Christian Science Monitor - Ben Rosen
The message is targeted at evangelicals and other conservatives, but many Americans do not see climate change as a moral issue, at least not yet.
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The terms "pro-life" and "pro-environment" are not normally linked,
but a growing number of Christian leaders insist they should be.
Pope Francis said so in
his 2015 encyclical on
the environment and human ecology. Now, the Evangelical Environmental
Network (EEN), a nondenominational organization committed to “
creation care,”
is promoting the argument that if you value life from its conception,
you should value a clean Earth for the rest of a child’s life and for
future children.
“When we talk about creation care in pro-life
terms, in caring for our children, both born and unborn, 97 to 98
percent of people get it,” says Rev. Mitch Hescox, president and chief
executive of the Pennsylvania-based Evangelical Environmental Network.
“That’s one of the reasons that I believe our community is growing to
take more action, to protect God’s creations and to protect children.”
Associating
"pro-life" with "pro-environment" is just one branch of religious
environmentalism, a movement that frames conservation in religious
terms. The idea has been around for decades, but has only started to
gain traction among evangelicals recently, especially among Millennials.
Still, most Americans
do not yet associate climate change with religion and morality, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Groups
like the Evangelical Environmentalism Network hope to change that. If
they are successful, it could have a major impact on the way much of
America views the issue, as evangelicals are estimated to make up
nearly a third of the population. But
some sociologists and historians doubt that reframing climate change as
a moral responsibility can reverse deep-seated skepticism among some
conservative Christians about environmentalism, especially among older
generations of evangelicals who have associated it with the culture wars
over abortion and same-sex rights.
“[The religious environmental movement] doesn’t
appear to have gained a lot of traction,” says Stephen Ellingson, a
sociologist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., and author of “To Care
for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement.”
“For a small number, it is primarily a moral and religious issue, but
for many it’s not seen that way. It’s not seen as important, I think,
because the environment is so highly politicized ... in some ways, it’s
framed really technically, as lobbying, litigation, and legislation.”
The
Evangelical Environmental Network and other faith-based organizations
do not try to separate climate change from politics. Both EEN and the
San Francisco-based Interfaith Power & Light, which encourages
environmental stewardship among religious groups, were on Capitol Hill
the past two weeks. But the groups try to downplay partisanship by
emphasizing a moral obligation for action.
For Mr. Hescox,
religion provides the “biblical imperative” to act, while so-called
market-based solutions are the answer on how to achieve results. Since
EEN is anti-abortion, he says, it believes all lives must be cared for
from the moment of conception. But the only way he believes he and other
conservative Republicans can get on board is through solutions such as
cap-and-trade programs or a carbon fee and fee dividend.
“It’s the only way we’re going to breach the chasm to conservatives,” he says.
Anti-abortionists
have been highlighting the threats that pollution is thought to pose to
unborn children for a dozen or so years, says Hescox. Rev. Jim Ball,
the past president of the network, tied
the rights of the unborn to the fight against mercury pollution.
Pope
Francis also integrated environmentalism and abortion in his second
encyclical, “Laudato si’,” when he wrote that environmental stewardship
is simply “incompatible with the justification of abortion.” But the
pope seemed to argue that people who care about endangered species and
the melting of polar ice caps
could not also support abortion,
as Crux reported. The Evangelical Environmental Network’s argument
appears to fit more into the religious environmental movement, linking
morality to the environment, not the other way around.
Many
Christian denominations have long supported the modern environmental
movement, in the 1960s and 1970s. Not evangelicals, however, writes Mark
Stoll, a historian at Texas Tech University who specializes on religion
and environmentalism.
“In the late 1970s they seized on the notion of the ‘culture wars’ and
lumped environmentalism together with abortion, feminism, gay and lesbian people’s rights,
and secular humanism as contrary to Christianity,” he writes. “Hostile
to environmentalism ever since, evangelicals cast even the solid science
on global warming as a conspiracy against freedom and faith promulgated
in schools and universities.”
This skepticism has continued until
the present day. In 2014, The Pew Research Center found only 28 percent
of white evangelicals said “climate change
is occurring mostly because of human activity such as burning of fossil fuels,” the lowest of any religious group Pew surveyed.
Those attitudes
have softened among
some millennial evangelicals, led by the likes of Jonathan Merritt,
author of “Green Like God: Unlocking the Divine Plan for Our Planet.”
A
pro-life, pro-environment association, then, is about gaining a
foothold among mainstream evangelicals and older generations, says Dr.
Ellingson at Hamilton College.
“It’s almost like reasoning by
analogy. ‘It’s like one of those issues for us. Then I can go ahead and
support it,” he tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone
interview.
Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and political science
professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and an evangelical
Christian, says EEN’s argument makes more sense than the “cognitive
dissonance” she describes among some conservatives.
“So often it seems like pro-life stops when you’re born. If you’re
really pro-life, you should be pro-life from conception to death,” she
says, mentioning United Nations efforts to
calculate the human costs of climate change.
This strategy is being used in other conservative
circles as well. Susan Bratton, an environmental science professor at
Baylor University in Waco, Texas, says many conservative Protestants
emphasize a humanitarian need to stop climate change. This includes
helping communities under threat from natural disasters and food
shortages. Rev. Canon Sally Bingham, president and founder of Interfaith
Power & Light, says that when she visits conservative congregations
in the South, she does not mention climate change. Instead, she focuses
her message on clean air, clean water, and a clean environment.
Two
years ago, in 2015, this moral framing of climate change had not yet
resonated with most Americans, according to the Yale Program on Climate
Change Communication. In the spring of that year, 10 percent of
Americans viewed global warming as a religious issue, 13 percent viewed
it as a spiritual issue, and about 36 percent viewed it as a moral
issue. But if this reframing does take hold, it could have a widespread
impact, according to the study’s authors. Americans tend to be more
religious than citizens in many other industrialized nations, they
write.
Links
Bloomberg recently announced the creation of a new website that will
provide audiences with important reporting on the economic and business
implications of climate change. The move comes at a time when big
businesses around the world are urging governments to take action as
they increasingly recognize the reality and the risk of climate change.
