What Would Jesus Do About Climate Change?

“Preserve and restore God’s great gift of creation.”

Robert Michael/Getty Images

This story was originally published by HuffPost and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Green New Deal has picked up endorsements from two major Christian groups, signaling a growing base of support among the faithful as climate change projections look increasingly apocalyptic. 

The Unitarian Universalist Association passed a resolution at its general assembly in late June endorsing the Green New Deal resolution that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced in Congress five months ago. The main national organization for the egalitarian spiritual movement, which has over 1,000 churches in the U.S., vowed to “actively support the development of federal legislation to implement” the deal.

Days later, the national deliberative body of the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant sect with nearly 825,000 adherents and close to 4,900 congregations across the United States, also voted to endorse the Green New Deal. It called the policy framework “what is needed to preserve and restore God’s great gift of creation.”

Last week, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, a youth organization within one of Protestantism’s most traditionally conservative denominations, praised what it called the Green New Deal’s “biblical principles” and pledged to work “toward translating these…into viable, bipartisan bills.” 

The announcements bring new momentum to the effort to advance a sweeping national industrial plan to eliminate planet-warming emissions and provide millions of Americans with good-paying jobs that fortify infrastructure and build renewable energy—at a moment when that plan is facing fierce opposition. The religious endorsements could give the Green New Deal appeal in conservative districts as activists urge 2020 candidates to adopt its framework. 

“You’ve got everyone from the Unitarian Universalists to the young evangelicals,” said Rev. Brooks Berndt, a 42-year-old United Church of Christ minister in the Cleveland area. “That’s quite a spectrum.”

Roughly 70% of the U.S. population identifies as Christian. Throughout American history, Christian clergy have taken leading roles in progressive social movements. They championed the rights of workers and immigrants amid the nation’s chaotic 19th-century boom. During the civil rights era, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. frequently cited the Bible to highlight the immorality of racism and spent his final years crusading against laws that preserved the poverty he saw as antithetical to the teachings of Jesus Christ. 

When the so-called culture war shifted to fights over evolution, abortion and LGBTQ rights, a new generation of religious hardliners with national TV platforms forged a powerful conservative voting bloc. In the mid-2000s, as the oil industry’s propaganda denying climate science became a main Republican Party line, those voters adopted a similar stance.

When the Pew Research Center polled different Christian sects in 2015 on climate change, white evangelicals were the least likely, at 28%, to recognize that the planet is warming due to human actions. That compared to 41% of white mainline Protestants, 45% of white Catholics, 56% of black Protestants and 77% of Hispanic Catholics. 

Yet the number of actual Christian deniers has plummeted over the past four years as mounting natural disasters, increasingly grave scientific forecasts and a rapidly growing political movement erase doubt over the cause of planetary changes. And new research published last week shows that religious messaging on climate resonates with Christians who already understand the crisis.

Providing “a better life for our children and grandchildren” came out as the top motivation among Christians and non-Christians to reduce planet-warming emissions, according to the study published in the journal Science Communication. But Christian respondents said they were also inspired by a need to “protect God’s creation.”

“[T]his research suggests that moral, religious, and social normative frames can be effective ways to engage Christians in the issue of climate change,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a co-author of the study, wrote in an email newsletter last week. 

In 2015, Pope Francis, the leader of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, released an encyclical― titled “Laudato si’,” or “Be praised”―outlining the theological case for combating climate change. The pope has repeatedly sermonized against the inaction on what he last month declared a “climate emergency,” calling the failure to reduce greenhouse gases “a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future generations.” He has not, however, endorsed the Green New Deal, even as the idea is gaining traction in Europe, Canada and elsewhere. 

Climate change, said evangelical Rev. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, is “first a biblical, moral and gospel issue, rather than first a political issue.” As such, Young Evangelicals for Social Action decided not to endorse the Green New Deal resolution outright, lest the group alienate the conservative co-religionists it aims to influence. 

“Rather than signaling which side of the tribal fight we’re on, we wanted to rise above that and set a lot of that aside and reflect that the Green New Deal actually reflects biblical principles,” said Meyaard-Schaap, 30, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. “We’re leveraging within our community the disaffection among young people with … the way in which our faith has become weaponized as a political tool.” 

Yet, for others, the latest string of endorsements are less about the redirection of entrenched institutions than about the political diversity of American Christianity.

“There’s no doubt that certain elements of Christianity have been hijacked by forces that are really antithetical to justice and the gospel,” said Berndt, who serves as an environmental justice minister in the United Church of Christ. “There’s a long history of Christianity, back to the Roman Empire, where there’s faith that gets co-opted by empire and faith that forms resistance to empire.” 

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate