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TechnoratiWASHINGTON – Unlike in the United States, there is little controversy among evangelicals around the world on whether climate change is real, said an evangelical representative at a press briefing on Capitol Hill.
“They know it is real,” said Deborah Fikes, executive advisor of the World Evangelical Alliance – a global alliance of churches in 128 nations and over 100 international organizations. But in the United States, many evangelicals deny climate change is real, causing their brothers in sisters in Christ around the world to interpret that they are “self-absorbed” and “lack [the] spiritual will” to change their lifestyle to help solve a problem that is life threatening, she said.
Fikes was a member of the delegation of evangelical leaders and leading climate scientists that briefed top White House advisors and U.S. Senate offices Tuesday about climate change. The self-described odd partners urged lawmakers to put aside their differences, as they had, and quickly act to address the climate change problem.
Pastor Joel C. Hunter of the Florida megachurch Northland, A Church Distributed, touched on what Fikes said about the “inconvenient truth” of climate change to American evangelicals.
“We are the most unlikely characters” to take action on climate change, said Hunter, who noted his church members are mostly white and wealthy. “We are the most difficult to convince because we have an idea that if there are changes we will be the most likely to be able to insulate our lives."
But despite the challenges, the pastor said his church has taken action to spread awareness and address climate change by: watching movies about the issue, doing an audit of expenditures that could lower the church’s carbon footprint, hosting energy expos, and listing the changes congregants can make in their personal lifestyle.
Commending such efforts, Fikes commented, “We are encouraged that there are rapidly growing numbers of churches in America who understand that they are the key to solving these problems.”
But while some evangelicals are vocal supporters of efforts to stop climate change, others are skeptical and have described global warming as “hype.”
Nearly 100 conservative Christians, many of which were evangelicals, argued last year that there is no hard evidence that climate change is as devastating as mainstream media and society claims. The group – which included Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Dr. Barrett Duke of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and radio host Janet Parshall – said while they agree that humans are responsible to take care of God’s creation, policy changes meant to alleviate climate change could do more damage than good.
“The number of premature deaths, number of diseases, and the harm to the human economy that can be predicted from the policies used to fight the warming” is more destructive than even if all the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)-predicted global warming-caused disasters came true,” argued Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, at the launch of the “We Get It!” campaign last May. Continue »
