End Times

As I considered the many ways that Evangelical Christians engage with climate change I found myself returning to the question of why so many in the United States are opposed to climate science. In fact, even Katherine Hayhoe is originally from Canada. Is nationality a larger determinant in climate science denial than religion? If so, then what is it about the United States Evangelical community specifically that finds itself threatened by climate science?

As I searched for studies that might shed light on this issue I found a fascinating ethnography of Scottish fisherman in a remote Scottish village called Gamrie. This article by Joseph Webster is entitled “The Eschatology of Global Warming in a Scottish Fishing Village” and explores the widespread denial of climate science in the town. The villagers of Gamrie deny climate science despite the disproportionate impact of climate change on their economic livelihood due to their reliance on marine ecosystems as well as their village’s vulnerability to severe weather. Webster’s article details the religious, cultural, and economic factors that feed into local beliefs and notes the local belief that while the end times are near that they are not being brought about by anthropogenic climate change but rather are signs of Christ’s imminent return.

Webster found that a general religiosity permeated the village, especially Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity. Yet, he believed that their faith was not the sole cause of their denial of climate science or their beliefs about the coming apocalypse. Rather, their religious beliefs were essentially the language through which they expressed and interpreted the daily struggles and uncertainties that they faced which sprang from economic and bureaucratic burdens. Further, while some of these hardships were inherent to fishing, many of their struggles were caused or exacerbated by EU regulations.

The laws imposed by EU bureaucrats in Belgium were felt to be not only out-of-touch or annoying but were literally seen as tools of the devil. As a brief example of how they came to this conclusion consider the impact of EU regulations related to fish quotas. The fishermen were sometimes forced to throw back already dead fish when one of their nets accidentally exceeded EU regulations for a certain kind of catch. Further, the fishermen were sometimes required to allow EU regulators to dye their fish red as an indicator that it should be sold below the standard price in keeping with trade regulations. The combination of wasted fish, lost income, and the cultural association of the color red with Satan led many of the fishermen to quite literally associate EU bureaucracy with the devil.

Further, according to Webster, the fishermen of Gamrie viewed the more hyperbolic rhetoric from environmentalists as a threat for deeper theological reasons. They viewed the dire warnings from climate scientists as a counter-narrative of the apocalypse that threatened their own beliefs about the end-times. Climate scientists, according to the fishermen, want to replace God’s will as the causative force in nature with an explanation based on human behavior. Indeed, a feature story in The Guardian entitled “Hellfire” that connects climate change to the forest fires in California shows that the fishermen’s view of environmentalism as a form of eschatology is not far-fetched. Additionally, the Gamrie fishermen felt that climate science attempts to replace God’s salvation with science-based solutions. Thus both causation and salvation, which should be seen as divine, are replaced by environmentalists with a human-centric worldview.

While Webster’s account certainly held a resonance for me with the kinds of anti-climate-science rhetoric that I have heard from family and friends, I was unsure how much it could apply to the Evangelical community in the US. Do economic and bureaucratic forces impact the Evangelical community here as in Gamrie? One study does hint at a possible similarity.

In an article published in 2018 and entitled “Insights on Environmental Attitudes Could Help Lessen Urban-Rural Divide“, Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment investigated the causes of climate science denial among rural US citizens. A prime issue that they identified was that rural Americans believed they were disproportionately and negatively impacted by environmental regulations while they were simultaneously underrepresented in legislatures. This is a very similar dynamic to what Webster described in Gamrie and surely points to a source of distrust between outside authorities and rural US citizens.

Nonetheless, the study from Duke is far from conclusive. While Evangelicals are more likely to be from Southern and Midwestern states which have larger rural populations the Duke study did not look directly at religious beliefs and environmental views. Further, while the Duke study uncovered a similar political dynamic to the one described in Gamrie it did not directly address religious ideology at all. In short, the Duke study taken together with Webster’s work suggests that a deep dive into the complex interconnections between religious views, geographic distribution, economic forces, and political pressures among Christian Evangelicals and climate science skeptics more broadly is called for. Additionally, the Duke study’s failure to investigate a link between people’s religious views and their views on climate change may indicate a general discomfort in the US with seeing religious and secular issues as intertwined. This suggests an area for improvement in future studies.