Who are American evangelical Protestants and why do they matter forUSclimate policy?

Abstract

White evangelical Protestants are the most skeptical major religious group in the United States regarding climate change. While their position of political influence in the Republican coalition is widely recognised, the full range of effects of this position on evangelicals' climate opinions is not. To move research on evangelicals from the margins of climate change opinion research, we review and integrate the interdisciplinary literature on US evangelicals, climate change, and politics. In assessing this literature, we identify three areas in need of further research. First, there is a critical need for more research on the climate attitudes of evangelicals of color, who comprise a growing share of the evangelical tradition in the US. Second, highlighting the Christian Right's active engagement in the climate debate, we identify a need for more experimental work examining how cues from religious elites may shape evangelicals' opinions. Finally, we suggest that to better harness insights across disciplines, researchers must become more explicitly aware of how different disciplines conceptualize temporality. Attending to temporal scale suggests that a new approach is needed to test how dominion beliefs, which are widely thought to be an important theological driver of climate skepticism, operate. We also suggest that two factors that appear to play a weak or limited role in driving climate skepticism over the short term (anti‐science attitudes and evangelical religiosity) may in fact play a significant role in driving skepticism over the medium term. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

Faithful Stewards of God’s Creation? Swedish Evangelical Denominations and Climate Change

“…A significant body of literature from the U.S. shows that environmental and climate concern is particularly low among White evangelical Protestants. There is an ongoing debate about which factors can help explain this finding, specifically whether the resistance to environmental and climate policy among evangelicals can most accurately be explained by reference to political orientation (including values and attitudes towards collective action), religious beliefs, or a combination of both (Veldman et al 2021). A significant number of studies have confirmed that political conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than their liberal counterparts (Dunlap et al 2001;Dunlap 2010, 2011;Antonio and Brulle 2011;McCright et al 2014).…”

“…Although most studies conclude that political orientation is the strongest predictor of climate opposition (see further in Edvardsson Björnberg et al 2017), there is evidence to suggest that religious belief may also shape the environmental attitudes and actions of evangelicals (see Veldman et al 2021 for a discussion). As noted by Veldman et al (2021), there is currently a noticeable lack of qualitative studies investigating some of the possible religious drivers of climate opposition.…”

“…Although most studies conclude that political orientation is the strongest predictor of climate opposition (see further in Edvardsson Björnberg et al 2017), there is evidence to suggest that religious belief may also shape the environmental attitudes and actions of evangelicals (see Veldman et al 2021 for a discussion). As noted by Veldman et al (2021), there is currently a noticeable lack of qualitative studies investigating some of the possible religious drivers of climate opposition. In the literature, biblical literalism is sometimes pointed out as a factor that contributes to increased levels of climate denial (Guth et al 1995;Smith and Leiserowitz 2013;Arbuckle and Konisky 2015;Morrison et al 2015;Schwadel and Johnson 2017).…”

“…In the United States (U.S.), White evangelical Protestants are among those who are most sceptical of climate science and least willing to support climate policy (Shao and McCarthy 2020;Veldman et al 2021). Survey work has consistently shown that White evangelicals dismiss the anthropogenic origin of climate change to a larger degree than other faith groups (Jones et al 2014;Leiserowitz et al 2015).…”

“…Well-funded organizations affiliated with the Christian Right continue to spread doubt about climate science within the U.S. evangelical community, prompting key leaders to withdraw their support for climate policy (Perez Sheldon and Oreskes 2017). The strong links that exist between the climate-oppositional evangelical groups and high-ranking U.S. Republican Party members mean that the former have a real opportunity to influence the country's political agenda (Bean and Teles 2015;Veldman et al 2021).…”