Soundings No. 52 – 16 March 2007

Climate change: two evangelical views

by Andrew Cameron and Lisa Watts

‘You can’t change the weather,’ we all used to say with a shrug, to make the point that some actions are well beyond the powers of puny humans. But a disagreement has opened up among U.S. evangelicals about the extent to which we can, or cannot, change the weather.

The purpose of this briefing is very limited. We simply want to outline the groups involved in this American Christian debate, and note some of their views. We will not evaluate the merits of their respective cases; that task is for future Social Issues briefings. We suspect that similar disagreements might be present among Australian evangelicals; however we don’t want attention to the U.S. scene to polarise our local scene. Rather, we hope that some recognition of the competing views might assist us to clarify the points at issue as we all consider our response to claims about climate change.

We will, however, take serious exception to two of the claims put by one of the parties concerned. These two claims go way beyond the issue of climate change and concern the nature of Christian ethics and the meaning of the term ‘evangelical’. It is important for us to name these two claims as wrong.

But first, can people change the weather? Christian debate on the American scene is, in part, about the extent to which global warming is ‘anthropogenic’, meaning caused by human activity. For signatories of a document by the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), the planet is warming largely due to human causes. The anthropogenic element implies an important moral claim: if humanity started it, then changes to human activity might also stop it. We have changed the weather, therefore we should attempt to change it again; and we should particularly do so, on this argument, out of respect for the world’s poor who will be most directly affected by climate change.

But for the authors and endorsers of a response document by the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA), the anthropogenic contribution to global warming is slight, and therefore human attempts to reverse it are overstated and will have little or no result, yet will be needlessly expensive and will involve unnecessary economic dislocations—to be felt most acutely by the world’s poor.

At this point it will be useful to pause, because the names and three letter acronyms begin to multiply. We thought it might help to list some of the protagonists in a table:

Global warming is mainly anthropogenic, and policy initiatives should seek to halt it:

Global warming is mainly natural, and policy initiatives should protect the economy:

Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI) http://www.christiansandclimate.org Key document: ‘Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.’

National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) http://www.nae.net Main spokesman: Rev. Richard Cizik

Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA) http://www.interfaithstewardship.org Key document: ‘A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming.’

Authors of an open letter to the NAE http://www.citizenlink.org/CLNews/A000004114.cfm Main (?) spokesman: Dr James Dobson (Focus on the Family, FoF) Further Reading:

Brief summary of the dispute: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-evangelicals10mar10,0,7299079,full.story?coll=l

Proposed debate on the ‘great moral issues’ claim:

http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/godspolitics/2007/03/jim-wallis-big-debate.html.

Soundings is a publication of the Centre for Christian Ethics, edited by Rod Benson.