In Kuwait, the rise of political Islam has led to religious institutions increasing their grip on the different levers of government and consequently on society’s psyche when it comes to advocating for conservative policy objectives. Examples include recent pushes for gender segregation in education, aggressive censorship of speech, and the banning of events promoting different forms of art. Yet absent from all of this religious mobilization is any embrace of environmental advocacy. This absence is surprising, as there is a sizable body of literature that highlights the emphasis in Islamic teachings on embracing a stewardship environmental ethic that mandates active sustainable management of the natural environment (Foltz, Denny, & Haji, 2003; Jamieson, 2001). Further, the absence of environmentalism from the narrative of morality in Kuwait has led to increased stigmatization of environmentally friendly attitudes such as recycling and reduction of waste. This research project explores the following question: Why do narratives of morality among the religious elite in Kuwait ignore or even degrade values of environmental stewardship and sustainability? I argue that in Kuwait, where conservative Islamists are a part of the semi-democratic monarchical system, sociopolitical advocacy by the religious elite has been limited by the country’s economic (and political) dependence on fossil fuel revenues. This dependence has muted Islamist groups in national conversations around future transformations of Kuwait’s economy away from fossil fuels. This research employs Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), drawing from a combination of original surveys and semi-structured interviews with important Kuwaiti religious leaders and groups (Al-Mudaires, 2006; Herb, 2016), to investigate this puzzle. The survey questions test the relative rank of environmentally oriented definitions of morality in comparison with other causes that dominate the agenda of the religious right. The results of this micro-level narrative analysis are complimented with semi-structured interviews with the same individuals in the sample. Together, the original data develop a grounded theory that explains the dominant definition of morality and the gap between prominent stewardship teachings in Islamic scripture and environmentally destructive socioeconomic systems that still thrive in Kuwait, with lessons for the saliency of environmentalism in fellow Gulf monarchies with hydrocarbon-based economies.