I have an uncle who's a born again Christian. He's a very blue collar kind of guy, grew up in a blue collar family of mill workers. He never went to college, and worked in a mill himself as a young man, as well as being a volunteer fire fighter in his small New England farming town. He's also an avid outdoorsman and a hunter, getting licenses every year for turkey season and deer season. In addition to all of this, he also tends a magnificent garden in the back yard every year, growing prize pumpkins and squash. The wall of his den is covered with dizens of blue ribbons from many years of entering his pumpkins and squash at the local fair each autumn. He has blue bird houses in the garden, and regualrly bird watches with a set of binoculars from the back porch. There's also a brook running through the back yard that he has landscaped himself. As his wife says of his gardening and his affinity for the outdoors: "He loves to play in the mud."
Back in his mid-20's, he went to the state police academy to become a state cop. And when he graduated they said: "You can either be a state highway patrolman, or a state game warden [aka an environmental police offcier]." With his great love of the outdoors, he naturally jumped at the chance to be a game warden, and he recently completed 40 years of service and is now retired.
He is VERY aware of the environment, and subscribes to magazines about wildlife and watches the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, etc. And also his many years of training as a game warden meant he had to take throughout his career formal classes on wildlife and on how to handle the various species in his jurisdiction (racoons, eagles, deer, etc). The kinds of phone calls that would come in to his office or even sometimes at his private home included please for help whenever someone might hit a deer down the road, or maybe someone knocked down an old barn and discovered a nest of baby owls, or a bear wandered onto someone's property, or else a racoon had got loose in someone's house. He also was --because of his job-- in regular contact with various science professors (the ones who specialized in zoological studies) from the local universities. Sometimes he was asked by those professors to assist with animals in the area.
His knowledge of animals and wildlife --even exotic species from around the world-- is amazing. We were all watching the Millioanire game show one night, and the question was "Which bird has the broadest wing-span: eagle, condor, albtross, or heron?" And he --a man who barely graduated high school and who pretty much never knows any answers to any quiz shows question ever-- shouted out "CONDOR!" (And he was right.)
His monthly (or is it quarterly? I don't remember) subscription to International Game Warden Magazine includes in-depth articles about the activities of game wardens all over the world, such as game wardens in Africa who protect the elephants and lions etc, and the wardens in Australia who protect the kangaroos, crocodiles, coalas, etc. (And there's always a special tribute in every issue to those game wardens from around the world who get killed in the line of duty, sometimes due to an attack by a ferocious animal, and sometimes due to the homicidal aggressions of illegal poachers. Poachers in Africa, Canada, and Florida seem to be the most notorious for not only resisting arrest but actually attacking and even killing game wardens.)
My uncle is a Christian, AND a blue collar sort of a "good old boy" (albeit a Northern/Yankee vartiety of good old boyhood) and he is absolutely convinced that global warming is a reality. He didn't ALWAYS believe in it and actively scoffed the idea for years. But for him, the turning point came when he was reading the enviromental studies about how polar bears are losing alarmingly high percentages of body weight each year due to the rapid diminishment of their ice-based environments. And that data was further bolstered by articles in Internation Game Warden Magazine about the current concerns being voiced by Canadian game wardens over the plight of the moose and caribou who are likewise suffering as their not-so-snowy-anymore environments rapdily change for the worse every year. My uncle is indeed a believer now.
Meanwhile, I had been hearing for years (decades actually!) from various Christians that global warming was a myth. So I have likewise witnessed this blind and defiant denial amongst Christians that the OP speaks of. Why were so many (at least in MY circles) Christias almost universally convinced it was all a lie?
I must concur with the OP: I believe it was a sad case of guilt by association.
The traditional bastion of environmental concern has always been a particularly ill-liked (ill-liked by many conservative American Christians) segment of the political left: the save-the-whale, save-the-snail-darter, crystal-wearing, tree-hugging, vegetarian, new-age crowd (I realize this is a sweepig generalization, but that sort of broad-sweeping dismissiveness is part of the problem here). So if THEY are the ones who are the primary proponents of this global warming stuff .... then seeing as how they're most assuredly wrong about their crystals, and wrong about their priority of valuing a snail darter over an unborn fetus, and wrong about that whole "harminic convergeance" thing (anybody here remember "harminic converegeance"?), and wrong about reincarnation (according to the Christian viewpoint), then surely they are also wrong about this global warming nonsense.
My blue collar uncle always had little tolerance for the crystals and the Birkenstocks and the harmonic convergeance. He got annoyed during more than one of his own private hunting vacations and left the forest in angry silence whenever a team of anti-hunting activists would show up wearing their orange vests and loudly scare away the deer. He would read in furious tears about lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest who would lose their limbs or maybe even their lives because their chain saws had riccocheted off of a porcelein spike driven into a tree by an anti-deforestation activist. He rolled his eyes at the commune down the road where about thirty hippies lived together in a 200 year-old, 10-bedroom farmhouse. And he very diplomatically kept his mouth shut and focused on the conversation at hand while attending a business-as-usual meeting with a local university professor who was obviously wearing a crystal or two herself.
So I share the same theory as the OP that because these claims of global warming wafted PRIMARILLY from the same ranks as all of the above sorts of people --people that my uncle found either amusing, pathetic, or criminal-- my uncle naturally marginalized their doomsaying claims, right along with their harminic convergeance .........
.......... he and about 40 million other American Christians ............
.......... for the past 30 years ..............
........... but then he read the data on the polar bears.
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