Creation Waits in Eager Expectation

… for American Christians to take climate change seriously. At the COP28 climate summit, fellow Christians wait too.

The 28th annual meeting of the United Nations Climate Change Conference—commonly called COP28—is winding down in Dubai. I’ve been here with the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP), which brings 30 emerging leaders from around the world to bear witness to conference events. COP28 includes both intense climate action negotiations with officials from 200 countries and something like a world’s fair, with pavilions from almost every country as well as many different interest groups.

One group that is noticeably underrepresented is the American church. There’s a faith pavilion here for the first time, and I’ve seen presentations from Muslims, Jews, and many Christians from other parts of the world. But aside from Americans involved via CCOP, I’ve not seen anyone representing Christians in the US.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. Christians are less likely than other Americans to think climate change is a serious problem, and evangelicals have the least concern about the environment of any American religious group. With fellow climate skeptics, they’re apt to argue that there are “bigger problems in the world,” and anyway, “God is in control of the climate.”

Those rationales for inaction may sound realistic, practical, even biblical. But they miss deeper scriptural themes of love, justice, and the responsibility for creation that God has shared with humanity on this side of eternity—and the next.

It’s true that many people have more immediate problems than climate change, but once you grasp the scale of the risk here, it’s hard to imagine a more significant threat to so many people’s way of life and livelihood, ...

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