What is the Meaning of Greening? Cultural Analysis of a Southern Baptist Environmental Text

Abstract

Scholars and journalists alike interpreted “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change”, a document released in 2008 by a group of American Southern Baptists, as evidence that American evangelicals were becoming increasingly concerned about the environment. Using the tools of textual analysis, I show that this was not the only interpretation of the document at play. While journalists and scholars understood the Declaration as addressing the need to halt climate change, for a group of key Southern Baptist signatories, the document expressed a need for Southern Baptists to engage more actively in the public environmental discourse, lest they relinquish this domain to secular and liberal voices. Critically, the latter group viewed the Declaration as compatible with climate scepticism. My analysis shows how cultural context informs climate change attitudes, while also suggesting socio-historical factors—particularly evangelicals’ embattled mentality—that may support climate change scepticism in Southern Baptist circles.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• global warming
• evangelicals
• greening of religion
• stewardship
• environment
• environmentalism
• politics
• textual analysis

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges Bron Taylor, Ken Wald, David Hackett, Charles Wood, and Katrina Schwartz for commenting on an early draft of this article and Leah Sarat for nimbly editing a more recent version. The author is solely responsible for any errors. The author also thanks Jim Ball and Jonathan Merritt for permission to reproduce the Call to Action and the Declaration (respectively). This work was supported by a Tedder Family Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Florida and a Research Grant from the Centre for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities of Iowa State University. It was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Florida, Protocol #2010-U-0446.

Notes

1. Merritt told me that he collected 750 signatures, although only 426 signatories are listed on Baptistcreationcare.org, the web site created to disseminate the Declaration.

2. The number of local news stories comes from an analysis of stories indexed in the database Access World News, which includes 5,419 news sources in the United States.

3. This analysis is available upon request.

4. This resolution was likely a response to the Call to Action, which had been published five months earlier.