The Influence of Evangelical and Political Identity on Climate Change Views

Abstract

The roles religion and politics play in the climate change arena have received greater attention in the past decade. Nonetheless, the relationship between religion and politics in how they shape climate change views is poorly understood, particularly among American evangelicals. This study uses data from a probability-based mail survey of residents in the political swing state of Florida, USA to examine the relationships between evangelical identity, religiosity, partisan affiliation and three measures of climate-related views: global warming knowledge, belief, and risk perception. Findings from structural equation modeling demonstrate that evangelical identity, mediated by religiosity, exerts significant negative influences on climate measures, even when partisan affiliation is considered. We discuss these results, exploring the nuanced relationships between these variables and the implications they have on the climate change views of a large and influential segment of the public.

Keywords:

• Attitudes
• Christianity
• global warming
• religion
• Republican
• structural equation modeling

Notes

Acknowledgments

We thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback, and James Colee and Walter Leite for guidance on interpreting portions of the structural equation model.

Notes

1 We did not hypothesize a relationship between partisan affiliation and religiosity because we reasoned that religiosity is a function of religious identity and reflects engagement with a faith community that is distinct from, but may be correlated with, partisan identity and associated engagement in political organizations.

2 The web version of the mixed-mode survey failed to include the instruction on the landing page, which may have affected respondent selection for the small number of web respondents (n = 25).

Additional information

Funding

This research is part of Florida Agricultural Extension Station project [FLA-AEC-005893] and supported in part by the USDA-NIFA [Accession No: 1021477] and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [grant no. DGE-1842473].