KH Comes Down Hard On the Evangelical Flock

 

Canadian-born  Katharine Hayhoe has achieved a certain celebrity for being a climate scientist and a devout evangelical Christian. Many see science and belief as diametrically opposed, irreconcilable. She doesn't. She also doesn't see basic Christian precepts flourishing among many evangelicals.

The biggest struggle I have is that in the Bible, Jesus says to his disciples, “You should be recognized as my disciples by your love for others,” and today when you look at people who self-identify as Christians in the United States, love for others is not one of the top characteristics you see. Christianity is much more closely linked with political ideology and identity, with judgmentalism, partisanship, science denial, rejection of responsibility for the poorest and most vulnerable who we, as Christians, are to care for. You know, there was a really interesting recent article about the landscape of evangelicalism in the United States, and it said that about 10 years ago if you asked people, “Do you consider yourself to be evangelical?” and they said yes, and then you asked, “Do you go to church?” about 30 percent would say no. But nowadays something like 40 percent of people who self-identify as evangelicals don’t go to church. They go to the church of Facebook or Fox News or whatever media outlet they get their information from. So their statement of faith is written primarily by political ideology and only a distant second by theology.

Mark Noll is a historian at Notre Dame. He wrote a book in 1994 called “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” In it he tracked how the political evolution of the United States directly related to how people viewed religion from an increasingly nationalistic and individualistic perspective, an increasing rejection of authority. Noll’s book, even though it was written so long ago, shows how the land had already been cleared, tilled and sowed for when the Moral Majority came along in the 1980s. They took advantage of those fertile fields to deliberately politicize religion in America. They couldn’t have succeeded if it wasn’t for this trend over the last hundred years to conflate individualism and American culture with theology.

Moral mind games. "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up already."

I think it’s Jonathan Haidt who says that we think that people use information to make up their minds but they don’t. People use what Haidt calls our moral judgment. We use moral judgment to make up our minds and then use our brains to find reasons that explain why we’re right. There’s no way to separate the emotional from the logical. We think it’s possible to convince people to act rationally in their best interests: Well, look at people who, as they are dying, are rejecting the fact that they have Covid. Look at people who are still rejecting simple things like taking a vaccine and wearing masks. We are primarily emotional, and emotions are engaged deeply with climate change because it brings up the most profound sense of loss: People on the right, for example, deeply fear losing their liberties because of climate solutions. So what we need to do is to show everyone how climate solutions are not only not incompatible with who they are but help more genuinely express who they are and what we care about; make us an even more-genuine advocate for national security, an even stronger supporter of the free market, an even more independent person or, in my case, a more genuine expression of my faith.