Climate Changed
What would Jesus do? Talking with evangelicals about climate
change
What would Jesus do?
Illustration: Eiko Ojala
In our new column about the American south and climate
change, we go towards Christians who have been resistant to ideas of
environmental stewardship - perhaps it’s a message they need to hear in their
own terms
by Megan Mayhew Bergman
Wed 19 Dec 2018 11.00 GMT Last modified on Wed 19 Dec 2018
15.15 GMT
I was, frankly, nervous about speaking to people of faith in
the south about climate change. I wrestled with my own preconceived notions and
past experiences, and was surprised when conversations took inspiring, if not
transcendent, turns.
Secular as I am now, I still think fondly of my childhood
minister, Dr Lehman, who loved college basketball and Honda Accords (he drove
13 of them during his lifetime). At the conclusion of each Lakeside Baptist
service, he’d call the eastern North Carolina congregation to action.
“Go forth,” he said as the organ began to play, “and be
involved in the world.”
My family later moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina, and my
high school experience felt ripped from the pages of the Footloose script.
Local parents disowned gay sons; classmates openly questioned the science of
evolution in biology class; Young Life leaders plastered an Abstinence Pledge
on the wall of our public school cafeteria.
My frustration from those years has at times stopped me from
reaching out to those in the faith-based community, especially regarding
political issues like climate change. I’m aware of my own bias, the way it was
formed by negative experiences, and how it limits my understanding of believers
and their choices. This realization helps me understand why believers might in
turn have problems connecting with someone like me.
But if we’re going to address climate change in time to
prevent catastrophic results, we’re going to do it by taking cooperative action
with those with whom we disagree. I find myself wondering if similar
discussions are happening in faith-based communities, and why there hasn’t been
a more palpable response to climate change among people of faith in the south.
While climate change scenarios have all the hallmarks of
biblical narrative – violent storms, epic floods, plagues, resource scarcity,
the displacement of people – it’s considered liberal political terrain. Scott
Coleman, a practicing Baptist and the amiable environmental manager of Little
St Simons Island, a mostly undeveloped strip of shoreline off the coast of
Georgia, tells me that “environmental stewardship is often associated with
liberal politics, thus looked upon negatively”.
The Lord God took the
man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
Genesis 2:15
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The political power of the pulpit is undeniable, even in the
post-Billy Graham south, where in many states nearly half of all citizens
attend church services.
I can’t help but imagine the sheer impact a faith-based
movement could have on expediting climate action. Scott Coleman agrees. “I
think that if our faith leaders in the south were more outspoken about the
importance of creation care, it would go a long way in helping to depoliticize
environmental issues in our region,” he says. “And if we could depoliticize
environmental stewardship in the south, imagine the progress we could make with
elevating environmental stewardship in southern culture.”
I spoke with people of faith in Alabama, Mississippi,
Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia, and it became
clear that the primary barrier to climate action is the fact that it’s been
yoked with the liberal agenda. Climate activist and author Anna Jane Joyner, whose
father is the pastor of a megachurch in North Carolina, writes that she grew up
lumping “environmentalists in with hippies and liberals and all the other
people who were probably going to hell”.
Dr Lucas Johnston, a professor of religion and environment
at Wake Forest University, explains that “there is a longstanding antipathy
toward environmental sentiments in Christian, and especially evangelical
circles, because they have, for centuries, been imagined as pernicious and
dangerous, and possibly bordering on paganism.”
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I asked former six-term South Carolina Republican
congressman Bob Inglis why discussing climate change is so difficult in the
south. A proponent of growing the eco-right and setting the free market upon
the challenges of climate change, he called the environmental movement a bird
with a left wing so large it can’t fly straight. Climate change is “rarely
talked about in the language of conservatism”, he explained. “If you want
someone to have a conversion moment, it helps for them to hear it in their own
language, from someone they trust.”
Inglis has been trying to start the conversation in
conservative southern circles since having his own conversion moment on a trip
to Antarctica in 2006. A scientist drilled into the ice, and Inglis saw,
firsthand, the Industrial Revolution’s impact on the ice record, which revealed
a long period of stability with a sudden uptick in carbon dioxide levels. He
accepted then that burning fossil fuels changed the chemistry of the
atmosphere. He was later booed at public events for stating his belief in
climate change.
