Friday, September 9, 2011

Religious faith and global warming denial



This interesting graph courtesy of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. I've been looking for some polling on religious belief and attitudes towards climate change, especially given Rick Perry's fundamentalist-fueled rise to Republican primary stardom, and here we go.

Looking at these results, we can see being religious by no means makes one a climate denier, but if you are a white evangelical it is, to use the medical parlance, a risk factor. White evangelicals are 70% more likely to deny the world is warming than a person with no religious affiliation. But for other denominations the link is weaker. Catholics were only 20% more likely to deny the earth is warming; the difference (18% vs 22% is likely not statistically significant.

Even among white evangelicals, more people think the Earth is warming and humans are the cause -- fully a third of those polled -- than think it is not warming.

That will not make certain people happy.

Rick Warren, author of the best seller "The Purpose-Driven Life" was one of 86 evangelicals to launch a "Evangelical Climate Initiative"

2 comments:

  1. It's bitterly ironic for these braying twits, who have smothered us for decades in their a) family values and b) personal responsibility, prattle to deny the real world situation that critically combines both their purported "issues."

    John Puma

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  2. Perhaps because they have so effectively lowered my expectations over the years, I was pleasantly surprised to see:

    * A number of prominent evangelicals step up and advocate for action on global warming.
    * A third of evangelicals to say global warming is real and humans are causing it.

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