The reporter covering my old stomping grounds in suburban New Jersey wrote a nice piece on the way local houses of worship are contending with the debate over global warming. There's been quite a bit of press lately about the rift between Richard Cizik and people like James Dobson over global warming, including a PBS Frontline special and several subsequent features in high-profile dailies and newsmagazines.
I'm rather interested in this topic, for three reasons. First, as a student of American Politics, I'm very interested in any issue that threatens to disrupt entrenched partisan voting patterns. One of the top indicators of vote choice in the U.S. is church attendance -- if you attend once a week or more, you're quite likely to vote Republican, while if you never attend church, you are very likely to vote for a Democrat. So, if religious organizations begin to take climate change seriously, that change could induce many voters who are currently voting for Republicans to cast ballots for Democrats. According to very consistent National Election Study survey research, voters from both parties overwhelmingly agree that Democrats are more likely to take steps to protect the environment. So increases in concern about the environment would seem likely to benefit only one of the two parties.
Second, as a very cynical observer of the Republican Party, I'm interested to see how members of the party attempt to deal with global warming from a policymaking perspective. One of the reasons why Republicans have been less eager to deal with global warming is because their ideology offers them very few practical solutions to solve the problem. Since the real core of the issue is finding ways to reduce carbon emissions, it is evident to most observers that the solution will involve some combination of regulation and externally-imposed incentives geared toward reducing consumption. A party with a libertarian regulatory outlook inherently detests many of the solutions that global warming makes unavoidable. Rather than adopt a pragmatic approach that would compromise their policymaking orientation, Republicans are simply attempting to deny that climate change represents a real threat, or even that it is even being caused by human actions. A revolt on the issue by the religious right would emphasize in bold the major ideological differences between the two major coalitions that hold the Republican Party together. It is logical that if Republicans are ever going to come around on global warming, it is the religious right that would lead the way, not the libertarian right.
Last, I'm an environmentalist. So, to see groups on the religious right potentially come on board with my primary policy interest is encouraging. Unfortunately, I suspect that most of the impetus behind the recent interest in climate change from people of faith comes from the religious left, which for some reason never manages to get much press. I suspect that when I'm done crunching data on churchgoers' attitudes on the environment between 2000 and 2008 I won't find any meaningful change from today's attitudes.
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