Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics

Religion and the Environment

Emma Bloomfield, Emma Frances Bloomfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367729622
• eBook ISBN: 9780429998355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics examines the intersection of climate skepticism and Christianity and proposes strategies for engaging climate skeptics in productive conversations.

Despite the scientifically established threats of climate change, there remains a segment of the American population that is skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change and the urgent need for action. One of the most important stakeholders and conversants in environmental conversations is the religious community. While existing studies have discussed environmentalism as a factor within the religious community, this book positions religion as an important factor in environmentalism and focuses on how identities play a role in environmental conversation. Rather than thinking of religious skeptics as a single unified group, Emma Frances Bloomfield argues that it is essential to recognize there are different types of skeptics so that we can better tailor our communication strategies to engage with them on issues of the environment and climate change. To do so, this work breaks skeptics down into three main types: "separators, " "bargainers, " and "harmonizers." The book questions monolithic understandings of climate skepticism and considers how competing narratives such as religion, economics, and politics play a large role in climate communication. Considering recent political moves to remove climate change from official records and withdraw from international environmental agreements, it is imperative now more than ever to offer practical solutions to academics, practitioners, and the public to change the conversation. To address these concerns, this book provides both a theoretical examination of the rhetoric of religious climate skeptics and concrete strategies for engaging the religious community in conversations about the environment.

This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of climate change science, environmental communication, environmental policy, and religion.

For the 2020 communication awards cycle, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment has won the following distinctions:

Book of the Year - Argumentation and Forensics Division of the National Communication Association

Outstanding Book Award - Spiritual Communication Division of the National Communication Association

Book Award Finalist – Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine of the National Communication Association

1 Defining the separators

War, melodrama, and authority

Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski tells a parable called “fish love” about two people discussing the love they have for the things that they consume. Upon seeing the first eat a fish and remark, “I love fish,” the other responds that their love for fish is not a true, giving love, but an internal, selfish love based on how the fish fulfills that person’s needs (BHAN 2017). While true love is reciprocal and offers genuine care for the person/thing being loved, “fish love” is a phrase synonymous with exploitative, manipulative love where only one side of the relationship benefits from the interaction. The one-sided relationship of “fish love” is one way to understand conceptions of nature as a tool to be exploited for the benefit of humanity (Milstein and Dickinson 2012). While people might note that they care for and love the environment, they may, in practice, not value nature beyond its capabilities for human survival and enjoyment.

Fish love is a useful lens through which to view separators, who may profess care for the environment, but often define the environment’s value only in terms of its utility for humans. Separators thus evoke a hierarchy of humans over nature and use that hierarchy to guide their orientation toward proper environmental actions. This hierarchy is in part validated by certain Christian interpretations that laud humans as the pinnacle of God’s creation. The separators are so named because their primary strategy for engaging environmental topics is to cleave their religious identity from an environmental one. Environmental identities, or “ecocultural” identities, are rarely cultivated in a vacuum. Instead, they emerge through the intersection and overlap of other identities such as political, religious, economic, and social ones.

An important point to consider throughout this book, and one that I am re-emphasizing here, is that religious adherents are not “anti-science” and do not participate in “science denial” for all meanings of the word science. For example, religious adherents make use of modern technology, adopt basic scientific principles, and often turn to science to explain many phenomena in their lives (Evans 2018). When I discuss how separators create distinctions between their religious interpretations and “science,” I am using the term to refer to mainstream climate science that supports environmental advocacy. To say that separators, or religious climate skeptics, enact the war between religion and all of science is an overstatement of their particular arguments, ideologies, and identities. It is more accurate to say that the war the separators are launching is a figurative counter attack to what they view as moral failings of climate science and as negative consequences of enacting environmentally-oriented policies.

In the discourse examined below, I trace separation as a rhetorical pattern that underlies a polarized, aggressive form of climate change denial. Separators create distinct rhetorical boundaries between friend and foe, making it difficult to open conversation when one is perceived as being on the “side” of the environment. This worldview potentially situates others as enemies who are not to be trusted, making productive dialogue challenging. Indeed, to engage with separators is an attempt to address a deep-seated rejection of mainstream interpretations of climate change. In order to create opportunities for conversation and to explore potential avenues for rhetorical correction, it is first integral to understand the frames, metaphors, and narratives that undergird separators’ understanding of the relationship between their faith and the environment.

In what follows, I analyze the discursive “fragments” of separators, from the Cornwall Alliance (CA) and personal conversations, to show their shared characteristics, rhetorical patterns, and argument strategies (McGee 1990: 279). I argue that the separators primarily make use of three argument strategies: (1) controlling definitions, (2) shifting the blame onto the environmental movement, and (3) appealing to the Bible’s authority to construct value hierarchies. The separators’ discourse features metaphors of war that can foster hostility and cynicism toward environmentalism and the topic of climate change. First, I describe the frames and metaphors of war and hostility in more detail, establishing both the foundation of the separators’ argument strategies and prefacing what distinguishes them from bargainers. Then, I use examples from publically available discourse and publications from the CA and interpersonal conversations to analyze the three argument strategies that emerge from the separators’ war frame. I identify these argument forms to illuminate the distinct rhetorical features of the separators and to provide resources from which to engage separators and their arguments in the following chapter.