We reject the notion
that God gave us the Earth to do with whatever we please.
A Lutheran worshipper from Atlantic Beach
While in office, Inglis introduced a Raise Wages, Cut Carbon
bill. Though grounded in science and conservative economic principles, his
efforts were seen as subversive by Tea Party opponents, who essentially implied
his bill would destroy civilization. “I had crossed the line of orthodoxy,” he said.
There’s a perceived social and political cost to speaking up
about climate issues among people of faith in the south. Roughly half of the
southerners I spoke with felt that people in the south avoided talking about
climate change altogether because it was awkward and politically divisive. Mary
Beene, a pastor in Savannah, notes that “in our congregation, it was a more
controversial topic than race or sexuality”. She observed that some women in
the south who believed in climate change worried “it simply would not be polite
to challenge what the men … were saying in public.”
Indeed, white male evangelicals are still dominating the
conversation and decision-making power structures.
Watch, for example, this clip from a 2014 GOP Senate primary
debate in North Carolina, where four contenders, including Senator Thom Tillis,
deny that manmade activity influences climate change in under one minute.
Tillis, whom the Center for Responsive Politics reports as having received over
$260,000 from oil, gas and coal interests, won the Senate seat, with 63% of his
voters identifying as evangelicals or born-again Christians. Ninety-five
percent of them were white.
According to Pew, 77% of Hispanic Catholics are likely to
say human activity has contributed to the Earth’s warming. Religiously
unaffiliated (64%) and black Protestants (56%) are also likely to tie climate
change to human activity. Pew points out that “fewer white mainline Protestants
(41%) view climate change as primarily due to human activity … white
evangelical Protestants are least likely to hold this view.”
When Rabbi Rachael Bregman moved to Brunswick, Georgia, she
was told: hurricanes don’t happen here. Then she evacuated for both Irma and
Matthew. “Both of the evacuations were on top of the holy days where we say the
words of the Unataneh Tokef,” she tells me. “It’s a prayer which asks, ‘who by
fire, who by water … who by drowning’ regarding the end of one’s life. Those
questions felt very real and not metaphorical.”
Her synagogue is 12 feet above sea level and a half-mile
from the ocean’s edge. During recent hurricanes, they “evacuated our five Torah
scrolls, locked the doors and hoped for the best for our 130-year-old building.
What has surprised me,” she says, “is how little has changed and how little
environmental activism sprang up as a result.”
Bregman, like many I talked to, has witnessed climate change
firsthand and is eager to see more responsiveness in the faith-based community.
She has made personal changes, like switching to an electric car; greening up
at the synagogue; and offering a sermon on climate change.
Tony Lankford, the senior pastor at the First Baptist church
in Saint Simons, has also improved the church’s energy and water use, and
organized a Coastal Green Team Summit for faith leaders to discuss climate
change.
There is a lack of
emphasis on climate change in the South due to a lack of knowledge. We often
experience it but, we don’t know how to articulate what we experience.
A United Church of Christ follower, Birmingham, AL
Lankford feels that “regardless of political or theological leanings,
there is agreement upon the basic tenet that God formed all of this beauty
around us, and scripture [Genesis 1-2] gives us a responsibility to be stewards
of that creation. For me, thus, mismanagement and abuse of creation is not only
immoral or unethical, but is sinful.”
The majority of southern believers I spoke to reported never
hearing climate change mentioned in a sermon, but, like Lankford, could ground
feelings about protecting the Earth in scripture, and felt that there was a
strong moral imperative to protect the planet and its inhabitants.
Several mentioned Dr Katharine Wilkinson’s book Between God
and Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change
as helping them articulate a scriptural basis for taking climate action in the
future.
When Bob Inglis – someone with whom I probably disagree on
several core issues – spoke with reverence about seeing an Australian scientist
evangelize about the natural world at the Great Barrier Reef, I could recognize
his passion for the natural world as my own. Sometimes, common ground gets lost
in semantics.
Inglis gave me the rational and the emotional case for his
conversion from skeptic to climate change believer. The emotional case is what
has stayed with me most since our talk, and is one I hope other skeptics manage
to hear from their children, like Inglis did.
His son once told him, lovingly: “Be relevant to my future.
Show some courage.”
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