In pretty good news for next year’s Easter brunch with your boyfriend’s parents — no weeping into the country club omelette bar in 2016, y’all! — new research from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication shows that the majority of Catholic Republicans actually believe in climate change:
Overall, we find that Catholic Republicans are more convinced that global warming is happening and human-caused, and are more worried and supportive of climate policies, than are non-Catholic Republicans. These differences between Catholics and non-Catholics are unique to Republicans; that is, we see far fewer differences between Catholic and non-Catholic Democrats and Independents on these issues. …
A majority of Catholic Republicans in the U.S. thinks that global warming is happening (51%), compared to a minority of non-Catholic Republicans (42%).
Why does this matter? As we well know, the Republican party line is that climate policies are dumb and misguided and unnecessary. Furthermore, Republican Catholics have a rich history of staunchly refusing to openly discuss sometimes ugly or complicated things (anything related to sex, for example). The fact that they are open to acknowledging the ugliest truth of our time (that humans have really garbled up that whole “caring for creation” thing) seems pretty significant!
You might be on to something, ol’ pope!
