The Evangelical PhD Student Convincing Christians To Care About Climate Change
Michelle Frazer on the Princeton campus in October 2019. Photo by Meagan Clark.
PRINCETON, New Jersey — Michelle Frazer, 28, turned in the hall of Princeton University’s Natural Sciences building and pointed to a bronze plaque with capital letters and a man’s portrait engraved.
“I’m probably the only person here who’s ever read it,” she whispered over quiet sounds of typing and page turning from nearby offices. It’s probably true. The sign is too high, fixed to a wall outside faculty and graduate student offices on a second floor. But Frazer pays attention to details, and this one matters more to her than to the casual passerby.
“ARNOLD GUYOT / A DEVOUT STUDENT OF NATURE WHO LOVED TO TRACE THE WISDOM AND GOODNESS OF GOD IN THE WORKS OF CREATION,” the sign reads, stamped 1889 and wrapped in what resembles palm branches.
Guyot, a Swiss-American geologist and geographer who died in 1884, was a “fervently religious” man of “deep devoutness” according to his peers – Guyot spent five years studying theology in Germany before turning to science – and rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution for old earth creationism despite criticism of his view. He discovered the laws of glacier motion, became Princeton’s first geology and geography professor, and created a national system in the U.S. for meteorology observations that became the National Weather Service.
Today, Frazer collaborates on research with the same weather system at a federal laboratory a short 10-minute drive from campus (when she’s not working remotely). She’s in her sixth and (she hopes) final year of her PhD at Princeton in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, researching the role of clouds in the climate system and trying to improve climate models used to inform how farmers and city planners prepare for the next few decades or even 100 years.
Like Guyot, evangelical scientists like Frazer see science and their faith in God as not only compatible but as part of the same search for truth. While white evangelical Christians are the least likely religious group to say that climate change is a crisis, many studies show that political party affiliation, more than religion, education, age or any other factor, determines a person’s views on global warming. Politics, not religion, is driving climate change skepticism.
There is a growing movement of evangelicals like Frazer who not only care about the impacts of climate change, but perhaps more significantly, are appealing to conservative Christians in ways that the secular, left-leaning environmental movement hasn’t.
“Most of my classmates tend to be not Christian and pretty liberal politically, and to them the idea of someone who is a Christian and actually cares about climate change is something they didn't really think existed,” Frazer said. “We need to try to target more of the population than just those who are already in the liberal camp when it comes to considering the environment.”
Christians care about climate change when the discussion is rooted in their values, like compassion for the poor and vulnerable, providing for one’s kids and grandkids and protecting God’s creation, Frazer said.
“God commands us to love– to have compassion for other people– and that should motivate us to care about climate change,” Frazer said. “Because climate change, if it's true, is affecting people, and it is affecting the least privileged among us. Christians all should be motivated by truth, and this has been a big motivating factor for me and why I care about studying climate change and communicating it to Christian audiences.”
Scientists have observed global warming since the end of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800’s, attributing it to the greenhouse effect: gases (including water vapor or clouds) trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere for a delicate temperature balance. Human activity has increased the effect: burning coal and oil has increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air, accelerating climate change.
Even though 97% percent of scientists agree that climate change is a growing threat to all life on earth and caused by humans, only 66% of Americans agreed in 2019, according to a Gallup poll. That’s an increase from 2015, when 55% of Americans agreed.
A LifeWay Research survey conducted in 2019 and released for this year’s Earth Day April 21 found that for the first time ever a majority of Protestant pastors (53%) agree that global warming is real and manmade, up from 43% in 2014 and 36% in 2010. Still, a third strongly disagree.
Frazer posing inside one of Princeton University’s science buildings, named Guyot Hall after the university’s first geology professor that was also a devout Christian. Photo by Meagan Clark.
Storm tracking in rural Indiana
At age 4, Frazer huddled in a utility room with her parents and sisters as two trees crashed onto their house on a wooded ranch in central, rural Indiana. Listening to the noise of that tornado was the start of her interest in severe storms. It’s also her earliest memory.
As homeschooled kids, Frazer and her younger sister became so interested in severe weather that they formed an amateur meteorological society, Storm Heads.
“We were committed to informing our friends and family about severe weather,” Frazer said. “We took the National Weather Services’ spotter training program, which is a two-hour class you can do, and then you’re qualified to report severe storm damage and hail to your local National Weather Service and we really enjoyed that.”
