April 22, 2009

As another Earth Day arrives, a wide gap exists between white evangelicals and Americans of other religious backgrounds concerning the issue of global warming.

An 2008 analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life reports that while 71 percent of the U.S. population thinks solid evidence exists showing the earth has been warming over the past few decades, only 58 percent of white evangelicals agree.

Among those who believe global warming is a reality, 47 percent of the general population blames the warming on human activity, while only 34 percent of white evangelicals lay the blame on manmade causes.

Fully 31 percent of white evangelicals dismiss the notion of there being hard evidence to prove global warming is happening, compared to 21 percent of the U.S. population.

And the numbers when comparing white evangelicals with Americans who list their religious membership as “unaffiliated” are even more at different ends of the spectrum, though the overall percentage of Americans who say the earth is getting warmer has decreased from 77 percent in since January 2007.

Why the differences? One often-heard criticism among evangelicals is that the secular media sways public thinking by printing misinformation.

At least one evangelical leader on the global warming issue thinks the real reason behind the Pew Forum research numbers lies elsewhere.

E. Calvin Beisner, a former professor of social ethics at Knox Theological Seminary,  is one of the leading evangelical critics of the validity of global warming. Among his primary answers for the “global warming gap” is that evangelicals are critical thinkers who demand strong evidence before they will believe what the world is telling them.

“We’re not absolute skeptics, but we’re fairly skeptical ... which helps explain why evangelicals have not jumped on the global warming bandwagon,” Beisner said, pointing to the apostle Paul’s admonition in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 to “test all things; hold fast which is good.”

Also setting evangelicals apart from the mainstream is their preponderance to view everything through a Biblical worldview, Beisner said.

Beisner explained that contrary to much of the scientific study conducted and presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the earth has natural, God-given methods of climate control that keep everything in balance.

“Evangelicals, because of their world view, would naturally look for such mechanisms and would expect to find a self-correcting system, but those who don’t think God created the world would expect a system that is fragile,” he said.

Beisner questioned the current relevance of the Pew report, citing its year-old information – the survey polled 1,502 Americans last April and was part of a larger study that also looked at gender, race and political affiliation – as reason to wonder why the results were released last week. He said that newer surveys show evangelicals are even less ready to affirm manmade warming than the Pew poll suggests.