There was much hue and cry among climate hawks in 2015 when Pope Francis issued his "Laudato Si," an impassioned, 184-page statement decrying humankind’s ill treatment of the Earth. In particular, it framed global warming as a challenge to the religious conscience. [...]
Now another, more thorough investigation of the pope’s climate influence has been done by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. (It was just released in the journal Climatic Change.) After more than a thousand 20-minute phone interviews with Catholics across the country, both before and after its release, influence of "Laudato Si" has become clearer. [...]
The Annenberg researchers spend a lot of words trying to explain this, but it’s not that complicated: Partisanship is more powerful than religion in the US. Or as the authors put it, "the worldviews, political identities, and group norms that lead conservative Catholics to deny climate change override their deference to religious authority when judging the reality and risks of this phenomenon."
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