WaPo | Black Protestants were more than twice as likely to describe climate
change as a serious problem, at 55 percent, than the 24 percent of their
white evangelical peers who agreed. White, mainline Protestants fell
somewhere between the two other groups on the question of how serious a
threat global warming represents. A full 41 percent agreed that it is a
"very serious problem."
The Pew poll also revealed signs that
while Catholics as a group are more likely than Protestants to describe
global warming as a real, man-made and very serious problem, Latino
Catholics might be driving that difference. A full 82 percent of Latinos
told pollsters that global warming is real, 60 percent said the problem
was caused by human beings and 63 percent agreed that climate change
represents a serious threat. By comparison, just 64 percent of whites
agreed that global warming is real, and 39 percent told pollsters that
it is both man-made and a serious problem.
Another divide: Protestants who attended church least often were the
most likely to view global warming as a real and serious problem of
human origins, while the Catholics who attended Mass most frequently
were most likely to agree.
In fact, environmental concerns do not
begin to even out across the Protestant-Catholic split until pollsters
also gathered data on just how people identify themselves politically.
The results are clear. In fact, they have been clear for some time. Politics override everything.
Catholic
Republicans were only slightly more likely, at 51 percent, to describe
global warming as real and happening, than were the 45 percent of
Republican Protestants who agreed. And the opinions of Democrats and
independents nearly aligned across the Protestant, Catholic break.
That pattern suggests that faith might not influence the way that
Americans view environmental matters nearly as deeply as do the
long-standing partisan differences and allegiances that have become a
defining part of membership in some groups.
An overwhelming number of white Protestant evangelicals, for instance, are Republicans. And the party's platform
appears to have maintained deep influence in the way that white
evangelicals respond to political questions about the environment. Of
course, the relationship between the pope and the Catholic faithful is,
by definition, considerably different from that of Protestant leadership
organizations to the nation's many Protestant churches. But, guidance
on environmental matters has been issued by many of the evangelical
world's biggest voices and it's been out there for some time. That so
few Protestants -- and particularly white evangelicals -- seem to
describe climate change as a concern, much less as a problem to which
they contribute, seems worth noting.
