Preserving God's creation?

The White House released a video as a lead-in to a big speech the president will give Tuesday at Georgetown.

Seems that Obama is using "creation care" language in this video. That's interesting. The possibility, or probability, that climate change would one day become a religious issue -- or a political issue couched in religious terms  -- was the topic of my PhD dissertation.

This approach is a way of reaching large numbers of otherwise uninvolved people, and of defusing objections from the religious component of the American right wing. The pathways for this kind of thinking were laid down long ago by various religious environmental organizations, led by the National Religious Partnership on the Environment or NRPE.

Mostly, the idea is that there's some kind of religious duty to protect the planet from climate change -- God made the planet the way it is, and humans shouldn't mess with it.

This is a kind of political trump card that can be played on climate change. If the expected speech involves an elaboration of this kind of thinking, this could kick off a new conversation among religious Americans -- still a majority. This messaging succeeds with large numbers in most mainline Christian denominations and both orthodox and reform Judaism. The choice of Georgetown, a Jesuit college, may be deliberate. The Catholic church was involved in the religious environmental messaging about climate change early on.

This kind of messaging also works with a proportion of evangelical protestants, if it's combined with obvious business-friendly rhetoric in this way. The evangelical churches are much more diffuse politically, with no strong national authority, and they are typically socially and economically conservative. so they're harder to reach with environmental messaging. Even so, it's kinda hard to explain to kids in sunday school why God would want us to destroy His creation, and so the message still works to some extent.

It is, however, subject to a right-wing backlash, also from a minority of evangelical organizations -- there's a pro-oil and coal, anti-climate policy wing of the evangelical movement too, whose particularly nasty rocks I once had, for my own sins, to overturn (for my dissertation research).

Here's the transcript, with the appropriate section highlighted.

Not much, just a teaser. I guess I'll be listening Tuesday.

In my inaugural address, I pledged that America would respond to the growing threat of climate change for the sake of our children and future generations

This Tuesday, I’ll lay out my vision for where I believe we need to go – a national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change, and lead global efforts to fight it.

This is a serious challenge – but it’s one uniquely suited to America’s strengths.

We’ll need scientists to design new fuels, and farmers to grow them.

We’ll need engineers to devise new sources of energy, and businesses to make and sell them.

We’ll need workers to build the foundation for a clean energy economy.

And we’ll need all of us, as citizens, to do our part to preserve God’s creation for future generations – our forests and waterways, our croplands and snowcapped peaks.

There’s no single step that can reverse the effects of climate change. But when it comes to the world we leave our children, we owe it to them to do what we can.

So I hope you’ll share this message with your friends. Because this a challenge that affects everyone – and we all have a stake in solving it together.

I hope to see you Tuesday. Thank you.