Repeated Reality Stick Blows Have Convinced Some White Fundies That Climate Might Be A Problem

[hatrack]

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In 2014, Pew reported that just 28% of white evangelicals attributed global warming to human activity. Last October, by contrast, 44% of them said climate change was due “mostly to human activities,” according to a Climate Nexus poll. Notwithstanding the difference in how the question was asked, white evangelicals have clearly become more willing to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change over the past decade. Indeed, while they remain less concerned about the issue than other major American religious communities, Climate Nexus found them to be closer to mainstream opinion than they used to be.

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Those numbers are little short of astonishing, given the successful effort of evangelical leaders (backed by the fossil fuel industry) to turn climate change into a religious issue comparable to abortion and LGBT rights in the Great American Culture War. That effort began in the 1990s as a means of combating a growing pro-environment movement within evangelicalism. The key figure then was theologian E. Calvin Beisner (who’s still at it as head of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation ). With key allies such as Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Beisner mobilized the religious right to prevent significant climate change legislation from being passed during the Obama years.

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And yet, a majority of them now think government action should be a priority. What happened? Even amid four years of Trump administration climate denialism, the persuasive evidence has likely come from Mother Nature herself: catastrophic weather events, rising sea levels, earlier growing seasons, hotter and hotter temperatures.

These days, out-and-out denialism has all but disappeared, even among the likes of Beisner. “I’m even happy to say, yeah, probably our addition of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere makes the world a little warmer than it otherwise would be,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins a couple of months ago. “But I am totally convinced that the emphasis is on ‘little.’”

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Ed. - That's nice. Maybe a few more decades of record-crushing droughts, fires and floods and Perkins/Osteen/Graham/Perkins et. al. might be prepared to approve of some sort of voluntary free-market approach to carbon emissions, or perhaps invoke TECHNOLOGY!(tm) for some sort of undefined Godly action . . .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/evangelicals-are-losing-their-climate-skepticism/2021/04/29/c9c58cd8-a8f7-11eb-a8a7-5f45ddcdf364_story.html

[I_UndergroundPanther]

1. The more fundamentalism fades away

In christianity,as well as other religions the better the world and humanity will be twords each other.