Six Reasons Why Evangelicals Don’t Believe in Climate Change

The epicenter of worldwide climate change denial is in the American Deep South among evangelical Republicans.   There’s irony in this.  Republicans appear to have abandoned their own history of leadership in the conservation movement in the US.  The GOP is bringing up the rear in response to the supreme ecological crisis in history.    Even more ironic is evangelical denial of the crisis.  Evangelicals consistently poll as the stand out group filling out the ranks of climate skeptics.  

I believe that evangelical climate skepticism is an aberration and contrary to its own tradition.  If conservative Protestants could recover its biblical roots and essential activism it could be a force for awakening  and mission not seen since the 19^th century.   

Why is the largest chunk of American Christianity, a group totaling over a quarter of the country’s population, reluctant to take on a coming catastrophe that is truly of biblical proportions?  There’s not a single reason, nor do all evangelicals shy away from the climate issue.  But, a huge group of Americans who file into pews week after week to hear about sin, redemption, one’s neighbor, and ultimate destiny are not much interested in an eerily similar message coming from climate scientists, namely a message of sin, redemption, neighbor and the future?

Here are six reasons why:

• Conservative Christianity has always had a troubled relationship with science.

The feud between science and the Church started four centuries ago when Galileo, peering through his telescope, offered the opinion that maybe everybody was mistaken about the Sun revolving around the earth.  Perhaps the truth was that the Earth revolved around the Sun.  Such opinions were so novel in the 1600’s that the Church, in the midst of the Inquisition, put Galileo on trial and eventually banished him to house arrest, which lasted until his death.   The entire incident was unfortunate.  It left the Church with a deserved black eye.  The arrangement of the solar system is not a biblical issue and the Church did not need to be standing guard over outdated cultural beliefs. 

The troubled relationship between Christian faith and science has continued through the modern era.  The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy was sparked by 19^th century scientific discoveries which enabled scholars to uncover new information about the Bible.   European scholars were discovering more and more about the human authorship and editing of the Scriptures. 

This development sent many Christians into a panic.  They worried that science might disprove in piecemeal fashion the essential doctrines of Christian faith.  Believers, in turn, are forced to respond in some way.  My own tradition, Presbyterianism, eventually clarified that truth is a single reality.  Thus scientific truth will always be compatible with the truth of faith.  This position is widely shared by both mainstream Protestants and Catholics. 

So whenever comes up with something that appears to invalidate something in Christian faith, either the science or the theology needs to be adjusted.  Our experience is that scientific breakthroughs invariably enrich our faith, even if we need to revamp our attitudes.  The rise of the Biblical Theology movement, is a good example of a flexible, developing approach to biblical interpretation, which takes advantage of all available sources of insight. 

Another widely used response to science and modernism is fundamentalism.  Most people think of fundamentalism as particularly intense form of Christian piety.  This is misleading.  Fundamentalism was basically a hedge against advancing modernism.  The word fundamentalism derives from a collection of fundamentals, 5 key doctrines that theologians deem essential to orthodox faith.  Christians should not have to negotiate the bedrock principles of their faith.  In practice this means that if science collides with a Fundamental then we’re not going to talk about it. 

The Scopes Trial in 1925 is a good example of Fundamentalism at work.  Back in the 1920’s Tennessee passed a law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools.   This law was put in place because lawmakers had been convinced that evolution was incompatible with the biblical version of human origins.  They responded simplistically by outlawing any teaching of such ideas in public school classrooms.  The trial was a nationwide media sensation which pitted Clarance Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in a lively debate.  John Scopes the substitute teacher who was found in violation of Tennessee’s law, technically lost his case, though he never paid a fine.

What the idea of the fundamentals and fundamentalism established was a precedent where empirical science could be rejected if its conclusions clashed with any doctrine that some conservative group deemed as essential.  

A complete story of how the church and science struggle is more complex than is necessary to lay out here.  Suffice it to say that the spirit of Fundamentalism continues in many groups within Christianity today.  For this group, biblical revelation can always trump science. 

Climate change is chocked full of ideas that clash with a traditional Christian world view.  The most obvious is the idea that people may go extinct.  This is incompatible with the Bible’s view that a human person bears the image and likeness of God.   The idea that such an exalted creatures might kill themselves off through their own stupidity and be replaced by cockroaches or catfish appears counter to their own exalted nature. 

The Bible sees the whole of Creation as the object of God’s love and an embodiment of God’s goodness, truth and beauty.   The fundamentalist temperament is to meet such challenges by ignoring them and banishing any discussion of them.  I believe that this attitude accounts for some of the silence about global warming in churches today.

