…..according to Dr. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Beisner, speaking at the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change on May 18 in Chicago, was asked if there was any Biblical basis that would lead evangelical Christians to assume they had a duty to join the anti-global warming bandwagon.

“I don’t think they have any good Biblical basis at all,” Beisner said. “What they do is they jump quickly from the Biblical teaching that we’re supposed to be caring for the poor to ‘global warming is going to hurt the poor more than it hurts anybody else,’ which by the way is true of every problem. You know, poverty makes you vulnerable, period. Wealth makes you less vulnerable, period. There’s even a proverb in the book of Proverbs that says essentially that.”

According to Beisner, the belief that fighting global warming was a component of helping the poor was specifically used by the Evangelical Environmental Network and endorsed by others to make this case.

“They jump quickly from, ‘We need to help the poor,’ to ‘global warming is going to hurt the poor, therefore we need to fight global warming,'” Beisner said. “In 2006, a group – the Evangelical Environmental Network launched a new project called the Environmental Climate Initiative, which put out a statement, ‘Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.’ And that statement was endorsed by 86 different leading evangelicals – presidents of the evangelical colleges, admission organizations. And I went down the list of endorsers. There was no list of authors of that. I later found out the main author was an ethics professor named David Gushee. When I debated him over that at this university, he told me before the debate, ‘You know when I was preparing for this debate, I found out the science was a whole more nuanced than I realized when I wrote the paper.’ I thought, ‘David, you should have known that before you wrote.'”…..