JSRNC Editor Robin Veldman on Evangelicals and Climate Change

We’re sharing some belated summer news coverage focused on the intersections of religious values and climate change that featured Iowa State University religious studies professor and JSRNC Senior Assistant Editor Robin Veldman. Here’s is an excerpt of the WaPo article featuring comments from Veldman.

The Christian right has been actively promoting climate change skepticism, especially on Christian radio and television, said Robin Globus Veldman, a religious studies professor at Iowa State University who is working on a book on evangelicals and climate change.

“Environmentalists were caught in the crossfire because they were positioned on the other side of the aisle and tend to be less religious,” Veldman said. “They started to be described as allied with the people who were trying to push Christianity out of the public square.”

Some environmentalists believe that evangelicals don’t care about the Earth because they believe Jesus is going to come back, so humans don’t need to focus on keeping the planet sustainable. But she said she hasn’t seen much evidence for this view.

And some people believe that evangelicals have had a deep skepticism of science going way back to the famous 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” when the American Civil Liberties Union defended a teacher convicted of teaching evolution, a landmark case addressing the roles of science and religion in the classroom.

“A lot of people portray evangelicals as anti-science,” Veldman said. “Evangelicals accept a lot of science, just not the parts that conflict their faith.”

The evangelicals Veldman has spoken to oppose evolution because they see it as a threat to their faith, contradicting the Bible. And many oppose climate change because they see it as a threat to God’s omnipotence.

You can read the full article at the Washington Post here.