• American Evangelicals are married to the Republican Party and don’t challenge its anti-socialist, pro-business emphasis.

For reasons that go beyond this essay, Evangelicals have made common cause with Republicans.  Republicans are willing to support causes long pursued by conservative Christians, notably the limitation of abortion rights and the granting to churches privileged status in public life. 

In turn, evangelicals have absorbed several conservative political ideas, which have mixed with distinctly Christian ideas.  Conservative political attitudes toward free markets, diplomacy with Israel, secularism, military, race, homosexuality, immigration, general patriotism, and so on have bled into church ideology and are indistinguishable from biblical faith. 

In fairness, this process happens on the political and theological left as well.  Several years ago, middle-of-the-road Presbyterian theologian, Dr. John Leith, said that Presbyterian Social Policy witness was indistinguishable from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Climate change is an issue that challenges the free market orthodoxy of the Republican party.   The urgency of action needed and the scale of change that must take place will require robust governmental intrusion into private life.   It will be necessary to regulate fossil fuels if warming is to be limited.  Such centralized authority is abhorrent to the neo-liberal political establishment.  In turn, Christian churches, feel at some level that the climate emergency is a threat to Christian values as well.

Quite simply Evangelicals and Republicans maintain their alliance by sticking together on issues that concern the other.  Though not supported by biblical faith, a lot of conservative issues receive sympathetic support from allies in the pews of conservative churches.  Nothing encapsulates this point like the devotional choral anthem, “Make America Great Again,” that was sung for Donald Trump shortly after his election at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas.  While the anthem makes no mention of God, it certainly conveys the idea that conservative religion and conservative politics are running down the same road.

• Evangelicals have a disabling eschatology

Again, books can and have been written on the Christian idea of the end times or the final destiny of both the individual and the whole of creation.   I would simplify the situation this way.  Information about Christian future hope is sprinkled throughout the Bible and particularly on the lips of Christ.  Interpreters need to comb through all of the many clues dropped throughout the biblical text and assemble them into some kind of coherent picture.  It should be no surprise that the picture varies and that thoughtful Christians can hold a variety of views.  Hal Lindsey, with his best seller, Late Great Planet Earth and then Tim Lahey with his Left Behind series of books give vivid evidence of how powerful and entertaining differing ideas of the end times can be. 

More recently, authors such as N.T. Wright have reminded us of the centrality that Jesus’ Resurrection holds in informing our idea of how life and history is going to wrap up.  Wright emphasizes the  this-worldliness of the end times.  After his crucifixion, Jesus  didn’t simply reappear at the right hand side of God the Father.  He came back to his earthly ministry and earthly associates, the disciples.  Wright goes on to point out how the Kingdom of God, about which Jesus teaches much, is clearly an earthly hope.  Someday God’s values and desires will be realized in the world we currently occupy.  Finally, expounding the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation, it becomes quite clear that John of Patmos’ vision of the culmination of all things is a this-worldly rather than other-worldly reality.  Heaven joins the earth as the setting over which Christ will reign. 

My point of looking at end times thinking is to notice that any idea that God will ditch  the created world after he has harvested only his faithful followers gives us too limited a scope for God’s saving work.   Unfortunately, Christians have uncritically thought that after death they, if they’re lucky, will go to live with God in a remote place called Heaven.  It’s as if Christians are evacuated from earth, which is discarded.

The idea that, as N.T. Wright puts it, “God intends to do to all creation what he did for Jesus when he raised him from the dead,”   revolutionizes our attitude towards the planet and all peoples.  I’ve talked with several pious Christians about global warming.  They don’t dispute the science behind the prediction of massive global disruption.   But they move immediately to a disabling view of the end of all things.  I’ve heard: “Oh, so that’s how the world’s going to end.”  The problem with this view is that it isn’t consistent with their own faith. 

Unfortunately, main stream American Protestants do no better.  We spend little time thinking about our personal destiny nor that of the whole creation.  The ideas of heaven and the consummation of life are much more current among Evangelicals.  It’s going to be difficult for believers with an other-worldly eschatology to get fired up about the destruction of the planet.

• Evangelicals neglect elements in Christian faith that support a robust response to climate disaster.

Probably my biggest criticism of institutionalized Christianity—church congregations—is that it bases its existence on too small a proportion of its own faith.  When was the last time you heard a sermon about…?  What worries me is that we can fill in that blank with a shocking list of topics.  When was the last time you heard a sermon on the Old Testament Prophets, the Sermon on the Mount, the Old Testament Law, the Exile, the Resurrection, the Book of Revelation, discipleship?  As someone who has preached every Sunday for 40 years, I can say emphatically that someone listening to my sermons would not hear enough about Christian faith.  And I’ve recognized this problem since the late 1970’s. 

