Catholicism and climate change in the USA: will the Pope’s intervention shift public opinion or further polarise a divided public?

This week the Head of the Catholic Church did something that legions of green activists routinely struggle to do: focus global media attention on climate change. In a Papal Encyclical stretching to 42,000 words, Pope Francis set out new doctrine on climate change, covering science, politics, economics and morality.

While warmly received by many political figures, and endorsed by eminent climate scientists as technically accurate, it predictably raised the hackles of some US Republicans – many of whom are Catholic themselves.

Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum and others reacted angrily to the searing social and economic analyses contained within the Encyclical. So will the Pope’s intervention shift opinion in the US on climate change, or further polarise a notoriously divided public?

A new report on US public opinion by Anthony Leiserworitz and his team at the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication claims that:

“The Pope’s message on climate change is likely to find receptive ears among Catholic Republicans and even conservative Catholic Republicans.”

However, their own analyses suggest otherwise. While Catholic Republicans are slightly more likely to agree that global warming is happening and to express concern about it, the numbers are not exactly compelling. Only 36% think global warming is caused by human activities (vs 30% non-Catholic Republicans), and just over a quarter of Catholic Republicans don’t think it’s happening at all (27% vs 37% non-Catholic Republicans).

So, while Catholic Republicans are slightly more inclined towards caring about climate change than non-Catholic conservatives, it is political views that are still playing the dominant role – something which the Yale surveys have themselves endlessly documented.

This suggests that the views of Republican senators warning the Pope to stay out of climate debate and ‘leave the science to the scientists’ are probably shared by a majority of right-leaning Catholics in the US.

A quick glance at the language employed by Pope Francis shows why. This was not simply a turgid retelling of the science of climate change, or a meek meditation on the ‘risks of dangerous climate change’: this was a powerful and prescient call to arms, drawing as much on political passion as it did on scientific studies.

Adopting many of the most emotive tropes of the ‘climate justice’ movement (‘we have a grave social debt towards the poor’), and aiming squarely at economic inequality as both a  driver and consequence of environmental degradation, Pope Francis left no room for interpretation: solving climate change means fixing a broken economic system.

Already hailed as the ‘Pope of the poor’, the climate Encyclical will cement his position as a spokesperson for the global South, rather than a mouthpiece for the corporations and governments of the North. So no surprise it got up the nose of the Republicans, who – on climate change at least – seem to put politics before religion.
If the Encyclical is to have a more universal appeal among US Catholics, then it will need reinterpreting by Conservative Catholics. As COIN’s research in the UK and Europe has shown, there are ways of talking about climate change that are consistent with conservatism – but attacking the free-market is not one of them.

The Pope’s intervention is a fantastic opportunity to get Catholics (and people of other faiths) all around the world talking about climate change. But in a deeply divided nation like the US, the story will need to be owned and told by Catholic leaders and Priests who represent the range of political opinion.

If it is not, then the same political differences that dictate public opinion on climate change will simply replicate themselves within Catholic communities – because even an intervention by an iconic and prestigious religious leader like the Pope is not immune from the powerful influence of partisan polarisation.
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Today’s UK election results have left many climate activists dejected as they had pinned their hopes on the Labour party championing climate action over the next 5 years. But what should they do now?

Climate activists have traditionally been radically minded,  focused on the transformations needed to deliver a low-carbon society. But now one of the most radical things that climate advocates can do is to break out of the safety zone of left/liberal environmentalism and actively engage with centre-right audiences.

At COIN we believe strongly that the crisis of climate change requires systemic changes rather than tinkering around the edges. We make no apology for this and are utterly convinced,  from our reading of history, that these changes will only emerge from strong and outspoken political movements.

But no movement will win unless it has strength of numbers and influence. We should not delude ourselves  that a highly motivated minority – what Marxists used to call the vanguard- can ever win this. This issue is far too large to be overcome without a near total commitment across society.

Yet, throughout the Anglophone world there is a dangerous political polarisation around climate change. In one particularly disturbing US poll, attitudes to climate change were a better predictor of respondents’ political orientation than any other issue – including gun control, abortion and capital punishment. Scepticism  of climate change is not just an opinion, it has become a dominant mark of people’s political identity.

This is no small problem. People with ‘conservative’ values (some of whom may also vote for centre-left parties) constitute the majority in almost all countries.

Climate change exists for us in the form of socially constructed stories or narratives built upon our values and identity. It is these narratives- not the underlying science or even the evidence of our own eyes- that leads us to accept or reject the issue.

Unfortunately one of the dominant values in the climate movement is a disregard, if not outright contempt, for the right-leaning mainstream and their concerns. Activists often talk with disgust of the selfishness, greed and stupidity of conservatives. Does this signify a tolerance and openness? The denigration conveniently ignores the diversity of opinion and life experience among small c conservatives. A struggling rural family, an elderly Christian on a small pension, a community shopkeeper and a Wall Street Banker are combined into one faceless enemy.

More often, though, people with centre-right values are just ignored. Few people in the climate movement want to deal with them, talk to them, or find out more about them. They simply don’t exist.

Last week COIN led a communications workshop in Brussels for one of the largest international environmental networks: one we respect and have worked with for many years. We asked them “do you think that the climate change movement has a problem with its diversity?” Absolutely, they replied, it’s too dominated by middle aged men, too white, too middle-class, not enough involvement from minorities or indigenous peoples, not many disabled people. Nobody mentioned the absence of centre-right voices, and certainly no-one in the room was admitting to being one.

Diversity is a powerful frame for progressives but its components have been (understandably) entirely defined by the struggles of marginalised groups for representation. It makes us blind to our own failure to involve the majority of our fellow citizens when we need to – and we need to with climate change.

Ironically we know how to change this. We need to build bridges across society not burn them down, we need to constructively engage people through their values, not just politicians. We need to create a social consensus that climate change is the defining challenge of the 21st Century, which every member of society has a stake in. Small c conservatives aren’t the only ones, we need a far wider and genuine social and cultural movement than currently exists. But the centre-right matters.

In reaching out beyond the usual suspects, we don’t need to take on other’s values or condone them but we do need to have two way conversations which allow those on the centre-right to see that climate change is an issue for them too, as we’ve set out in some of our recent work. Conversations need to focus on centre-right values such a desire for safety and security and the protection of the ‘green and pleasant land’, and the notion of building a better future. As well as new messages we need new messengers, voices that reach across the political polarisation and champion the shared values necessary for sustained climate action.

The  process by which we respond to climate change creates the tramlines for our future strategies. If we use it to build a narrative around our interconnectedness and shared humanity then we stand a good chance of pulling through, just as divided communities can settle their differences to pull together after a hurricane. If we build our  movement through distrust and division we create the preconditions for future in-fighting, blame and scapegoating.

So the challenge to all people concerned about climate change is this: when are we going to accept the challenge of reaching across partisan boundaries and building a broad social consensus for action? We do not even have to agree about the details of the solutions- indeed we need to maintain a strong debate. But surely we can come together in the recognition that dealing with climate change is the greatest calling of our age?

This is an amended version of a blog posting by George Marshall, COIN’s Director of Projects that was originally posted on his blog www.climatedenial.org