Religious affiliation and climate change

Where folks worship affects their outlook on global heating

Before we get started, I’d like to mention someone fairly new to Substack who promises to be a great environmental resource. Rainforest ecologist

Mike Shanahan

, who has been a human rights advocate and a writer for The Economist, Nature, Newsweek, Scientific American, Mongabay, and other publications, started The Nature Beat a few months back. I highly suggest you give him a click and maybe a subscribe for his updates on conservation and biodiversity.

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Last week, in The Green Dispatch I wrote about misogyny and authoritarianism and how people with a low regard for women or a high regard for authority will tend to be dismissive about climate change and environmentalism in general. That got me wondering about other viewpoints and how they might affect a person’s acceptance of the science of global warming. I decided to look into people’s religious beliefs and how they might influence their views on this topic.

The leadership of most major religions in the U.S. have addressed climate change and encouraged their flocks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Pope Francis has given Roman Catholics considerable guidance on global heating. He has issued two encyclicals on the subject and established a Day of Prayer for the care of God’s creation. Although previously expressing skepticism on climate change, the National Association of Evangelicals has recently issued a report that called on their faithful to acknowledge and address climate change. The National Council of Churches is a featured partner of StopGlobalWarming.eu and has spoken out on other environmental causes. Jewish, Baja’i, and other religious organizations have also addressed climate change.

Yet the findings from a Pew Research poll from November of 2022 indicate that the faithful are far behind their religious leaders when it comes to acceptance of the science of climate change. A more recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found similar results.

The Pew poll found that of all religious groups in the U.S., evangelical Protestants are most likely to deny the existence of man-made global heating. Almost a third (32 percent) of this religious group say they are unsure or unconvinced that our Earth is warming at all. A larger share, 36 percent, acknowledge that the Earth is getting warmer, but they say that the temperature rise is due to natural causes outside of what humans are doing. In all, 68 percent of this section of American faithful do not believe in the connection between Earth’s rising temperatures and humans spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Only 32 percent of Evangelicals acknowledge that the global temperature is increasing due to the activities of humans.

In the survey, many evangelical Protestants agreed with the statement that God was in control of the Earth’s climate. They also had a retro view of American politics, with most (63 percent of Evangelicals) saying that when the U.S. and its people make decisions as a country, our values should be in step with previous generations. Other religious groups were more apt to believe that this country needs to consider factors that previous generations did not think about.

In contrast to Evangelicals, half (50 percent) of all mainline Protestants and slightly more (54 percent) Roman Catholics agreed that global warming is real and caused by humans.

The later survey from PRRI had some interesting findings concerning race and heritage and how those influenced belief in climate change. The overwhelming majority (76 percent) of Hispanic Catholics and a majority (59 percent) of black Protestants say they believe in anthropogenic climate change. PRRI offered no explanation as to why black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics diverged so greatly from their white counterparts, nor can I think of any explanation.

What’s behind the numbers

The folks at Pew connect politics with evangelical Protestants’ doubts about climate change. Since the late seventies, the GOP has fostered conservative Christians, particularly Evangelicals, as a voter base. Ronald Reagan and the GOP fostered abortion as a political issue, while Evangelical religious leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, developed it as a religious issue in the early eighties.¹ This political/religious alignment has, over the years, incorporated other issues that appeal to religious conservatives, such as book banning. This alignment is probably stronger than it was in the eighties.

Many of the world’s religious leaders are encouraging their flocks to care about climate change and the environment. Photo: The Christian Reformed Church crcna.org

Fossil fuel companies support the GOP. Coal companies give 95 percent of their campaign funds to the GOP; oil and gas companies give 87 percent of their campaign monies to the GOP as well. The Party of Lincoln has thus become the party of climate denial and delay. Pew says the climate denial of the political party cross pollinates to evangelical Protestants.

Although they are often lumped together as the same, Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestants are not the same, but at least a subset of evangelical believers share fundamentalist beliefs in the literal truth of the bible. These folks are suspicious of much of the scientific world—astronomy, geology, botany—as many scientific findings run counter to their belief in an inerrant bible. I would guess that at least some of the doubts these folks have about climate change spring from their general doubts about science.

The less church, the fewer doubts about climate science

According to Pew, believers who were less involved with their churches or places of worship were more likely to see man-made global warming as a reality, with 70 percent of those who said that they had a low level of religious commitment acknowledging man-made global heating (as opposed to 50 percent of those with medium commitment and 39 percent of those with high religious commitment).

Perhaps to the chagrin of many believers, if there is going to be any progress on climate change in the U.S., it will not be fostered in our synagogues, mosques, and churches. Atheists and agnostics turn out to be the ones who are most concerned about global warming. Ninety percent of atheists and 78 percent of agnostics agree that the Earth is warming and identify human activity as its cause.

How about you? Are you very religious? Do you accept climate change as fact? Why are atheists so willing to acknowledge the science of climate change? Please share your thoughts by clicking the “Leave a comment” button below.

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1. By DUDLEY CLENDINEN Special to The New,York Times. "Rev. Falwell Inspires Evangelical Vote: Opposition to Abortion 'Not a Minority Movement' New Lines of Communication Counter to Democratic Platform Strong Images, Words of Gus Hall." New York Times (1923-), Aug 20, 1980. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/rev-falwell-inspires-evangelical-vote/docview/121105876/se-2.