Denominations have a similar struggle.  Presbyterians emphasize different aspects of Christian faith than do Baptists or Catholics.  I always thought that new members in my congregations brought a wealth of fresh insight into Christian living when they were switching from another denomination.  

Now the widespread neglect of aspects of faith should not be a surprise.  Christian faith in general is complex and really represents the merger of two traditions—that of Israel and that of Jesus.  Additionally, someone wisely observed that the ideas of Christian faith are not always obvious or even common sensical.  This is doubtless why Christianity has spawned more heresy controversies than other religions.  It is not obvious.  It requires, as someone else said that we “stand on tiptoe” as if looking over a high fence in order to catch a glimpse of a bit of its grandeur. 

It is because of this complex and sublime character of Christian faith that it shouldn’t be a surprise that the emergence of a world threatening crisis might catch us completely unprepared.  As I’ve thought on my own about Global Warming I also think about themes in the Bible that no one else seems to be talking about.  For example, the Old Testament Prophets faced the same kind of life and death crises that we’re facing now.  The Prophets interpreted their own situations in ways that shed a powerful light on what we face.  How might God feel about global warming?  How much of this is our fault?  What should we be doing about it?  Where does judgment and punishment fit in?  What is God’s ultimate plan? 

Why aren’t we hearing a vigorous word from Jeremiah and Isaiah in pulpits across the country as the climate warms?  Because we haven’t given Jeremiah and Isaiah much attention in decades.  There exists this great forgetting.

This isn’t just about the Old Testament Prophets.  What about the character and vocation of Creation as it is laid out in Genesis and threads through the Bible?   What about a thoroughgoing biblical eschatology along the lines that I’ve mentioned above?  What about the theological essence of the human person?   How can a being made in the image and likeness of the Creator be going extinct?  That’s a theological problem.  What about Noah?  Here’s a character that figures so prominently in the Creation story and he deals heroically with, what do you know, an ecological disaster.  There’s an obvious place to start. 

If we were facing a world-wide problem of individual sin or the need for grace or gratitude, all areas where the church has focused its proclamation, I believe that pulpits would thunder with a response.  Climate has hit us much as the appearance of the Magi hit Herod and Jerusalem when Jesus was born.  They had to scramble to figure out what they had to say.

• Evangelicals are leery of nature worship.

Suspicion of nature worship is a primitive habit of mind in biblical religion.  Ancient Israel struggled for centuries to differentiate itself from the traditional fertility religions that were ubiquitous in Canaan and throughout the Mediterranean World.   The New Testament gives evidence of this ancient tension.  Paul worried about the influence of Corinth’s Temple to Aphrodite, a long-time center of cult prostitution.   As the Church came into contact with the peoples around the Mediterranean Sea, it also encountered a host of Mystery Religions and classical worships that bristled with fertility themes. 

The primitive mind saw sexuality as a powerful life force and elevated it to divine status.   This is still true.  The sphere of life on and above the earth is powered by sexual reproduction and energy.  There is some warrant to equating religion and fertility. 

Biblical religion, however, seeks to keep the compelling power of fertility from becoming an object of veneration.  The biblical God created and transcends the World’s powers , notably the powers of fertility.    

It should be no surprise that Christians are going to be cautious about any issue that emphasizes nature, the environment, or any kind of reverence for the Earth.  The expression Mother Earth, for example, falls outside of an essentially biblical outlook. 

This is not to say that biblical faith is disinterested in nature and the peoples of the world.  This is the aspect of biblical faith that Protestants need to recover.  The Bible makes clear that nature suffers when humans treat one another abusively.  Egypt’s use of Abraham’s descendants as slaves resulted in a series of 10 plagues, all of which looked like ecological disruptions.  We see a hint of this principle at the hour when Jesus died on the cross.  The earth and weather appeared to signal its displeasure with darkness.  Throughout the Old Testament the creation acts as YHWH’s partner in signaling the spiritual condition of its inhabitants.  The preeminent indication of God’s interest in the created order is revealed in the Rainbow Covenant, in which God issues a guarantee that the earth would never be destroyed.  

Clearly, Christians need to dig back into their own tradition in order to recover a full-orbed outlook toward the Cosmos, or Creation, that is today so profoundly threatened.

• Evangelicals have a simplistic idea of Providence.

The word Providence has an unparalleled elegance.  The idea of providence is that God looks after the world and people in the world.  After God created everything in Genesis, God continued to guide and sustain what he had made.

