The Gospel of Climate Skepticism

Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change

Robin Globus Veldman

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520972803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Why are white evangelicals the most skeptical major religious group in America regarding climate change? Previous scholarship has pointed to cognitive factors such as conservative politics, anti-science attitudes, aversion to big government, and theology. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, The Gospel of Climate Skepticism reveals the extent to which climate skepticism and anti-environmentalism have in fact become embedded in the social world of many conservative evangelicals. Rejecting the common assumption that evangelicals' skepticism is simply a side effect of political or theological conservatism, the book further shows that between 2006 and 2015, leaders and pundits associated with the Christian Right widely promoted skepticism as the biblical position on climate change. The Gospel of Climate Skepticism offers a compelling portrait of how during a critical period of recent history, political and religious interests intersected to prevent evangelicals from offering a unified voice in support of legislative action to address climate change.

PART ONE

Why Traditionalist Evangelicals Are Climate Skeptics

CHAPTER 1

The End-Time Apathy Hypothesis

In 2013, the hip evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll ignited a minor controversy by arguing that there was little need to take care of the environment because Jesus was coming back. “I know who made the environment,” he reportedly declared in a speech given at a major evangelical leadership conference. “He’s coming back, and he’s going to burn it all up. So yes, I drive an SUV.”¹ A number of audience members tweeted the line, causing consternation in the blogosphere, where Driscoll was condemned for advocating a “throwaway theology which sees the created world as disposable” and accused of following in Pat Robertson’s gaffe-prone footsteps.² Was Driscoll representative of a larger trend within evangelicalism?

Blogging for the Washington Post, Richard Cizik, an evangelical who had become a major player in evangelical environmental circles via his support of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, seemed to think so. As evidence, he cited a 2011 study showing that 67 percent of white evangelicals believed that the severity of recent natural disasters was evidence of what the Bible called the end times.³ In the same study, only 52 percent of white evangelicals viewed such events as evidence of global climate change. White evangelicals, in other words, might indeed be unconcerned about climate change in part because they saw it as a sign of the end times. Speaking from his own experience, Cizik added that such views were common: “Those who ascribe to the ‘God-will-burn-it-all-down school,’ pop up everywhere.”⁴

Together with anti-science attitudes and political orientation, end-time beliefs fall among the most commonly proposed popular explanations for evangelicals’ lack of environmental concern. But how good of an explanation is it? This chapter describes the origins of the idea and makes a case that our understanding of how end-time beliefs actually produce environmental apathy is limited, having been bolstered more by historical circumstances and inference than by direct evidence, and that further investigation is therefore needed.

THE PERVASIVENESS OF THE END-TIME APATHY HYPOTHESIS

Although the end-time apathy hypothesis is not necessarily well known outside of environmentalist circles, it has come to be a standard explanation for conservative Christians’ lack of environmental concern. It has appeared in influential environmental books and magazines, on the lips of well-regarded scientists and politicians, and in numerous scholarly and popular works. In other words, it is not simply the paranoid speculation of environmentalists on the margins, but an idea that is expressed by the most prominent and celebrated among them. A few examples will suffice to illustrate the point.

One of the highest-profile appearances of the end-time apathy hypothesis was in Al Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, published not long before he was elected vice president. In the book, which had sold over half a million copies by 2000, Gore argued that “for some Christians, the prophetic vision of the apocalypse is used—in my view, unforgivably—as an excuse for abdicating their responsibility to be good stewards of God’s creation.”⁵ The role of end-time beliefs in discouraging environmental concern was not a central point of Gore’s book, but his reference to it certainly gave the impression that there was no doubt that end-time beliefs were an important driver of environmental apathy.

Another high-profile example of the end-time apathy hypothesis comes from the eminent Harvard biologist and biodiversity advocate E. O. Wilson. In a fictitious “Letter to a Southern Baptist Pastor” that appeared in his 2006 book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, Wilson pleaded for scientists and religious practitioners to “set aside our difference in order to save the Creation.” Still, he was troubled by a major barrier: the “perplexing” but “widespread conviction among Christians that the Second Coming is imminent, and that therefore the condition of the planet is of little consequence.” “For those who believe this form of Christianity,” he concluded, “the fate of ten million other life forms indeed does not matter.”⁶

Written for a narrower academic audience, the historian Roderick Nash’s important book The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics also suggested that Christianity discouraged environmental concern, in part because

Christians expected that the earth would not be around for long. A vengeful God would destroy it, and all unredeemed nature, with floods or drought or fire. Obviously this eschatology was a poor basis from which to argue for environmental ethics in any guise. Why take care of what you expected to be obliterated?⁷

Nash is less well known outside of academia than Gore or Wilson, but he is a highly regarded environmental scholar. His reference to the end-time apathy hypothesis further demonstrates the caliber of individuals who have voiced it.

The end-time apathy hypothesis was even included in a popular environmental science textbook, Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment (2000). In answering the question “Why do uncontrolled population growth, resource abuse and pollution occur?” the authors asserted that Christianity deserved some of the blame because it had helped shape the overarching worldview in the West. According to them, it taught not only that “God gave humans dominion over creation” but also “predicted that God would bring a cataclysmic end to the Earth sometime in the future.”⁸ “Because these beliefs tended to devalue that natural world,” the authors concluded, “they fostered attitudes and behaviors that had a negative effect on the environment.”⁹ Not only was the end-time apathy hypothesis articulated by educated elites; it was literally the textbook explanation for Christian environmental apathy.

None of these texts argued that end-time beliefs alone were responsible for Christians’ environmental attitudes, yet by choosing to highlight this explanation, these works illustrated the pervasiveness of the idea that end-time beliefs are an important factor diminishing Christians’ level of concern about the environment.¹⁰ Interestingly, the notion was apparently so obvious that those expressing it felt little need to include supporting evidence. Gore referenced a single individual who had purportedly downplayed the need for environmental protection because of his belief in the apocalypse (James Watt, who is discussed below), while Wilson cited a poll about the prevalence of prophecy belief—a poll that said nothing about environmental attitudes. Nash and the Biosphere 2000 textbook offered no evidence at all in support of their claims.

So where did this idea originate, and how did it come to be regarded as self-evident?

THE ORIGINS OF THE END-TIME APATHY HYPOTHESIS

In a narrow sense, many Americans were introduced to the possibility that end-time beliefs might cause apathy about the environment in 1981 when it was widely reported that Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Interior, James Watt, had said there was little need to be concerned about conserving the nation’s natural resources because “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”¹¹ Watt’s quotation has echoed through the decades, becoming the most commonly cited example of end-time-inspired environmental apathy. It is the direct origin of the end-time apathy hypothesis.¹² But this quotation alone cannot fully explain the widespread circulation of the hypothesis. First, Watt never actually justified his philosophy of natural resource management with reference to his end-time beliefs. The quotation is real, but the full context in which he uttered it reveals a different intent. But even if it had been interpreted correctly, Watt was just one person. How could one person’s views be used to indict an entire faith? I suggest that the answer has to do with what Watt represented.

Watt’s high-profile position publicized the end-time apathy hypothesis, but if he had simply been a person who happened to be an evangelical Christian and who also happened to hold an environmentally consequential political appointment, people likely would have forgotten about the end-time apathy hypothesis once it faded from the headlines. The fact was, however, that Watt represented a political shift of tectonic proportions. An evangelical Christian as well as an anti-environmentalist, Watt personally embodied both the ascent of the “New Christian Right” (as the Christian Right was called at the time) and the aggressive anti-environmental backlash movement that were both emerging in the early 1980s. As a closer look at discussions of the environmental impact of end-time beliefs during the Reagan era will reveal, it was this larger political context—in which environmentalists were newly pitted against a Republican party that was both anti-environmental and supported by evangelical Christians—that made the end-time apathy hypothesis seem so plausible. Underlining the importance of political context, the pattern would repeat itself during the George W. Bush administration.

My point in showing that political circumstances contributed to the wide circulation and acceptance (among environmentalists, at least) of the end-time apathy hypothesis is not to assert that it is false. Rather, my point is that we do not know to what extent it is true because its apparent plausibility has for too long made further investigation seem unnecessary.

Watt and the Anti-Environmental Backlash Movement

Reagan had been indifferent to environmental issues as governor of California, but the pro-business, small-government platform of his presidential campaign directly conflicted with environmentalists’ strategy during the 1960s and ’70s of pursuing environmental protection at the federal level. Reagan made this threat clear when he expressed support for the most important anti-environmental movement of the time, the Sagebrush Rebellion. Sagebrush Rebels, who were based largely in the West, argued that the federal government was an inefficient land manager and should cede control of public lands to state and local officials who could be more sensitive to local needs. To environmentalists and other critics, however, the rebellion was “a land grab, with states fronting for certain interest groups who [sought] exclusive rights to exploit the resources of these lands free from any regulation.”¹³ The movement was especially threatening to environmentalists because state-owned lands would not be eligible for federal “wilderness” status, a designation that environmentalists counted on to protect natural areas from urban growth and industrial, agricultural, and consumptive recreational uses. Hence, Reagan’s statement of support for the movement—“Count me in as a rebel,” he assured an audience in Utah while campaigning for president in 1980—was deeply worrisome to environmentalists.¹⁴

Reagan’s pledge of support for the Sagebrush Rebellion became a reality when he appointed Watt, also a self-proclaimed Sagebrush Rebel, to the most environmentally consequential political position of the era, secretary of the Interior. From the perspective of environmentalists, the appointment was a disaster. Watt was “planning to unravel the whole conservation fabric of the country, basically repeal the gains of the 20th century in conservation,” warned the executive director of the Sierra Club. “It’s appalling.”¹⁵

Environmentalists had good reason to be suspicious of Watt. In 1977, he had been hired as the first president and chief legal officer of a conservative public-interest law firm known as the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF).¹⁶ In that position, Watt sued (successfully in many cases) the Environmental Protection Agency, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Department of the Interior, mounting forty-seven cases in all.¹⁷ Hence, in a playbook that would become familiar in subsequent decades, in being nominated to the position of secretary of the Interior, he was being called to oversee an organization whose mission he had previously worked to thwart. His transition to secretary of the Interior therefore epitomized the environmental movement’s perception that

in the Reagan years, most of the federal offices responsible for the environment became foxes’ dens for profit-making special interests. These political foxes did not hav...