While Christians are exhorted by the Bible to care for the Earth, do religious views have any influence on views about climate science? Pew Research has studied this question and concluded that the answer is "no". According to Cary Funk and Becka Alper, "When it comes to people's beliefs about climate change, it is the religiously unaffiliated, not those who identify with a religious tradition, who are particularly likely to say the Earth is warming due to human activity. Hispanic Catholics, like Hispanics in general, are more likely to say the Earth is warming due to human activity. White evangelical Protestants stand out as least likely to have this view." I encourage you to take a look at the Pew report at http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/22/religion-and-views-on-climate-and-energy-issues/.
While many perceive that evangelical Protestants often question the reality of climate change, evangelical churches, along with mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics, have undertaken climate change initiatives. A cross-denominational group called Interfaith Power and Light (www.interfaithpowerandlight.org) was started in 1998 and has operated continuously since to address the issue.
At the forefront for evangelicals is a group called The Evangelical Climate Initiative (www.christiansandclimate.org). It's composed of more than 300 senior evangelical leaders across the USA.
Is any of this support for climate change initiatives by churches having an impact? It seems not. Even though Christian churches have often expressed views in support of the idea of climate change, they don't seem to be a key factor affecting the views of those attending church. According to the Pew researchers, "Just 6% of U.S. adults in the 2010 survey said religious beliefs have had the biggest influence on what they think about "tougher laws to protect the environment." More said the biggest influence on their views has been education (28%), the media (24%), personal experience (18%), or something else (11%). Another 6% said friends or family had the biggest influence on their views."
This tendency for Christians, particularly Protestants, to be skeptical of climate science seems to parallel skepticism about Darwin and evolution by natural selection. The figures seem to be in parallel, with one interesting exception. While black Protestants seem to be particularly skeptical of Darwin and evolution, they are comparatively strong supporters of the idea of human causes to climate change. Fifty six percent of black Protestants believe that humans are causing climate change.
So why, then, do white Catholics and mainline Protestants have a relatively low belief that humans are causing climate change (45% and 41% respectively), and white evangelical Protestants have an even lower support (28%)? According to the researchers, the reason wasn't because of what churchgoers were hearing on Sunday. "A series of multivariate logistic regression analyses, not shown here, found no significant effect of church attendance on views either predicting that the Earth is warming or predicting that the Earth's warming is due to human activity, once other factors are controlled. Similarly, the major religious affiliation groups did not differ from the religiously unaffiliated in views about climate change."
Instead, the researchers concluded it had more to do with politics than religion. "However, in multivariate statistical modeling, the major religious affiliation groups did not differ from the religiously unaffiliated in views about climate change. Political party identification and race and ethnicity are stronger predictors of views about climate change beliefs than are religious identity or observance." Based upon this, the reasons white Catholics and Protestants are more likely than others to be climate change skeptics has less to do with religious beliefs than with their propensity to be Republicans.
