Do Evangelicals Care About Climate Change?
Photo by Matt Palmer
(ANALYSIS) A few weeks ago I listened to an episode of “This American Life.” The main story was about a man named Michael Foster. He was married with two young girls when he began to devote his life to climate activism. His daughters would often join him on stage and give short speeches about the dangers of a warming planet and the cataclysm that awaits us if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.
Eventually, it drove a wedge between Mike and his family. He told the kids they couldn’t get a cat or fly on an airplane because of the impact it would have on the environment. His wife divorced him, and his two daughters have basically no relationship with their father now. I found this section about one of the daughter’s especially insightful:
Stella’s carbon footprint started to haunt her. When her mom drove her to school, when she drank a glass of milk, even when she exhaled sometimes, she’d think, all I’m doing is putting more carbon dioxide into the air. She started having nightmares every night of the world burning, or of oceans rising and flooding her house, or going to the grocery store and finding the shelves completely bare because droughts had killed off all the plants.
For those of us who grew up evangelical Christians, we experienced bouts of anxiety about our immortal souls and those of our friends and family who rejected salvation through Jesus Christ. It looks very similar to what Stella was experiencing.
But Mike’s response when a reporter told him about his daughter’s feelings was the most impactful:
Guilt is seriously underrated. Guilt and shame keep people from murdering each other. And honestly, guilt may be one of the few things that could keep life on Earth going for the next 10,000 years. If we can’t feel guilt or shame about what we’re doing and learn how to do something else, it was over a long time ago.
Mike’s response illustrates how both ends of the political spectrum can employ the same mantra: the ends justify the means. In this case — it’s okay to give your children anxiety and make them feel guilty, as long it gets them to reach your desired result. That could be either stop engaging in behavior that will lead to global warming or accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior and avoid eternal damnation.
This got me thinking about how those two concepts (environmentalism and religion) may be deeply intertwined with each other. To explore further I used survey hosted by the Association Religion Data Archives. The data I used was from the American Trends Panel (Wave 106), which was collected by the Pew Research Center in April of 2022. In the current discourse about religion, climate change has not really taken center stage. It seems the debate is focused on social issues: same-sex marriage, the rights of transgender Americans and abortion. Climate change and burning fossil fuels are not part of that discussion.
Do major religious groups see climate change as a pressing concern? And how do they understand the causes of that phenomenon?
Atheists are the most likely to be concerned with climate change — nearly two thirds think that it’s an extremely serious issue. About half of agnostics agree (54% say it is an extremely serious issue.) The gap between agnostics and other world religions is wider. A little more than a third of other world religions and those who report their religion as nothing in particular say that climate change is extremely serious. Among Catholics, nonevangelical and evangelical Protestants, concern is even lower. Only 31% of Catholics, 29% of nonevangelical Protestants and 17% of evangelicals see the issue as extremely serious.
However, it’s also important to point out the percentages of those who do not see climate change as a problem. Not many people are dismissing climate change completely. Only 6% of Catholics say it’s not a problem;it’s the same share of nonevangelical Protestants. Among evangelicals, only 15% are not concerned at all, which is about the same share who indicate it’s an extremely serious issue.
Politics may better explain these patterns, so I incorporated political groups into the analysis: Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.
The situation comes into clearer focus now. It’s not that evangelicals don’t care about climate change and atheists care a lot. It’s much simpler than that — Democrats believe climate change is a serious issue and Republicans don’t.
Recall that atheists expressed the most worry. Well, that’s really just because most atheists are Democrats. Nearly all atheist Democrats say that climate change is an extremely or very serious problem. Twenty-nine percent of Republican atheists agree.
That pattern repeats for every group visualized here. A Democrat is about 60 points more likely to be concerned with global climate change on average compared to a Republican. That’s not to say that religion doesn’t matter — for instance, only 77% of evangelical Democrats think that climate change is a extremely/very serious problem compared to 98% of Democratic atheists. But views of climate change turn more on politics than religion.
Climate change is complicated, so there may be differences in how people talk about it. The Pew survey asks about the possible causes of climate change. One question is about whether human activity is to blame, specifically the burning of fossil fuels.
