Abstract
Because a significant portion of the American electorate identify themselves as evangelical Christians, the evangelical position on climate policy is important to determining the role the United States could play in global climate cooperation. Do evangelicals oppose all climate policies, or are they particularly opposed to certain types of policies? We argue that American evangelicals oppose climate policy due to their distrust of international cooperation and institutions, which has been a prominent feature of evangelical politics since the beginning of the Cold War. Using data from the 2011 Faith and Global Policy Challenges survey and the 2010 Chicago Council Global View survey, we find support for the theory. Evangelicals are equally likely to support domestic climate policy as other Americans, but they are significantly less likely to support international treaties on climate cooperation. The findings suggest that proponents of climate policy could win more evangelicals to their side by focusing on domestic action, instead of multilateral negotiations or international institutions.
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Notes
See http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations. Accessed October 29, 2012.
Rothenberg and Newport identify respondents as evangelicals when they classify themselves as Christians, agree with the statement that Jesus was a unique person and the real son of God, and respond affirmatively either to the question that a person must personally accept Jesus Christ as their savior in order to have eternal salvation, or to the statement that they identify themselves as “a born-again Christian.” Rothenberg and Newport explain that they include the question about personal acceptance of Christ in order not to rely completely on self-identification as “born-again,” as in 1984 the term “born-again” may not have had familiar connotations for all respondents. The surveys we use both rely completely on self-identification of respondents as “born-again or evangelical” Christians. Because both terms have become so prevalent since the 1980s, self-identification in these terms is now a much more reliable strategy for identifying respondents who believe in the necessity of personal acceptance of Jesus Christ. Rothenberg and Newport’s use of self-identification implies that this group is more than a categorical group, but has forged some kind of social identity through shared beliefs (Kellstedt and Smidt 1991).
See, for example, Skotece (2012) on progressive Christian organizations and climate change.
The dominion view is derived from the book of Genesis 1:28: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (NIV).
One of the key Bible passages in stewardship theology is Psalms 24:1: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”
See also: Barker et al. (2008) who find that belief in the inerrancy of the Bible is associated with greater preference for militarism in the United States.
See Kull et al. (2011) for their report.
In the Supplementary Appendix, we show that our results are also robust to including Catholic and Orthodox respondents who identify as evangelical. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their advice here. The Appendix and replication materials are available on this journal’s website.
For both the domestic and international questions, respondents could also select “Don’t Know” or refuse to answer. We exclude these respondents from our analysis.
The GV survey also asked about nuclear power plants as a way to reduce emissions, but responses to this question were strongly driven by the respondent’s feelings on nuclear power, as opposed to addressing climate change. Responses to the nuclear power question were very poorly correlated with responses to the other climate change questions. The pairwise correlation coefficients between nuclear power and the other three questions were 0.11, 0.06, and 0.01 respectively. This makes the nuclear power question incomparable to the international climate change questions.
The other options were “Jewish, Muslim, Other, or No Religion.”
Again, we can only observe that the respondent selected this group.
A more detailed description of all variables is in the Appendix.
Income bracket was measured on a 19 point scale, with different household incomes. We use the race variable to code a binary indicator for white/Caucasian respondents, White. Married, Male, and Employed are binary indicators for whether the respondent was married, male, or employed, respectively.
The regressions each use robust standard errors which are clustered according to the region the respondent lives in. Both surveys classified the respondent’s region according to their state of residence. The four regions were Northeast, South, Midwest, and West.
In general, these results are robust to alternative specifications that allow the disturbances across survey response items to be correlated. Using seemingly unrelated estimation, with both FGPC questions or all five of the GV questions or other combinations, the coefficient on the Evangelical variable is almost always negative and significant for the international questions, but not for the domestic questions.
These estimates are from fixed effects logit regressions, using STATA 12.
The GV survey did not ask a similar question.
The p value for the evangelical constituent term in second column is 0.103, just missing statistical significance. However, this variable is significant with slight changes to assumptions about the error terms, like non-clustering or clustering on sub-regions.
See, for example: Konkol, Brian E. “Climate Change, Poverty, Distractions, and Denial.” Sojourners Online, http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/09/14/climate-change-poverty-distractions-and-denial.
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Acknowledgments
We appreciate the helpful comments from Michaël Aklin, Andrew Cheon, Sung Eun Kim, Evan Lewis, Werner Selle, and Shannon Skotece. Thanks also to Valerie Schlosberg and Ignacio Arana for efforts in research assistance. We owe special appreciation to the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, The Chicago Council, and the authors of the Faith and Global Policy Challenges and Global Views surveys for making their extensive data publicly available.
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Chaudoin, S., Smith, D.T. & Urpelainen, J. American evangelicals and domestic versus international climate policy. Rev Int Organ 9, 441–469 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-013-9178-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-013-9178-9