There’s more than one view on climate change among evangelicals.

"You can’t change the weather," we all used to say with a shrug, to make the point that some actions are well beyond the powers of puny humans. But a disagreement has opened up among U.S. evangelicals about the extent to which we can, or cannot, change the weather.

The purpose of this briefing is very limited. We simply want to outline the groups involved in this American Christian debate, and note some of their views. We will not evaluate the merits of their respective cases; that task is for future Social Issues briefings. We suspect that similar disagreements might be present among Australian evangelicals; however we don’t want attention to the U.S. scene to polarise our local scene. Rather, we hope that some recognition of the competing views might assist us to clarify the points at issue as we all consider our response to claims about climate change.

We will, however, take serious exception to two of the claims put by one of the parties concerned. These two claims go way beyond the issue of climate change and concern the nature of Christian ethics and the meaning of the term ‘evangelical’. It is important for us to name these two claims as wrong.

Files: sie060-climate-change.pdf