Minister Peter Carman of Binkley Baptist Church reads from Genesis during the National Preach-In on Global Warming in March.
On a recent Sunday morning at Binkley Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, N.C., the choir opened worship with a rendition of “Morning Has Broken,” a hymn set to a Gaelic melody that exults in the dawning of a new day.
Binkley, an American Baptist Church, participated March 4 in the Preach-In on Global Warming, an event aimed at educating and mobilizing faith groups nationwide.
When Binkley Minister Peter Carman took the pulpit, he described global warming as “a terrible crisis of our own making.”
“Let me acknowledge today I don’t believe in hell,” he said. “But let us acknowledge that, accept or reject that, humanity has the power to create hell in the here and now.”
Amen! one parishioner muttered from the pews.
I spent weeks learning about Baptist attitudes toward climate change for a story at The Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. I learned that the 52 million Baptists living in the U.S. have incredibly diverse views on the environment. But for many of them, scripture is the key to their opinions about climate change.