THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVISM
In hindsight: Debates over climate change are often framed as secularists v. religionists. Yet moral and religious values have long shaped environmental ideas and actions.
The debates on how to respond to climate change — or whether to respond at all — often get cast as two opposing sides: secularists, who believe in the science, and religionists, who do not. This simplified dichotomy, however, obscures a long and active tradition of spiritual and religious environmentalism that dates at least to the 1800s and continues through today.
Moral and religious values have long shaped environmental ideas and actions, inspired by foundational religious texts and animated during earlier periods of perceived crisis. In the mid- to late-1800s, for example, concerns about the environmental degradation of industrial America found expression in Progressive-era activism. But that movement also had a religious undercurrent. As the historian Donald Worster writes, “the antidote for environmental destruction has been a movement called environmentalism and that movement has, in the United States, owed much of its program, temperament, and drive to the influence of Protestantism.”
In our contemporary era, Evangelical Protestants have been active voices for climate change action since the 1990s, issuing calls for protection of God’s creation through the National Association of Evangelicals and the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). The group contains more than a thousand local churches and programs such as Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. In 1996, the EEN, which had been founded three years earlier, proclaimed its support for renewing the Endangered Species Act. The organization described the Act as “the Noah’s Ark of our day.”
Perhaps the most influential evangelical climate change activist is Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and “climate evangelist” at Texas Tech University. Hayhoe has been thrust into the national spotlight because of her efforts to convince conservative Americans, especially Christians, that climate change is real. Hayhoe became active politically because, as she says, Evangelicals have been given “information about climate change that is not true. We have been told that it is incompatible with our values, whereas in fact it’s entirely compatible with conservative and with Christian values.” Hayhoe pointed to progressive-era Republican president Theodore Roosevelt to bolster her claims.“What’s more conservative than conserving our natural resources, making sure we have enough for the future, and not wasting them like we are today?” said Hayhoe. “That’s a very conservative value.”
Climate consciousness has been growing among Catholics, as well. According to a Yale University study, Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home) intensified the climate change conversation within Catholic communities and increased the percentage of Americans and American Catholics who acknowledge the reality of global warming (among American Catholics, the numbers went from 64% in March to 74% in October 2015). Already in 1990, Pope John Paul II had warned about “the increasing devastation of the world of nature” and called the “greenhouse effect” a “moral crisis” In his encyclical, however, Pope Francis made sure to locate that moral critique in “a very solid scientific consensus” that climate change is man-made.
“Environmentalism and that movement has, in the United States, owed much of its program, temperament, and drive to the influence of Protestantism.”
—Historian Donald Worster
One of the most interesting developments in climate change action is the emergence of interfaith organizations, including Interfaith Power and Light, GreenFaith: Interfaith Partners on the Environment, and the World Council of Churches. These interfaith collaborations began in 1986, when Prince Philip of the World Wildlife Fund brought together Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu leaders to address growing environmental concerns, including global warming. These diverse faith organizations continue to speak a common language whether at the level of international or national governing bodies or via local parishes, congregations, temples, mosques, etc.
They have acted, too. In late 2012 three branches of the United Church of Christ became the first faith organizations to resolve to divest funds invested in fossil fuel companies or to rule out new investments in such companies. Rev. Jenny Phillips, Fossil Free United Methodist Church Coordinator and Minister for Environmental Stewardship and Advocacy in the Pacific Northwest Conference explained that “by letting go of their financial stake in the growth of fossil fuels, they are living their commitment to a sustainable world” and no longer providing “moral cover for the massive ecological destruction and human suffering caused by the fossil fuel industry.” Quaker organizations, such as the Haverford (PA) and Lansdowne (PA) Meeting of the Society of Friends, voted to channel the divested funds into the fossil free “Green fund” at Friends Fiduciary Corporation.
This year, in May 2017, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment sent a letter to President Donald Trump, urging him to remain part of the Paris Accords climate deal. Signed by leaders of Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, Baptist and Evangelical groups, the letter urged the President “to be guided by a moral framework that includes not only being responsible stewards of God’s creation, but protecting poor and vulnerable populations in the US and abroad while meeting our obligations to future generations.” Despite their letter, the President withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change on June 1, 2017.
Some state and local officials and business leaders, like California Governor Jerry Brown and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, have argued that the United States can and will continue to work toward the climate goals espoused by the Paris accord, even without federal support. But American faith organizations offer a very different perspective from which to consider the policy debates surrounding climate change and environmental policy. By situating scientific consensus within moral frameworks derived from sacred texts and centuries of ethical teachings, these groups offer up a different set of characters and an alternative set of ideals to explain the evolution of modern environmentalism.
Paul C. Rosier’s column for the Lepage Center this fall focuses on environmental history. He is Mary M. Birle Chair in American History at Villanova University.
