TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Alexis Madrigal February 07, 2008

Two Church of England Bishops want their followers to join them in a "Carbon Fast" for Lent, the 40 day period in which many Christians abstain from eating or imbibing some favored item.

But really the plan is closer to a carbon diet than a fast. According to the UK's Independent, those joining the fast will, among other carbon-cutting tips, "be asked to remove one lightbulb from a prominent place in the home and live without it for 40 days."

The bishops green stance is not about protecting the environment, per se, but rather a call to lessen global warming's impact on the residents of third-world nations.

"It is the poor who are already suffering the effects of climate change. To carry on regardless of their plight is to fly in the face of Christian teaching," James Jones and Dr. Richard Chartres, bishops of Liverpool and London, respectively, said in a statement. "There’s a moral imperative on those of us who emit more than our fair share of carbon to rein in our consumption."

Those words would be music to the ears of environmental folks here in the States who have long held skeptical hopes that Christians, particularly evangelicals led by Richard Cizik, would become a potent new constituency in an emerging climate change political coalition.

But pro-environmental evangelical “calls to action” in February 2006 and January 2007 haven't seemed to make much of an impact on the mass of US evangelicals, at least according to a 2007 survey released by the Christian consulting firm, The Barna Group.

One thousand random US adults were asked the question, “Think about how you would like the United States to change within the next 10 years…” and given a wide variety of areas of concern they’d like to improve including the reliability of news coverage, national security in the US, and the health of Christian churches. Among the total survey group, 60% of people felt that “investment in environmental protection” should be a top priority. But those meeting “born-again criteria” felt differently:

Evangelicals stood out regarding their views on the environment. Only 35% said that protecting the environment should be a top priority - the lowest score recorded among any of the 80 subgroups studied.

Even though the Barna survey's phrasing seems destined to draw negative reactions with the inclusion of the they’ll-raise-your-taxes codephrase “investment,” it still doesn't begin to explain evangelical distaste for environmental issues evidenced in the results.

It's clear that here in the States, we have a long way to go before mainstream Evangelicals are willing to do anything green, even if some other polls show less disheartening results (pdf).

Labels: Americans, Barna Group, carbon fast, Christian, evangelicals, global warming, Lent