Her sisters developed more interests outside science, leaving Frazer to hang out with the boys who liked engineering and math. She completed her high school science credits with her older sister (because it’s more fun to do science with a lab partner, she said) and then took advanced physics and studied violin more. In high school, she also joined a debate society, where she first studied environmental policy.
“That’s when I started forming my own beliefs about climate change,” she said. “Since I was tackling it not so much from the science perspective but from the policy perspective, I actually grew a little more skeptical of climate change because I saw policies being promoted, at least on the global scale, that did not seem very ethical.”
Frazer bristled reading about the United Nations Population Fund, for example, accused of supporting sterilization and forced abortion policies in China in order to limit the population and protect the environment. The Trump administration withdrew funding over those concerns, but the UNFPA denies the claim.
She studied physics at Cedarville University in Ohio, a private Baptist school, with only one other female in her major. It wasn’t until grad school where she studied climate change that she really began separating the science from the policy responses. She now believes this is key to reaching conservatives about climate change.
For example, Frazer remembers as a kid her family and community questioning why they should care what Al Gore (or any liberal favoring big government) had to say about the environment.
The real reason some Christians don’t believe in climate change
Protecting the planet from global warming used to be a bi-partisan issue in the U.S.
In 1988, Republican George H.W. Bush successfully campaigned for president as a self-identified environmentalist, calling for government action to prevent acid rain and deforestation. He particularly emphasized the importance of mitigating climate change, a concern just entering the mainstream.
By the presidential election in 2000, climate change had become a polarizing issue. Energy companies had fiercely lobbied Congress, targeting Republicans for their business-friendly reputation. Exxon had studied climate change impacts since the 1970s, a pioneer in some ways, and then changed course to fund a massive public relations campaign to question the science behind claims that global warming is real and caused by people emitting fossil fuels. Other oil giants like Shell also knew greenhouse gas emissions were rising and dangerous. A coal industry journal warned of climate change dangers as early as 1966.
George W. Bush’s campaign narrowly defeated Al Gore in part by portraying him as a left-wing environmentalist who wanted to destroy coal mining jobs. Bush emphasized economic practicality and that America runs on oil and gas, while also pledging that he cared about the environment but would give states greater control over regulations. Gore wanted tighter federal regulation and made environmental protection his signature campaign promise. Gore pledged to help seal the Kyoto Treaty in which industrialized countries pledged to move faster to curb emissions while developing, polluting nations like China and India could continue emitting greenhouse gases. Bush and others criticized the deal as costly and unfair to America and ineffective to combat a global problem.
In 2006, the film An Inconvenient Truth portrayed Gore’s campaign for president and mission to curb global warming, eventually winning two Academy awards and reinvigorating environmentalists around the world. But not everyone was impressed, with even some scientists saying the science was generally right but presented with exaggerated claims to scare people.
In one scene, Gore shows an illustration of Florida sinking into rising sea levels, but critics say the scientific consensus predicts only a few inches’ rise over centuries, not 20 feet. Many on the right argued Gore’s charts showing rising carbon dioxide levels and temperatures looked at a limited timeline when the climate system is cyclical and older data suggests temperatures were sometimes higher on earth before the present era. Climate scientists point out the difference is that today the CO2 levels are rising much faster instead of over millions of years, and changes as abrupt as today’s have resulted in catastrophic extinctions in the past.
By the time Barack Obama reached the office, polarization had grown even more and in Congress, Democrats prioritized healthcare reform. The White House used the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to create new regulations like a state-level cap-and-trade program for energy companies, but the procedure of circumventing Congress angered Republicans, fueling President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle many of the Obama administration’s EPA rules.
Polarization has only increased going into the 2020 election, but support for climate change mitigation is also increasing. According to a Reuters poll in 2019, 70% of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) want the government to take aggressive action against climate change, as long as they don’t have to pay for it. That number dropped to a third when the respondents were asked if they would pay a $100 annual tax.
Who wants to pay to combat climate change?
So if evangelicals don’t hinge on religious reasons to oppose actions to slow climate change, why do they? Galen Carey, vice president of government relations at the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), says they just don’t want the government to interfere with their freedom.
In a 2014 Duke University study, when presented with a carbon tax or other government regulation, only 22% of Republicans said they believed temperatures would rise as much as a statement given by scientists. But when presented with a free market solution, 55% of Republicans said they believed the same statement.
American Christianity has also long entwined itself in fossil fuels and the wealth they bring. The prime example is John D. Rockefeller, the oil tycoon who long after his death remains the richest person in modern history and was also a devoted Northern Baptist and philanthropist.
