Religion and Climate Change
Religion and Climate Change
A recent poll by the Pew Research Center examines Americans’ opinions about climate change and correlates those opinions with religion. The opinion that climate change is not a serious problem because God is in control of the climate is held by 29% of evangelical protestants, and 11% of US adults. 17% of evangelical Christians also agreed with the statement that “there is no solid evidence that the Earth is getting warmer,” and 38% of them feel that climate change is not a serious problem. Republicans overall mirror these opinions. One positive result from the poll: few of any religion or political stripe agree that “new technologies will fix problems caused by climate change.” Let’s delve a bit deeper into how and why the Christian religion in the US impedes efforts to fight global heating.
Providence
In Hillary Mantel’s book about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, Maximilien Robespierre says “But if we are not under Providence, what is everything for?” Camille Desmoulins answers “Surely it is to bring us to the kind of society that God intends? To bring us to justice and equality, to full humanity?” The US Declaration of Independence similarly ends with a pledge of mutual support among the signers “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”
Providence refers to God’s intervention in the universe, and can include miracles. Providence “involves more than mere vision or knowledge, for it implies the active disposition and arrangement of things with a view to a definite end....All things, whether due to necessary causes or to the free choice of man, are foreseen by God and preordained in accordance with His all-embracing purpose” (Divine Providence, in The Catholic Encyclopedia.)
The idea that God is guiding the course of history on Earth takes agency away from humans. If God has a plan for us, surely it will be fulfilled. God won’t let things get too bad.
A 2009 article in the Christian Science Monitor on “Climate change and the providence of God” stated that “creation under the providence of God is not subject to global warming, either as a relatively sudden phenomenon or as the result of climatic cycles. It is securely maintained by spiritual laws whose harmonious operation is not subject to change or disruption. In my prayers, I recognize this spiritual creation as the only one, and that we can see evidence of God’s government here and now.” This amounts to a denial of climate change on religious grounds. Christian Scientists, in spite of their name, are notoriously un-science-friendly. The article goes on to extoll the virtues of prayer, and to advocate for faith, which “can have a profound and lasting effect on the physical environment.” This “all we need is prayer” attitude is similar to the advice given in Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, which is to look inward and develop a stronger personal spiritual practice. It’s hard to see how this will fight climate change.
Calvinists and Presbyterians believe that God guides government toward the ultimate divine purposes, though “he does so through cooperation with those who seek the divine purposes and will for the creation.” If I were an adherent, this doctrine would signal to me that I have a role to play in helping God fight climate change, but I don’t have to worry about it too much, since God will take care that things don’t get out of hand.
Some Christians interpret the Book of Revelation to mean that the “end times” are coming soon. There’’s been a cottage industry for hundreds of years trying to correlate current events with the prophesies in the Book of Revelation concerning the rapture and second coming, including a book named Don’t Miss the Rapture by Cynthia Wallace, a cousin of mine. James Watt, President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, believed in the end times, and stated “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” According to an article in the L.A. Times, Evangelicals’ apathy toward climate change “is driven not only by their well-documented distrust of science but also by a specific eschatological belief that Jesus is coming soon to bring history to a rather climactic end.” Maybe the climactic end will also be a climatic end—God will bring about the end of the universe through climate change.
Personal morality can come from a variety of sources, including religious beliefs. But those religious beliefs should stay in the private sphere, and not be brought into public policy. It’s difficult to know how much these sorts of beliefs in divine providence are behind climate denialism or how much they affect climate policy in the US. But it’s unquestionable that they take agency away from people. In my opinion, the late James Watt’s views that life on earth will end in the next few generations should have disqualified him from public office.
American Civil Religion
Sociologists have a theory “that a nonsectarian quasi-religious faith exists within the United States with sacred symbols drawn from national history.”
According to Catherine L. Albanese’s 1976 book, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution the American Revolution produced these religious properties: a Moses-like leader in George Washington; prophets such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine; apostles such as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin; martyrs such as at the Boston Massacre and in Nathan Hale; devils such as Benedict Arnold and Hessian "mercenaries"; sacred places such as Independence Hall and Valley Forge; rituals such as raising the Liberty Pole; symbols such as the Betsy Ross flag; sacred holidays such as Independence Day; and a holy scripture based on the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
Some of the tenets of this civil religion are that freedom comes from God through government, governmental authority comes from God, that God can be known through the American experience, America’s prosperity results from God’s providence, and that America is a “city on a hill,” a beacon of hope and righteousness. This “civil religion” is conceived as interdenominational, though it obviously leaves out atheists.
The US Constitution as a Sacred Text
Last year, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas said that “we were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but the words of God because he wrote the constitution.” The belief that the US Constitution was divinely inspired, and that God has chosen the US to lead the world, is a belief in Providence, and is apparently common among US evangelicals. It is also the official position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons.
We fetishize the Constitution. Tom Paine, in Common Sense, said we do not need a king as a symbol of nationhood. Instead, we should frame a “charter of fundamental law” (i.e. the Constitution) which they would parade in public and crown on a solemn occasion to inform the world that, in America, law is king.
The belief that the Constitution is divinely inspired ties into originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation used by some US Supreme Court justices, especially Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. The theory of originalism is that the intent of the drafters of the Constitution, and the meaning the words in the Constitution held at the time of their drafting, is the touchstone for interpreting the Constitution. In some ways, it is to be interpreted as a sacred text, like the Ten Commandments. The idea that God wrote the constitution means that we should treat it as a sacred text.
We have no good way of knowing how much the US Supreme Court justices’ religious beliefs influence their mode of interpreting the Constitution. Six out of the nine justices are Catholic. The other three are Protestant (Jackson), Jewish (Kagan), and Episcopalian, but raised as a Catholic (Gorsuch). Such predominance of Catholics sheds light on the court’s position on abortion. Divine providence has been an important thread in Catholic theology since St. Augustine in the 4th century. It was developed extensively as a doctrine by Thomas Aquinas, and has continued to this day as part of Catholic belief.
Article VI, Section 1, Clause 3 of the US Constitution requires public officials to take an “oath or affirmation” to support the Constitution, and, since 1790, all nationalized citizens must take an oath of allegiance to both the USA and its Constitution. The taking of this oath is akin to a religious ritual, as suggested by the Constitutional wording: Clause 3 says the oath is required, “but no religious Test shall every be required...” The oath substitutes for the religious test required for public office by the English church. According to Thomas C. Grey’s, article, “The Constitution as Scripture” in the Stanford Law Review (37 Stan. Law R. 1), Clause 3 suggests that “America would have no national church...yet the worship of the Constitution would serve the unifying function of a national civil religion.”
Under the current oath, specified by Congress in a statute, a public-office oath-taker swears or affirms that he or she “will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and will bear true faith and allegiance to the same...So help me God.” It’s unclear from this text or the constitutional text just what the oath means, but a reasonable interpretation is that the oath-taker promises not to undertake political reforms outside the constitution, and can’t support a rebellion or overthrow of the constitutionally established government. But, still, an oath of loyalty to a text suggests that the text is sacred. Another indication that some folks consider the Constitution to be a sacred text comes from its inclusion, along with the Declaration of Independence, in the “God Bless the USA Bible.”
Just like the belief in divine Providence or the imminence of the end times forecast in the Book of Revelation, the belief that the US Constitution is a sacred text deprives humans of agency. Should we amend the Constitution when it was originally written by God? This is similar to the Christian question about Providence: Should we worry about climate change when God is charge of the big picture? These sorts of questions should not be shaping national policy, but they are.