re: #312 ShanghaiEd

I would also add Global Warming to that list of agendas they’ve tried to tie to religion. For some reason it seems to have worked far less well than with abortion and gays. Why do you think that is?

You know, I almost put Global Warming on that list.

I suspect one reason it hasn’t worked is because there are already churches, many of them evangelical, that are already green. Here’s an article from Time in 2006:

A Group of 86 evangelical Christian leaders launched a campaign today to educate Christians about climate change and urged the U.S. Congress to enact legislation to curb global warming. The initiative marks the first time that influential evangelicals have defied the White House on an environmental issue, going so far as to equate stopping global warming to their commitment to “protect unborn life.”

time.com

Basically I think the reason is that there’s no doctrinal unity among the Protestants and evangelicals in particular that the anti-GW people can appeal to. There’s a split in how they interpret scripture; the green ones believe God gave us stewardship over the earth and its creatures, and therefore there’s a duty to take care of it/them.

The others believe that God will provide no matter what we do to the earth.

And some even have the explicit belief that GW is a good thing, because they believe by destroying the earth we’re running down the clock on when Jesus will return. (James Watt believed that; here is a PDF doc about that.)

So the religious right that is on board with denying climate change can’t come out and admit that they believe that the destruction of the climate and the earth is a good thing. That’s why they’re silent on the issue, and motivated to keep religion out of the discussion.