Democratic climate change deniers mirror religious deniers

A week ago, I noted several Democratic climate change minimizers in comments to a Nate Silver piece on Substack.

Last Friday at his Roaming Charges, Jeff St. Clair confirmed, with link to the original AP. Here's the setup graf:

Americans are less convinced that climate change is caused mostly or entirely by humans compared to data from recent years, declining from 60% in 2018 to 49% this year. Americans are less convinced that climate change is caused mostly or entirely by humans compared to data from recent years, declining from 60% in 2018 to 49% this year.

Followed by the nutgraf:

Democrats and independents are becoming less convinced that climate change is caused mostly by humans, while Republican attitudes remain stable.

So, most of that 11 point drop is from Dems.

Yet another reason I'm not one.

But wait, there's more. The Sierra Club and its youth wing, Sunrise Movement, can't blame blue collar Democrats, whether white or "of color," because:

This increased doubt was just as significant for someone who graduated from college as someone who has a high school diploma or less (11 percentage point drop), and was more pronounced for younger Americans (17 percentage point drop for those ages 18-29 vs. 9 percentage point drop for the 60+ age group).

The denialism is becoming more entrenched in Democrats, then, if it's growing among young people in general. (AP had no "age + party" breakout.)

We're screwed.

But WHY?

I think I have part of the answer from religion scholar Ryan Burge, both an academic and a congregational pastor. Christians of all stripes take climate change no more seriously than do non-Christians of other world religions. But, that's not the biggie. It is that religious people in general take it less seriously than agnostics and atheists. And, Religious Right smears aside, your average Democrat is about as likely to be religious, and almost as likely to be Christian, as your average Republican.

As you see, this difference is HUGE.

Forget about the likes of Kuff-type BlueAnon Democrats, or even Burge to a lesser degree, trying to spin this as evangelicals vs others. By percentage points, the "all religions" vs "agnostics" gap is bigger than "evangelicals" vs "all other religious." And, related to that, it's also not Democrats vs Republicans, and forget about that spinnning too. It's secularists vs. religious. By degree of difference, on the "extremely serious," the separation between atheists and either "nones" or "world religions" is GREATER than that between evangelicals and non-evangelicals.

Burge runs the religious breakdown through the parties filter, and in this case, I don't think that's good framing. More to the point, I don't think it's "fair" framing. He uses "independent" to cover anything not D or R, first. Second, he doesn't do a by party (plus independents, even if separating them by political stance) breakout of religiosity. It's true that "nones" are more Democrat than Republican, but that's also not as much as some might think, and "nones" is a catch-all anyway. Pew looks at "belief in God," but also with the same three-way breakout of politics.

I know that Burge has limited data on politics and religion when Pew has only the standard three-way breakout. He had the choice of doing less extrapolative guesstimates than he did, given that.

That said, he does also look at age issues related to this. In all religious groups, the younger are more worried than the older about climate change — except atheists, where it's even across the board.

That said, Burge also may not have been aware of the AP piece before he posted. Well, he is now, since I posted this there.

I'll probably unpack this further, and in yet more directions, in a week or two on my philosophy-critical religion-critical thinking second blog.