Here, the same general pattern is repeated. Democrats are much more willing to believe that human beings are responsible for global warming than Republicans. Every atheist Democrat in the sample blamed human beings for global warming. It was 96% of Democrat agnostics. It is worth pointing out that belief is not as strong among evangelical Democrats; only 71% of them believe humans are to blame for the warming planet.
But very few Republicans are willing to make the same assertion. In most cases, only a quarter of Republicans believe that humans are primarily to blame for the warming planet. But again, religion does seem to be playing a bit part in these results. Republicans who are atheist/agnostic are more likely to implicate human beings in a warming planet compared to evangelical Republicans.
But one narrative concerning religion and the environment is that younger evangelicals are much more concerned with the issue and they will be pushing for significant policy changes in this area among the Republican party in the future. There’s an organization called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action that works toward these goals. But do young evangelicals actually care?
First, it’s important to establish a baseline. In the entire sample, 70% of folks between the ages of 18 and 29 say that climate change is an extremely or very serious problem. Among younger evangelical Protestants that share is just 48%, which is easily the lowest percentage of any religious group in the sample and not by a small margin. For most other groups, the percentage is closer to 70%. The only group that comes close is young Catholics at 59%.
Older evangelicals express lower levels of concern than younger evangelicals. Only 37% of evangelicals who are at least 55 years old say that climate change is a very serious or extremely serious problem. That’s about 14 percentage points lower than the entire sample. This data shows that older Americans are just less bothered by climate change, but that’s not always the case. For instance, the oldest atheists are more worried about climate change than any other age bracket of any other religious group.
But why are younger evangelicals less concerned with global climate change? Maybe the answer is that they just don’t think it’s a human-caused problem. If the rising global temperatures are just part of cyclical weather patterns, there’s no reason to fret. So, I examined that possibility.
In the entire sample of young adults, nearly 70% said that climate change is primarily caused by human activity. Just 15% indicated it was natural weather patterns. However, young Democrats were much more likely to blame humans (86%), and almost none said it was natural weather patterns. Younger Republicans have a much different view. The plurality of young Republicans believe that warming temperatures are just a result of weather patterns (36%), not human activity (25%).
Now, I did create a category of people who both identified as evangelical and Republican. But there’s a big caveat here. This group for 18-29 year olds only consisted of 55 respondents — so big grain of salt. But just 5% of young evangelical Republicans say that humans are to blame for rising temperatures.
Those findings are consistent across all the age categories I analyzed, as well. Democrats are much more willing to place the blame on humans for burning fossil fuels than on natural weather patterns. Republicans (evangelical or not) are much more apt to say that there is no evidence of global warming. A full 30% of evangelical Republicans who are at least 65 years old say that there’s no evidence of global warming at all.
As is probably becoming pretty evident now — this is a story where politics is really taking the lead and religion is in the backseat. I think there’s empirical evidence for why this is the case. The Pew survey asked folks who were attending religious services at least once a month how often that they had heard climate change discussed during the sermon.
For evangelicals, it appears rare that climate change is ever a topic of conversation from the pulpit. Fifty-six percent said that they had never heard it discussed on a Sunday morning, and another 22% said that it was only discussed a little. But those percentages are not far off in other religious traditions, either.
In nonevangelical Protestants, over two-thirds of attenders said that they had heard a little or nothing at all about climate change. Among Catholic Mass attenders, the numbers were almost exactly the same. The overall impression you get from this data is that pastors aren’t putting the environment front and center when it comes to their sermon preparation.
Paul Djupe and I wrote a paper about this that was published in Politics and Religion a few years ago. The survey we used asked folks if human beings should hold dominion over the Earth or that humans should be good stewards of natural resources. What we found was that whichever option appeared first was much more likely to be chosen by religious respondents. In other words, they didn’t hold strong views of environmental topics. Just changing which response option they saw first was enough to change their minds.
When pastors don’t talk about it, something else has to fill that void. And, as these results have illustrated pretty clearly — people fall back on their political partisanship when they have to come to conclusions about issues like this.
Political ideology — not theology — is driving this conversation.
This piece is republished from Graphs About Religion on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanburge.