Environmental Beliefs Among Evangelical Leadership

There has been consensus among climate scientists for over a decade about the reality of human caused climate change. Even with this consensus, the public understanding of this issue remains divided based on factors generally unrelated to the science. While political conservatism is consistently the strongest predictor for climate change skepticism, evangelical protestants are another group which consistently polls as more skeptical of climate change. This is true not only when compared to the general population but also when compared to other religious demographics. It is worth noting that past studies and our study demonstrate that the climate skepticism of evangelicals remains even when controlling for increased political conservatism among this demographic. Most large-scale surveys of evangelicals assume the demographic to be a monolith and do not attempt to break the demographic down further. In this nationwide survey, we take a closer look at the opinions of those in evangelical leadership roles such as full-time ministers or full-time professors at evangelical institutions of higher learning. In this presentation we compare our results to similar Pew surveys which look at the larger evangelical demographic. We found evangelical leadership to respond similarly to the larger evangelical demographic, but those in professorship roles are more likely to believe in climate change than those in ministerial leadership roles. Gender also might play a role with females being more likely to believe in climate change than males in certain tests. There are also indications that evangelicals may be even more divided on this issue than the general population. In addition to the quantitative results of the survey, respondents were allowed the opportunity to write in comments for each question. This resulted in over two hundred pages of qualitative data related to the opinions of evangelical leadership on issues surrounding climate change. These written responses offer invaluable insights in attempting to understand the belief structures that might relate to increased skepticism among evangelicals. This presentation will focus primarily on the quantitative results of the survey but will briefly touch on the initial qualitative results which are still in the process of analysis.