Why are white evangelicals the most skeptical major religious group in America regarding climate change? Previous scholarship has pointed to cognitive factors such as conservative politics, anti-science attitudes, aversion to big government, and theology. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, scholar Robin Globus Veldman reveals the extent to which climate skepticism and anti-environmentalism have in fact become embedded in the social world of many conservative evangelicals. Rejecting the common assumption that evangelicals' skepticism is simply a side effect of political or theological conservatism, the book further shows that between 2006 and 2015, leaders and pundits associated with the Christian Right widely promoted skepticism as the biblical position on climate change.
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AXIS Moondy AXIS Moondy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought in the Department of Liberal Studies at Landmark College, and I am joined today by Dr. Robin Veldman.
She's Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Texas A&M.
She describes herself as an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar with research that examines how religious beliefs and culture identity shape attitudes toward and conceptions of the natural world.
And, Professor Veldman, I want to welcome you and thank you for joining us on Straight White American Jesus.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Yeah.
Now you have just published a book.
It just is coming out this month, University of California Press, The Gospel of Climate Skepticism, Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change.
And so I want to just start with that.
We talked some on this podcast about evangelicals and views on education and intellectualism and the history of their views on science and scientific authority, and we'll talk more about that as our discussion progresses.
But I want to begin by asking you, would it be fair to define white American evangelicals as climate skeptic?
Yeah, that's a good question.
And so the way I would answer that is, I mean, I wouldn't define them as climate skeptics, because climate skepticism is certainly separate from evangelicalism.
But what surveys and social scientific studies show is a A tendency relative to other major religious groups to be more skeptical.
So just a survey from 2014, you know, finds that, for example, Hispanic Catholics, 43% of them are very concerned about climate change.
When you get down to mainline Protestants, 22% are very concerned about climate change.
And then you get down to white evangelical Protestants, it's 18%.
Over time, surveys have consistently found them to be the least concerned and the most likely to reject the scientific consensus, either believing that climate change is not happening at all or that it's not happening, that it's not being caused by human activities.
And in addition to that, what's really interesting about evangelicalism is that when you do more sophisticated statistical analysis, analyses they show that there is some kind of association between evangelical religiosity, you know, it's unclear exactly what the mechanism is, or I have my theories, but, and skepticism toward climate change.
And you don't see that with other religious traditions.
So, you know, while you can't say all evangelicals are climate skeptics, that's certainly not true.
They are more likely to be climate skeptics than Americans and other religious groups, and that skepticism is in some way linked to their identity.
So, I mean, I don't want to put you too much on the spot, but you say you have sort of some theories.
Do you have an explanation for that?
I mean, for example, a lot of our listeners will know that white evangelicals, for example, share a lot in common with, say, Catholics on the views of abortion or something like that, or some other sort of quote-unquote traditional family values kinds of things.
And yet, as you're saying, the numbers on something like climate change or the climate crisis, however you want to phrase that, is different.
Do you know anything about those mechanisms?
Or are you doing work, are others doing work, to try to understand what that connection is with the religiosity levels?
Yeah, so I do.
That was really what I was trying to figure out in the book.
So the main theories that are out there, of course, are that it's kind of a side effect of political conservatism.
Political conservatism, there's a big partisan divide on climate change.
Democrats are more likely to be concerned, Republicans are not.
And then there are questions about whether it's some aspect of evangelical theology, you know, whether it's end-time belief or belief that Jesus is going to return soon, so they don't care about the fate of the planet.
Or, you know, sort of a displacement effect where they're more focused on, say, the afterlife than on the present, and, you know, so they just don't have room in their lives, or they're more focused on, you know, pro-life activities, and maybe they don't have room to deal with environmental issues.
So, or there's, you know, ideas about whether they are more sort of individualistic in their theology, and that might be a factor discouraging them from wanting to think about these Essentially collective action problems.
And so what I have come to over, it's actually eight years of study now, quite a long time, and I started out doing ethnographic field research with a subset of evangelicals I call traditionalists, and this is Kind of a group that is sort of the laity that is associated, I guess, with sort of supportive of the Christian right.
They want to restore Christian values to their former place in American public life.
That's kind of the unifying feature and that's a narrative that the Christian right has promoted as well.
So and these are, you know, politically conservative, obviously theologically conservative as well.
So I started out there and I I talked to people in the region where I was working, and I went to churches, and I really just tried to understand how they made sense of how they thought about the environment, what their attitudes were, what they thought about climate change, and I asked about those separately.
And then later, I came to understand, or I came to believe, that you can't just see it as evangelicals' attitudes are not just based on their personal experiences, or their personal ideas, I would say, but they're being really influenced by what's appearing in the evangelical mass media.
Um, like Christian radio in particular and Christian television.
So, um, yeah.
So, um, going back to, you know, my initial kind of observations, um, were that, um, you know, I think early in the, say, you know, climate change first became an issue in the, well known to the public in the late 1980s.
So in the 1990s and early 2000s, I think it's fair to, to, Attribute evangelicals' attitudes towards climate change to kind of ahistorical factors, some of the ones that I mentioned.
And if you go back and look at early surveys of their attitudes toward climate change, evangelicals always have stood out as being a little less concerned and a little bit more skeptical than the rest of, you know, if you're comparing them to the American public at large.
But what happened, there was a series of events That happened in the mid-2000s that drew attention to climate change.
It became a major topic of debate within the evangelical community.
Right.
And we can talk about it.
It's kind of a long story, but yeah, there was an attempt to raise concern about climate change within the evangelical community.
It was associated with an effort called the Evangelical Climate Initiative that came out in 2006.
It got a lot of media coverage.
And basically, it inspired a lot of backlash, and I think when we try to understand how evangelicals today tend to make sense of climate change, you have to view it through the prism of that backlash campaign, because that encouraged leaders with major media ministries, and I'm thinking of people that I... anyone who knows the Christian right, I think, will recognize these names.
Other people, they might not be as familiar, but like Chuck Colson, Pat Robertson, David Barton, people like this started gradually talking about climate change on their radio broadcast or television broadcast and presenting it in more of a skeptical light.
And I think that really shaped how evangelicals around the country came to understand climate change.
In particular, it was not always but often, and I'm basing this on my sort of analysis of radio
Mostly radio, but some television programs between 2006 and 2015, how they talked about, they sort of highlighted climate change activists and advocacy as being anti-Christian, as in particular suggesting that, you know, climate change is, it's an alarm, it's alarmist, first of all, like they use a lot of ideas that you see in the secular climate denial sphere, but then they would also sort of attribute a
Antichristian impulse to it and say, well, they're just, you know, they're trying to come up with a competing end time story.
You know, and I had one woman tell me, you know, I already know how the world is going to end.
I don't need to, I'm not going to worry about, you know, polar ice caps.
So there's this sense of that, this message about climate change was being put out there intentionally to try to sort of undermine Christian faith.
And that was a, An interpretation that I think was really furthered in the evangelical media.
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