The Washington Post isn’t known for being a paper friendly to religious believers. After all, this is the same paper that famously said of some Christian believers: “[They] are largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” But on Tuesday, the paper found at least one believer worthy of respect: An evangelical Christian who is also a climate scientist.
Writer Dan Zak invoked the book of Genesis as he touted Katharine Hayhoe:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, and the Earth was shapeless and barren, so God added light and water and land and sky and plants and animals and humans. If you extend this belief forward, then God also created coal and oil and gas, which we began burning to do our own creating, on a massive scale. Health and wealth flowered across the planet, but there were consequences: first for the poor and marginalized, who were more exposed to the pollution, and then for everyone, in the form of a changing climate that is endangering creation.
Later in the article, Zak mocked the cynical “Pharisee behavior” of Republicans in attendance at a climate congressional hearing:
At the start of the hearing, all the officials were men, dressed in soft charcoals and navy blue, and most were Republicans, who preached against the “toxic” Green New Deal, even though the hearing had nothing to do with it. It was, you might say, classic Pharisee behavior.
Zak eventually broached the problem some “deniers” have with climate change liberalism: That this is about promoting liberalism.
Religious people who deny climate science are generally spurred not by theology but by an assumption that climate science is based on political beliefs — namely, liberal ones. Converting nonbelievers on political grounds seems next to impossible.
Gee, you think?
Zak gushed over Hayhoe’s attempts to bring climate science to other Christians: “It was a kind of creation story. It described a world and cast us again as stewards. The future could be milder, or it could be harsher, depending on our choices.”
A bit different than, say, this take on Christians from the Post:
Corporations pay public relations firms millions of dollars to contrive the kind of grass-roots response that Falwell or Pat Robertson can galvanize in a televised sermon. Their followers are largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.
— Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf, February 1, 1993 news story.
In December of 2018, NBC found God as Al Roker decried the “sin” of not fighting climate change. In February of 2019, CBS talked to Hayhoe and lamented that there was even “a debate at all.”