The Cornwall Alliance

Started in 2005 as the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, the CA is an evangelical group that supports conservative environmental policies. The CA’s slogan is “for the stewardship of creation,” indicating a concern for the protection of God’s creation, but we will see that this term emphasizes the comfort and protection of human life (CA 2018: para. 1). The CA borrows the term “stewardship” from the Creation Care movement, which uses religion to advocate for environmental protection. But, the CA’s definition of stewardship leads them to conclude that pro-environmental policies are dangerous to religion and society. Specifically, the CA (2013: para. 1) advocates for “economic development built on Biblical principles” and argues that excessive environmental protections inhibit economic progress, harming humans in the process. Dr. E. Calvin Beisner is the founder of the CA and publishes most of the content on the CA’s website. In addition to publishing articles, the CA hosts events, provides consulting services, and educates the public about the dangers of the environmental movement. Included among their publications are moral declarations, open letters, and responses to what the CA considers scientifically-biased news and scholarly articles. The CA seeks to validate its Christian perspective and advocate for using the Bible to make decisions on environmental policy.

Some scholars have cautioned against focusing on individual groups, such as the CA, as exemplars of religious discourse (Evans 2018). To avoid such reductionism, I pair an analysis of the CA’s discourse with individuals who share these perspectives to get a fuller picture of the influence and circulation of war metaphors in religious climate change rhetoric. Furthermore, I justify focusing on the CA’s rhetoric because the CA is an important player in the climate change controversy, where traces of its discourse reverberate through the public sphere. For example, the CA regularly publishes public commentaries, gives lectures at conferences hosted by anti-environmental groups such as the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change, and has released a popular video series, Resisting the Green Dragon (Beisner 2011). The CA frequently collaborates with the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation, prominent conservative think tanks that advance economic arguments against environmental protection. The CA was in the news for supporting Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by sending a letter with the signatures of scientists who supported the decision to Congress (Beisner 2017c; Leavenworth 2017).

Due to the CA’s extensive funding by and connections to the fossil fuel industry, some have questioned the sincerity of the CA’s religious arguments against climate change (O’Connor 2017). It is quite possible that in the CA conservative industry leaders have found compatriots, fighting against environmental policies for vastly different reasons. Whether motivated solely by faith or also by financial interests, the CA fosters and circulates aggressive, belligerent attitudes toward the environment, which get picked up and repeated in online spaces. O’Connor (2017: para. 13) argued that the CA is akin to a religious “enforcer” that keeps the Christian, and specifically evangelical community in line in order to stop environmental attitudes from “gain[ing] a following” within Christianity. Studies have shown that Christians are not, on the whole, “going green” or expressing more environmentally-friendly attitudes (Konisky 2018), so perhaps the CA and other groups have played a role in effectively quashing environmental activism in the community.

Given the reach and public presence of the CA and their primary use of aggressive discourse often referenced in climate communication studies (Evans 2018), I have selected them to be the exemplar separator. It is important to remember that these categories emerged organically from reading publications, news articles, and in interviews with climate skeptics, and I now describe prominent rhetorical characteristics with examples that I located within that examined discourse. Before elaborating on the primary features of the separators’ discourse, I analyze their discursive framework that hangs on metaphors of war, hostility, and separation.

Guiding terms

The separators’ guiding terms serve as the terministic screen, or filter, through which they view the climate change controversy (Burke 1966: 45). It is important not to view these guiding terms as deterministic or exhaustive, but as important features of the separators’ environmental worldview that influence how they perceive mainstream climate science, engage in conversation, and prioritize environmental topics. In viewing mainstream environmentalism as a challenge to their faith, separators build symbolic walls to protect their values and morals. The CA’s discourse is quite extreme in part because they perceive that climate science, which supports environmental policies, has been tainted by undue liberal and secular influences and thus should be avoided and destroyed. I do not claim that the CA’s discourse is representative of all climate deniers. Indeed, the CA do not consider themselves deniers, but that they have the correct scientific and Biblical interpretation of appropriate human behavior toward the environment. The CA is a particular group of climate skeptics that injects public conversation with aggression and hostility, protecting their faith and values against what they perceive to be malicious environmental influences.

I argue that the CA’s discourse is an important contributor to the climate conversation because it legitimizes aggressive inventional resources that are echoed by politicians, leaders, and publics. These attitudes and beliefs get taken up in online spaces, as well, where people who distrust climate science and turn to their faith for guidance on environmental matters and may find resonance with the CA’s messages. I support this argument by detailing conversations I have had with religious climate deniers on online discussion forums about their beliefs. Previous studies on climate denial discourse online has found that skeptics sometimes turn to insults (Ross 2013) and threats of violence (Bloomfield and Tillery 2019) as appropriate ways to engage environmental topics, providing evidence that aggression is an active part of climate change discourse.

