The generational divide over climate change among American evangelicals

Abstract

Abstract As urgency grows to address global warming, younger generations can play a strategic role in mobilizing communities that have generally been more opposed to climate action and policy, such as political and religious conservatives in the United States. American evangelical Protestants—and white evangelicals in particular—are the largest religious group in the U.S. and also the most skeptical of climate science. There is growing interest, however, around whether evangelicals are becoming ‘greener,’ and whether climate attitudes among younger generations are diverging from their elders. We analyze empirical evidence for such generational divides by comparing data from two Climate Change in the American Mind surveys (n = 2332) with a national survey of Generation Z evangelicals (n = 1063). Our results show that young evangelicals are highly likely to say that global warming is happening (89%) and anthropogenic (75%), with approximately a third of young evangelicals doing so despite perceptions that their parents disagree. They are also consistently more likely than older evangelicals to express pro-climate positions on a range of belief and attitudinal measures. The results are more mixed when young evangelicals are compared more broadly with the general American public as well as with Generation Z Americans. Notably, however, young evangelicals are more supportive of climate policies, such as funding renewable energy research, than Americans overall, even though they are also more politically conservative and Republican. These results suggest that a generational ‘greening’ of American evangelicals may indeed be taking place, potentially along with some decoupling of climate attitudes from political identity. This may have major implications for the future of climate action and policy in the United States and beyond.