(RNS) — On the same day Pope Francis issued a new call for climate change action, a group of mostly mainline Protestant and Jewish leaders launched a seven-year campaign to advocate for meaningful climate solutions.
“One Home One Future” is the latest multifaith effort intended to engage congregations in caring for the Earth.
But a new survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that work won’t be easy.
Beliefs on the severity of climate change have not shifted much among religious traditions over the past decade and few religious Americans view climate change as a crisis, according to the PRRI study published Wednesday (Oct. 4).
Overall, 27% of Americans say climate change is a crisis, just a few percentage points up from 23% in 2014. Among the nation’s religious groups, beliefs on the severity of climate change have not shifted significantly. In fact, among white evangelicals the view that the Earth is in crisis actually dropped — from 13% in 2014 to 8% today.
No religious group topped one-third of respondents agreeing climate change is a crisis. American Jews were the most likely to say so at 32%, followed by 31% of Hispanic Catholics, 22% of white mainline Protestants, 20% of white Catholics, 19% of Black Protestants and 16% of Hispanic Protestants who say there’s a climate crisis.
The survey of 5,192 adults in all 50 states, conducted online June 8-28, 2023, shows that despite growing climate calamities, American opinions have not moved dramatically.
“The fact that it remained unchanged was pretty remarkable to me,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI. “It’s just really concerning,”
So far in 2023, the United States has had 23 separate weather and climate disasters that cost more than $1 billion each in damage, The New York Times reported. Those include Hurricane Idalia in Florida and the wildfires in Hawaii, which are believed to have killed 97 people. The month of August was the planet’s hottest in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 174-year record.
While religious Americans mostly agree that climate change is caused by human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, here too there are exceptions. Nearly half of white evangelicals (49%) still believe climate change is caused by natural patterns in the environment.
To a great extent, these unyielding views of the climate crisis may be shaped by politics. Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints, who overall don’t see climate change as a crisis, are stalwart Republicans, a party that has resisted acknowledging climate change. (Former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee in 2024, has called the extremely settled science of climate change a “hoax.”)
“I’m not at all surprised to find that white evangelicals and Latter-day Saints tend to be the least likely to think that climate change is caused by humans or see any sort of policy to address it because we know that the Republican Party’s official position has often denied climate change and it’s certainly not advocating for policies that mitigate climate change effects,” Deckman said.
