People of all faiths, including white evangelicals, are convinced climate change is real and a threat, according to a new poll, but whether they believe it’s caused by humans depends on the denomination.
Further, climate change doesn’t seem to be controversial among Roman Catholics, despite the contention of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who is Catholic, that the issue was too “controversial” for her to comment on during a recent Senate hearing.
A majority of Catholics believe that climate change is happening, that it is caused by humans and they are worried by it, according to the poll conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.
Overall, nearly three-quarters of 1,884 registered voters said they believe climate change is happening, and a majority said it is a very serious or somewhat serious problem. And 58 percent said climate change is “caused mostly by human activities,” with 71 percent supporting at least some government action, presumably including those who believed it is caused by “natural changes in the environment.”
The online poll asked respondents to identify their faith.
Although 63 percent of white evangelical Protestants said climate change is happening and a majority believe it is a somewhat serious or very serious problem, only 44 percent believed it is caused by humans.
But a majority of all other affiliations, with the exception of “other,” believed the cause is human behavior.
“This is more evidence that there’s this dawning awareness within people of faith communities that climate change is in fact a moral and religious issue,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program.
Leiserowitz said the poll also found more people are hearing about climate change than in the past. It has also become a serious topic in presidential debates for the first time.
There has been a sharp shift in interpreting the Bible to support concern over the environment, according to Leiserowitz. He cites the passage in Genesis: “And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'”
The term dominion had traditionally been interpreted to mean that God gave humans the right “to do whatever you want.” Now the view is that humans are stewards of the earth, and is viewed in conjunction with the biblical passage stating humans were given the Garden of Eden to “tend and watch over it,” he said.