According to the historian Darren Dochuk in his book, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America, American oil executives have historically been among the most enthusiastic evangelists in business, embracing prayer in boardrooms and using their operations as modes of witness and outreach. The oil industry involves heavy speculation, and many relied on prayer, believing God would lead them to oil and that their desire to amass wealth was to carry out God’s work on earth, like funding missionaries, Dochuk writes.
Once oil men broke free of Rockefeller’s monopoly, seeing him as a liberal Northern Christian, they began sponsoring their own version of evangelicalism, according to Dochuk. Oil money funded projects like Billy Graham’s outreach and First Baptist Church in Dallas, now led by the Fox News commentator and Trump supporter Robert Jeffress. In the 1970’s, these oil men lobbied for both reducing reliance on foreign (Muslim) oil and for family values.
Vice President Mike Pence has tapped into this dynamic by recalling what he named America’s three pillars of greatness: faith, freedom and “vast natural resources.” From the Permian Basin in West Texas last spring, Pence promised that “developing the vast, natural, God-given resources that we have” will make America “more prosperous than ever before,” safer and great again.
Meanwhile, evangelical support for mitigating climate change is growing.
In 2008, the NAE fired ITS then government relations vice president Richard Cizik in part for his stance on climate change. Just three years later, the NAE published a report titled “Loving the Least of These” about “the biblical basis for Christian engagement, the science of a changing environment, how climate affects the poor and practical ways to move forward.”
Groups like Young Evangelicals for Climate Action and the Evangelical Environmental Network appeal to shared values like caring for children and the poor, even incorporating language of the pro-life movement, to encourage Christians to care about climate change. The Evangelical Environmental Network spent more than half a million dollars in 2017, funded by progressive environmentalist groups like the Marisla Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Young Evangelicals for Climate Action is their youth wing.
Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical and atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University, is a leading voice in the movement, with more than 156,000 followers on Twitter. Her Youtube channel, Global Weirding, features short animated videos that speak to climate skeptics with titles like “I’m not a tree hugger” and “What’s the big deal with a few degrees?”
The next generation of evangelicals
At work, Frazer tweaks climate models composed of thousands of lines of computer code that’s solving equations of physics, biology and chemistry to represent the climate system. Her lab, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is one of the world’s biggest climate modeling centers. (Frazer says her views in no way represent the lab.) Clouds are important to the climate because they both reflect sunlight, which cools the earth, and contribute to the greenhouse effect, which warms the earth. Without the greenhouse effect, the earth would be about 40 degrees cooler, and we’d all be dead.
Frazer sits at her desk in a federal lab of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Photo by Meagan Clark.
“These climate models are used to try to project future climate to understand if this much CO2 is in the atmosphere, what does that mean for the climate down the road?” Frazer said. “So we’re looking for short term projections to help farmers and city planners understand what might be happening in the next couple decades, but also trying to look at what happens 100 years from now.”
The job requires a combination of climate science and coding, inputting data that’s used to predict weather patterns, including major storms. She learned the coding language C++ in class but uses the programming language Fortran for the models, which is suited for scientific computing. “You just have to learn it as you go,” she said.
But Frazer has done her research much beyond science. Sitting across from me in the Princeton science building’s library, she references study after study about Christians’ and Republicans’ motivations for wanting to mitigate global warming.
A study in 2019 found that the number one reason non-Christians surveyed wanted to mitigate climate change was to prevent the destruction of most life on the planet. But the number one motivation for Christians was to provide a better life for their children and grandchildren, “more of that human factor,” Frazer said.
The second most motivating factor for Christians was “to protect God’s creation,” not the kind of messaging most secular environmentalists use.
Frazer wants to encourage young people to speak up on climate change, as long as their opinions are based on research. She also cautions young Christians not to lose sight of why they care about climate change, hopefully because they love God and love people.
She was disappointed that some Christians argued against Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish environmental activist who became a global sensation, simply because she’s young.
“It’s not a Christian response to look down on the young,” she said. “But we don’t want to hold up youth as inherently better qualified to address an issue.”
Ultimately, Frazer is aiming for broader support. The older generations vote more and have the money to fund political campaigns and activism.
“That’s going to take more unique messaging to help them understand why we should care about climate change without just demonizing fossil fuels,” she said.
Meagan Clark is the managing editor of Religion Unplugged. She previously reported retail and economic news for International Business Times, and human rights and religion stories from India for several outlets like Indian Express, the Wire and Scroll.in. Follow her on Twitter @MeaganKay.