Evangelical Protestant clergy are outliers among their peers in rejecting the scientific consensus that earth’s climate is changing and human actions are a major cause.
Nearly 80% of evangelical Protestant clergy reject this idea, which is strongly held by the scientific community. This group’s rate of rejection is quadruple what is found in Mainline Protestant clergy and more than triple what is found in Catholic and Black Protestant clergy.
These findings come from a newly released report, “Clergy in America,” from the National Survey of Religious Leaders. The data are based on a nationally representative survey of clergy serving U.S. congregations across the religious spectrum in 2019 and 2020.
The survey was funded by the John Templeton Foundation and administered by Mark Chaves, Anna Holleman and Joseph Roso of the Duke University Department of Sociology.
Their findings correspond with previous research by Public Religion Research Institute, which reported in 2023 that only 31% of white evangelical Protestants believe climate change is caused by humans.
Comparing the two data sets, that makes evangelical clergy more likely to deny human causes of climate change than their congregants. The Clergy in America survey also found 74% of evangelical clergy say their political views are about the same as their congregants.
The scientistic consensus — which also is rejected by the current Republican administration — is that burning fossil fuels generates greenhouse gas emissions that act like a blanket wrapped around the Earth, trapping the sun’s heat and raising temperatures.
In 2023, PRRI found 19% of white evangelical Protestants “believe there is no solid evidence of climate change” and that white evangelical Protestants (49%) and Mormons (44%) are “the most likely to believe” climate change is caused by natural patterns in the environment.
The Clergy in America survey found even more stark contrasts in the views held by evangelical clergy: 87% believe the climate is changing, but they are much more likely than other clergy to deny human actions are a major cause.
Mark Chaves
“The real religious difference among clergy concerns the importance of human actions in causing climate change, not the fact of climate change itself,” said Chaves, the Duke sociologist who directed the survey.
“Religious differences in accepting scientific consensus about the earth’s creation or human evolution are nothing new,” Chaves said. “But differences among clergy about the more recent issue of climate change suggest a connection to partisan politics more than to theology.”
In other findings from Clergy in America:
- A majority of evangelical and Black clergy (68% and 79%) say scientific findings conflict at least a little bit with their religious beliefs, in contrast to a minority of Mainline Protestant and Catholic clergy (36% and 39%).
- A majority of evangelical and Black clergy (75% and 73%) believe God created the world in six 24-hour days. Only a small number of Mainline and Catholic clergy (17% believe that.
- Very small numbers of evangelical (4%) and Black Protestant (16%) clergy believe humans evolved from nonhuman life forms, compared with half of Mainline Protestants (53%) and Catholics (47%).
- Half of Mainline Protestant clergy (53%) say they are more liberal than their congregants, including 20% who consider themselves much more liberal than most of their people.
- Among Catholic and Mainline Protestants, more clergy would encourage a hypothetical person with cancer to pursue palliative care than to hope for a miracle cure. For Black and evangelical Protestants, it’s the opposite.