Separators highlight a distinct subset in the constellation of climate discourse that uses rhetoric to encourage aggressive attitudes toward environmentalism and foster fears of the environmental movement’s consequences. A faith-based frame of war constructs opposing opinions on climate science as a holy war. In a holy war, there is no room for gray areas or compromise. Everyone who is not fully aligned with the separators’ beliefs is deemed untrustworthy. Given this attitude, it is easy to see how working within a framework of war might inhibit productive conversation, which relies on the willingness of multiple parties to engage and respect one another. In addition, the war framing raises the stakes of the conversation, where separators believe there is much more on the line that simply a belief in climate change, but also one’s identity as a Christian (McCammack 2007). From this perspective, separators’ rhetorical strategies are far more than counter-arguments to what they view as harmful environmental policies; they are also performances of their faith. When climate science appears to contradict Christian practices by seemingly promoting the pagan worship of the Earth or valuing the environment over vulnerable human life, separators respond with a vocal defense of their moral priorities.

The metaphor of war influences separators’ attitudes and behaviors in prominent ways. First, separators create distinct lines between those they perceive to be correctly following the Bible and those who turn against it. In viewing climate science through the lens of Christianity, the Bible can be considered a “written Constitution” or originating terminology that prescribes certain actions and outlines consequences for deviating from its rules (Burke 1969: 377). To reject mainstream climate science in favor of literal readings of the Bible signals a move in favor of one side over the other. Because climate science is perceived to begin from a different starting point outside of the Bible, separators sometimes label mainstream climate science as anathema to the flourishing of the Christian worldview. After enemies have been identified, there is a clear and simple route forward: eliminate them and thus end the war. Separators thus enact a clear separation between true heroes and evil villains, which is easy to understand and envision. The “clarity and simplicity in assigning wrong predominantly to one side” offered by war frames makes the frame particularly appealing, attention-grabbing, and meaningful (Desilet and Appel 2011: 348). In this sense, the use of the war metaphor may be a purposeful strategy to capture media attention hungry for polarized narratives (Dixon and Clarke 2013) and to mobilize those who share the separators’ morals and values to take the potential threats of environmentalism more seriously.

It is important to note that launching counter-arguments against environmentalism is not viewed as a neutral act, but establishes that one side represents clear “moral wrongs [and] injustices that cannot be rectified through political compromises or minor adjustments” (Schwarze 2006: 250, emphasis in original). Separators may view discourse and discussion of the environment as more than a simple verbal exchange, but as direct attacks on their worldview and faith. The separators’ rhetoric and behaviors, therefore, reflect “an arduous heroic journey” that must be undertaken until “the moral balance is restored” (Lakoff 1991: 30). In restoring that balance, Lakoff (1991: 30) argued that the heroes of the story “cannot negotiate with villains; they must defeat them.” In response to their enemies’ attacks, separators position themselves as the defenders of their faith and the heroes of the war, solidifying the separation between themselves and their perceived enemies. The adoption of a war frame also serves a legitimizing function in the separators’ arguments by which an ongoing war validates aggressive argument strategies in response to mainstream environmentalism. Steinert (2003: 266) argued that “war forges the bond of community … like nothing else,” because war clearly sets a distinction between opposing sides. In adopting a war metaphor, separators legitimize aggressive responses toward environmentalists in defense of their faith.

This war frame is most reminiscent of the genre of melodrama, through which strict, dividing lines are drawn, differences amplified, and stakes raised. Schwarze (2006: 244) argued that melodramas can be productive in environmental conversations in that they work to “stag[e] new visions of moral order” against one deemed immoral, restrictive, and oppressive. Melodramas thus encourage an “emotional identification with victors or victims, whether celebrating the former or sympathizing with the latter” and provide a “motive force for collective action” to restore the lost order (Schwarze 2006: 244). By invoking a metaphor of war, the separators create a “connect[ion] to strong emotions and social values” that work to “mobiliz[e] people and resources” toward their perspective (Schwarze 2006: 268). While Schwarze (2006) engaged the opportunities for melodrama in environmental discourse, melodrama emerges in separators’ discourse as a way to shut down productive environmental communication and to polarize the controversy between warring sides. The use of war metaphors as part of the separators’ vocabulary stems from their melodramatic terministic screen and highlights the need for people to identify which side they are on: the side of the heroes (separators) or the many villains that challenge them.

While I use the term strategies to describe the following three discursive features of separators’ rhetoric, I do not wish to propose that these features are necessarily or perpetually intentional. Instead, these features are logical extensions of the separators’ guiding framework of war and melodrama that center on hostility toward environmentalism ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The intersection of Christianity and the environment
• 1 Defining the separators: War, melodrama, and authority
• 2 Separator strategies: Asking questions, accepting premises, and making it personal
• 3 Defining the bargainers: Revolution, modification, and negotiating with environmentalism
• 4 Bargainer strategies: Working within frames, joining the revolution, and employing examples
• 5 Defining the harmonizers: Harmony, collaboration, and acceptance
• 6 Harmonizer strategies: Shifting frames from private to public, communicating urgency, and thinking globally
• Conclusion: What we learn at the intersection of Christianity and climate change
• Executive summary: Talking points and strategies for engaging in climate change conversations
• Index