Survey Finds Evangelical Clergy Most Likely To Reject Human-Caused Climate Change

NEW YORK — Nearly 80 percent of evangelical Protestant pastors reject the scientific consensus that the climate is changing and human actions are a major cause, according to a new report.

By contrast, only about one-quarter of clergy from other Christian traditions, such as Catholic and mainline Protestants, share this same skepticism, the report, released on Wednesday from the National Survey of Religious Leaders, said.

The findings, published in the report “Clergy in America,” highlights significant divides in how U.S. Christian leaders view climate change and its causes. The NSRL, a nationally representative survey conducted between 2019 and 2020, included responses from 1,600 clergy members serving U.S. congregations. The wide-ranging report focused on the 890 respondents who served as primary leaders of their congregations.

While the majority of evangelical clergy (87%) acknowledge that the climate is changing, they are far more likely than clergy from other Christian denominations to dispute the role of human activity in this change.

“The real religious difference among clergy concerns the importance of human actions in causing climate change, not the fact of climate change itself,” said Mark Chaves, a sociologist at Duke University who directed the survey.

Most Americans say the Earth is getting warmer, including a narrow majority (53%) who say it is mostly because of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, according to a separate study conducted by the pew Research Center released in 2022.

The same Pew study found that there has been “a consistent pattern” by religious groups on questions about climate change. In general, evangelical Protestants tend to be the most likely of all major U.S. religious groups to express skeptical views. For instance, only 32% of evangelical Protestants, Pew noted, said the planet is getting warmer mostly due to human activity.