As underscored by the current consternation of conservatives with Pope Francis over his encyclical on global warming, religion is perhaps the most confounding variable when it comes to grappling with the issue of climate change. Even more than Catholics like Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum, however, it's been evangelicals who have been most reluctant to accept the science of global warming. Which is actually a bit of a puzzle, really, once you start to really parse the arguments they put forward in religious garb, because the grounding in Scripture or theology is nowhere to be found.
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| Katherine Hayhoe talks about faith and climate change. |
Katharine Hayhoe is one person who was particularly puzzled by evangelical objections to climate change. Hayhoe is both a climate scientist and an evangelical Christian herself, and, as a Canadian largely removed from the polarizations of American political culture, she saw nothing in her evangelical faith more compelling in relationship to global warming than a strong moral imperative to care for God's creation. That all changed when she married an American, and then found out how differently he saw things.
Read the Salon story by Paul Rosenberg - “Faith-based arguments that deal with climate change are a smokescreen that mask the real problem.”
