For years I’ve wondered why climate change became a political issue, with conservatives jumping on the denialist propaganda offered up with gusto by the fossil fuel industry funded disinformation campaign. One conclusion I’ve been able to get my hands around is that many, many conservatives are also conservative Christians with a deeply antithetical stance toward science and the work of scientists. And these Christians are predisposed to oppose scientific inquiry.
Not that this is new. The tension between Christianity and science has long existed because science relies on objective proof, whereas religion relies on faith in traditional doctrines, interpretations of the Bible and revelation. The Church famously denied the theory of Copernicus and prosecuted Galileo when he argued in its favor. Darwin has been and continues to be a curse word for fundamentalist believers, even though the theory of evolution has been the bulwark of many of the advances in biology and medicine over the last 150 years.
Of course, not all scientific research has been condemned by Conservative Christians. Believe it or not, many Christian Organizations, including Baptists, were at the forefront of campaigns to expose the health risks of smoking cigarettes in the 20th Century. So why have they been so reluctant to assume that the science of global warming is a hoax, a pile of lies concocted by Al Gore and his evil minions? I think a lot of it has to do with where they go to get their information about the science of climate change. Conservative talk radio. Fox News. Media outlets with deep ties to the Republican Party and Big Business, which have their own financial interest in muddying the waters on what should be a non-controversial issue.
Which is where the subject of my title finally makes its long awaited appearance. You see, at least one Conservative Christian husband and wife team, he a fundamentalist preacher and she a climate scientist have written a book together to try to convince their Conservative Christian brethren that yes, climate change is real, and yes, we, as human beings, really are the culprits behind global warming and the many dangers it poses to our future:
As an evangelical Christian living in Texas, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe found that many conservatives had questions about climate change based on things they’d heard on talk radio.
So Hayhoe and her husband, Andrew Farley, the pastor of a nondenominational church in Lubbock, Texas, decided to answer the questions in a new book from religious publisher FaithWords, “A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-based Decisions.”
“The observed increase in greenhouse gas levels, due to human production, is the only explanation we can find to account for what has happened to our world,” Farley and Hayhoe wrote. “We’ve dusted for fingerprints. There’s only one likely suspect remaining. It’s us.” […]
Hayhoe teaches in the Department of Geosciences at Texas Tech University, and she was a lead author of a U.S. government report on climate change in the United States that was released in June. She also was one of some 2,000 scientists on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which reported in 2007 that there was unequivocal evidence of warming.
Farley, a conservative Republican, is the pastor of Ecclesia, a nondenominational Christian church, and teaches linguistics at Texas Tech.
“To get information on climate change, you have to go to the people who know the information. That’s why we wrote this together as a climate scientist and a pastor,” Hayhoe said. “He asked the tough questions. He said you’ve got to talk about this and this and this, and these answers have to satisfy me.”
Many of the questions were from the arguments of conservative celebrities.
I welcome anyone who attempts to cut through the dirty haze of the conservative media’s disinformation campaign, especially people who are Conservatives and are Fundamentalist Christians. More than any other problem which confronts humanity, this is one in which the traditional divisions between liberal and conservative, left and right, religious faith and scientific research, should not exist.
So I salute Professor Tahoe and her husband Pastor Farley for making the effort to reach out to their fellow believers with the truth about climate change and why it is occurring. The sad irony is that they likely will be condemned by many Conservative Christians for “drinking the liberal Kool-Aid” on global warming because so many right wing believers would rather put their trust in liars and hatemongers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who act as well paid shills for the disinformation campaign of Big Oil, Big Coal, and other industries with a vested interest in the use of fossil fuels, than in dedicated scientists who share their faith, like Professor Tahoe.
