Online Talk by Karin Björnberg (KTH Stockolm) on Evangelical Christians and Climate Change

Karin Edvardsson Björnberg (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)

On 6/12/2023 between 16:00-18:00 CET, Karin Björnberg  (KTH Royal Institute of Technology | Stockolm) will give a talk on "Evangelical Christians and Climate Change" at the University of Verona (Italy) within the Conference Cycle "Environmental Humanities".

Abstract: Surveys from the United States (U.S.) show that white evangelical Protestants are among those who are most skeptic of climate science and least willing to support greenhouse gas emissions reductions. When asked about whether they believe in anthropogenic global warming only 28% of those who identified as white evangelicals gave a positive answer, in comparison to white mainline Protestants (41%), white Catholics (45%), Black Protestants (56%), and Hispanic Catholics (77%). Well-funded organizations, such as the Cornwall Alliance, have been successful in spreading doubt about climate science and prompting key evangelical leaders to withdraw their support for climate action. To date, most research on the evangelical climate countermovement has focused on the U.S. This is unsurprising considering the large percentage of evangelical Christians in the U.S. and their significant influence on American politics. However, evangelicalism is a visible political force in many other countries too, not the least in the Global South, and it is therefore interesting to investigate how the climate issue is framed within communities outside a U.S. context. In this presentation, I discuss the findings of a study into Swedish evangelical denominations and their framings of the climate change issue. Representatives of four Swedish evangelical denominations – the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden, the Pentecostal Alliance of Independent Churches, the Swedish Alliance Mission, and the Seventh-day Adventist Church – were interviewed with the aim to identify the denominations’ views on the scientific underpinnings of climate change and the moral implications for political action, using six arguments put forward by the Cornwall Alliance and similar actors as analytical departure point: anti-paganism argument, enrichment argument, omnipotence argument, lack of moral relevance argument, cost-benefit argument, and “end times” argument.   To receive the Zoom link, please send an email to Laura Langone, [email protected]