Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment

The election of President Donald Trump and the wide and deep support he received from white evangelical Christians has highlighted and reinvigorated much popular and scholarly work attempting to better understand the role Christianity plays in contemporary American political life. Similarly, in the field of environmental communication, there are reams of work focusing on how to better communicate with skeptical or dubious publics about the threats posed by climate change, which only grow in severity. However, and perhaps surprisingly, there has not been much work examining the intersection of these two topics—the discourses of American Christianity and the rhetoric of climate skepticism. Emma Frances Bloomfield's book Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment fills that gap. Building on Bloomfield impressive research record in this area, the book provides a typology of three types of climate skepticism exhibited by Christians, described by Bloomfield as Separators, Bargainers, and Harmonizers, and makes suggestions about how this skepticism might fruitfully be countered through identification and dialogue.