The surprise is that the word, Providence does not actually appear in the text of either the Old or New Testaments.  Now this sweeping assertion needs qualification.  Some English translations will insert the word as a rendering for a Hebrew or Greek word that other translations render differently.  An example of this would be the Douay-Rheims Bible’s rendering of Ecclesiastes 5.6 as: “Give not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin: and say not before the angel: There is no providence: lest God be angry at thy words, and destroy all the works of thy hands.”   Twenty-seven other English Bible Translators use another word instead of providence.  At most there are four possible occurrences of the word, none of which are all found in the same English version.  It’s remarkable that such an important word and idea makes so few, if any, appearances in the Bible.

This is not to say that the activity of God’s providential care for what God has created is absent.  Everywhere we find evidence of a beneficial force intervening in the course of the narrative through both testaments.  The Red Sea parts just in time to save the Hebrews.  Peter casts a line and catches a fish that has a coin in its mouth, just enough to cover the tax he owes.  Examples are plentiful. 

It is important for Christians not be idled by a naïve idea that everything will turn out fine because God’s providence will  rescue the earth without human effort.   In Christian circles, doing nothing may seem like confidence in God’s management.    Such confidence runs counter to the way “providence” operates in the world of the Bible.  In Exodus, for example, following the Hebrew’s escape from Egypt, the mass of people under Moses’ leadership find themselves pressed between the sea and a oncoming blitzkrieg of Egyptian chariots.  Moses stands up and says exactly what you’d expect: “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today…the LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” 

Curiously, the waters of the Red Sea don’t begin to part as an escape.  In a tense moment, God speaks to Moses:  “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on. Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground” (Exodus 14.13-16).

Of course, there’s a miracle here.  But the divine intervention is clearly contingent on the prior activity by both the people and Moses.  This story is no lone example of a divine intervention which rides into the created order through the people’s activity. 

There are other times when God’s providence shows up in the Bible, not as a rescue from on high but as miracle deeply buried within human activity.  When primitive church members in the New Testament comes into conflict with local authorities they are not spared imprisonment .  God doesn’t intervene from above to save them from the arrest.  But clearly God is guiding the events.  We soon see that through the earliest believers’ suffering the gospel message becomes more attractive and reaches a larger audience.

I’m convinced that Christians today would plunge into the work of halting CO2 emissions and helping those displaced by storms and fires if they were willing to take seriously God’s willingness to use them as instruments of his care and preservation of creation.

What I’ve described as barriers that block evangelicals from getting engaged with the climate crisis are also open doors through which they can enter in order to recover neglected aspects of their own faith.   Science will not displace Christian faith.  Rather, uncomfortable new insights challenge us to plunge deeper and humbly into our understanding of what we believe enlightened by scientific insight.  Likewise, Christian faith and right-wing politics are different ideal systems.  Neither Evangelicals nor other Christian groups need the protection or special favors of any political party.  If ever there was an unequal yoking between a greater and lesser it is surely when a Christian communion squeezes itself into the mold of a secular political philosophy.   That principle goes for the political right and left.  The church flourishes not by political alliances but by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. 

Further, the scope of salvation extends beyond the individual and will gather up all of creation and her peoples at the end of time.  The climate crisis beckons Christians to recover and dig deeply into the New Testament vision of the Kingdom of God and the Resurrection of all things.  The Climate Crisis does not necessitate that believers become nature worshippers.  The church has always walked a tightrope between ignoring the natural world and seeing it as divine.  Finally, God intends to do for the entire Cosmos what he did for Jesus when he raised him from the dead.  But that glorious destiny for all things will be realized when humanity becomes deeply engaged in contributing to it.  Through our own planning, prayers, and outreach we will discover that our own efforts are being amplified by a power beyond anything we could command.

The story of Noah nicely parallels the challenge faced by Christians of all traditions.  Shortly after the Creation in Genesis, humanity strayed from God design and intention for the world.  Almost like a natural process, human wickedness resulted in ecological disruption in the form of the flood.  Noah recognized or was alerted by God as to where where Creation was headed.  In a marvelous alliance the Creator and Noah built a boat, an unimaginably huge project in a time before machinery and factories.  On the boat, Noah managed to save as much of the original creation as possible, mostly the entire animal kingdom.  Not only did Noah’s toil rescue an amazing chunk of what God created, but God also appeared moved by the entire experience.  When the boat finally came to rest, God established a covenant with the whole world that such a catastrophe would never engulf creation again.  Even more striking is the Bible’s assertion that Noah was a righteous person.  Early in the Biblical story we get a model human being—who is able to see ahead, listen to instructions, and act resolutely, without a list of excuses for idleness, on an impossible project. 

Not only are we in Noah’s debt, we’re his children.  And our task is before us.