Evangelicals and the Environment

According to Arlie Russell Hochschild from her recent book Strangers in Their Own Land,

The National Association of Evangelicals is a voice for its 30,000,000 members, who make up a quarter of the American electorate, and a leading organization of the religious right with a political voice. This is true too of the Christian Coalition, which supported some 36 senators and 243 members of the House of Representatives, half of whom received a score of 10 percent or lower on the environmental scorecard of the League of Conservation Voters. (Kindle Locations 2109-2112)

According to a 2010 Pew Research Center report, 41 percent of all Americans believe the Second Coming “probably” or “definitely” will happen by the year 2050. Given automation and corporate offshoring, real wages of high school– educated American men have fallen 40 percent since 1970. For the whole bottom 90 percent of workers, average wages have flattened since 1980. Many older white men are in despair. Indeed, such men suffer a higher than average death rate due to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide. Although life expectancy for nearly every other group is rising, between 1990 and 2008 the life expectancy of older white men without high school diplomas has been shortened by three years— and truly, it seems, by despair. In their tough secular lives, life may well feel like “end times.” (Kindle Locations 2147-2157)

It would seem nearly impossible to make forward progress on environmental concerns while holding the above belief. Given the magnitude of America's carbon footprint and its disproportionate effect on climate change - e.g. through its own emissions of green house gases and its influence on international decisions like the Paris Agreement - this seems to suggest that some 30 million evangelical Americans are deciding the future of the planet. That is roughly 0.4 percent of the current world population.

Eight-one percent of evangelicals backed Trump in the recent election, who has promised to, "lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars' worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal" and "cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs".