Religious Leadership and Climate Change Communication

My final culminating action project was inspired by the climate scientist and Evangelical Christian Katherine Hayhoe, who was first introduced to me when we watched Episode 1 of Years of Living Dangerously, entitled “Dry Season” in the course Climate Change Communication (Bach, 2014). Hayhoe’s clear influence as climate messenger, as well as her discussion of how environmental advocacy was constitutive of her faith, alerted me to the power of religious leaders as communicants in the climate debate. Over the course of the class, I became acquainted with research which identifies religious leaders as cultural authorities on science for religious individuals and communities (Akinloye, 2018; Schietle, 2018). This perception of scientific authority is particularly apparent for Evangelical Christians, who in turn are especially likely to oppose political action against climate change (Johnson, 2017). People also tend to be more receptive to discussions about climate change when they engage with individuals they know or are familiar with. Given their influence within both moderately concerned and denialist circles—which make up roughly 45 percent of Americans, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication—scholars have identified priests, ministers, and chaplains as important communicants within the climate debate (Markowitz, 2012; Arbuckle, 2017; Akinloye, 2018; Goldberg et al. 2020).

This body of work encouraged me to conduct a series of qualitative interviews with priests, ministers, pastors, and chaplains for my micro-study assignment. The conversations and connections I made throughout my execution of this project encouraged me to continue to investigate the potential of religious leaders and faith communities to positively influence the climate debate. Two of the primary results of my research were especially promising. First, I realized that most religious leaders are unaware of their power to influence the climate attitudes of their congregations, and second, that those who are aware of their influence and wish to utilize it struggle to frame conversations with their congregations about environmental stewardship. This is because they view their jobs as spiritual leaders as inherently apolitical, and climate change is laden with political baggage that makes it difficult to discuss in a nonpartisan context. In the intersection of these results, I realized the need for a communications initiative which alerted religious leaders to their power as climate communicants, and provided them with strategies to help them frame conversations about climate change mindfully.

Therefore, I decided to dedicate my culminating action project for Climate Change Communication to creating a document that fulfilled these needs. I began by interviewing two pastors with the United Church of Christ (UCC) who I met through my micro-study project. I did this with the aim of discussing how they felt conversations about environmental stewardship with Christian leaders could be most successful. These interviews were invaluable to my project, as they pointed me in the direction of helpful resources like the UCC e-letter The Pollinator, and provided me with advice about how to address ministers as a non-Christian. I followed these discussions with some mild research on framing environmental discussions, and climate change communications strategies. I referenced many texts from this course throughout my project, especially Per Espen Stoknes’s What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, and Matthew Baldwin and Boris Lammers’s article “Past-focused environmental comparisons promote pro-environmental outcomes for conservatives.”

I amalgamated all of this information in a six page document which outlined why religious leaders are important climate messengers, and identified four tools for ministers to utilize in order to harness their power to influence the climate attitudes of their congregants. The four tools, in turn, were “Connect Climate Change to Other Serious Areas of Concern,” “Discuss Climate Change Casually,” “Frame Calls to Action Mindfully,” and “Commit to an Ongoing Education.” “Connect Climate Change to Other Serious Areas of Concern” emphasized an intersectional understanding of environmental stewardship, and encouraged religious leaders to frame climate advocacy as a means of mitigating other issues of Christian moral concern, such as poverty, disease, refugee crises, racial injustice, wealth inequality, food insecurity, and water insecurity. “Discuss Climate Change Casually” suggested that Christian leaders mention climate change in the midst of everyday life, with the aim of normalizing and depoliticizing the topic. “Frame Calls to Action Mindfully” explicitly discussed the importance of utilizing frames which may be most effective for the cultural identities of individual faith communities; for example, I suggested that conservative pastors may benefit from framing discussions of creation care in terms of conservation. Finally, “Commit to an Ongoing Education” emphasized the importance not just of scientific literacy, but of beginning and maintaining dialogues between religious leaders and environmental scientists, climate activists, local non-profit organizers, students, and even other pastors.

I began my distribution of this document by sending it to some of the religious leaders I interviewed in my micro-study. Minister Sandra Fischer, who I also interviewed in the creation of this document, has brought it forward to the Faith Leaders Subcommittee of the Granby Racial Reconciliation Council. This was done in the hopes that they may be able to organize a climate justice Sunday sometime this summer, which would consist of a series of sermons across Granby, Connecticut, and would aim to emphasize an intersectional understanding of environmental stewardship. I also submitted the document to several religious e-letters, blogs, and journals. One of these blogs, The Green Prophet, which is run by biologist, journalist, and tech entrepreneur Karin Kloosterman, has expressed an interest in the piece. Kloosterman has been in contact with me, and may publish the document online soon. Overall, while this piece has not reached a large number of people yet, my hope is that this project will continue to evolve even after the semester ends, and continue to positively impact the climate debate well into the future.




References


Akinloye, I. (2018). Towards the implementation of sustainable development goals in Nigeria: Maximizing the influence of religious leaders. STJ | Stellenbosch Theological Journal, 4(1), 39–60. https://doi.org/10.17570/stj.2018.v4n1.a02.


Arbuckle, M. (2017). The Interaction of Religion, Political Ideology, and Concern About Climate Change in the United States. Society & Natural Resources, 30(2), 177–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2016.1209267


Bach, J. (Director). (2014, April 13). Dry Season (Season 1, Episode 1). [Dry Season]. In A. Schwarzenegger, J. Bach, D. Gelber, A. Bolt (Executive Producer), Years of Living Dangerously. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.


Baldwin, M. & Lammers, J. (2016). Past-focused environmental comparisons promote proenvironmental outcomes for conservatives. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, 113(52), 14953–14957. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1610834113


Goldberg, M., Gustafson, A., Rosenthal, S., Kotcher, J., Maibach, E., & Leiserowitz, A. (2020). For the first time, the Alarmed are now the largest of Global Warming’s Six Americas. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.


Johnson, D., & Peifer, J. (2017). How Public Confidence in Higher Education Varies by Social Context. The Journal of Higher Education (Columbus), 88(4), 619–644. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2017.1291256.




Markowitz, E., & Shariff, A. (2012). Climate change and moral judgement. Nature Climate Change, 2(4), 243–247. https://doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE1378


Scheitle, Christopher P., et al. “Scientists and Religious Leaders Compete for Cultural Authority of Science.” Public Understanding of Science (Bristol, England), vol. 27, no. 1, SAGE Publications, 2018, pp. 59–75, https://doi:10.1177/0963662517718145.
Stoknes, P. (2015). What we think about when we try not to think about global warming : toward a new psychology of climate action. Chelsea Green Publishing.