“I’M A VEGETARIAN.”

His words clanged across the chasm between us. Vague images of hemp friendship bracelets, vegan pizzas, and red paint dripping off fur coats swam across my mind. I couldn’t name one person from my conservative Christian school or church who was a vegetarian.

He had always been a hero of mine, my ever-present playmate through childhood, my guide through the mysteries of adolescence, my friend and my role model. Now my older brother, newly returned from a semester abroad, was telling me he was someone totally different—someone I didn’t recognize.

Along with our older sister, my brother and I had grown up together in a tight-knit Christian community. The Christian K–12 school we attended was woven into the fabric of our town, and church steeples rose above every neighborhood. We were invested in our local church, attending Sunday services as well as several other programs throughout the week. We had been told the stories of Jesus before we could walk. We knew the names Abraham and Moses before Cinderella or Snow White. By the time I was in high school, I was on my church’s praise and drama teams, I was a student leader in our youth group, and I served as a summer student intern implementing neighborhood outreach programs for kids in the surrounding community.

All of this had formed my siblings and me in profound and particular ways. We learned about the overwhelming love of God, the free gift of grace, and the beauty of Christian community. Our worldviews were shaped by biblical values like faith, hope, and love. Our measuring stick for integrity involved patience, kindness, self-control, and the rest of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). And yet, such a seemingly innocuous announcement from my brother about a simple lifestyle choice was enough to send me reeling—to make me feel unmoored, lost, and betrayed. Why?

My brother had not attended a clandestine program designed to deconstruct his Christian worldview and erect in its place a monument to secular humanism. Though foot soldiers of the culture wars like to imagine such Trojan horses lurking around every corner of higher education, the study-abroad program he had attended was thoroughly Christian, complete with regular worship and courses designed to bring Scripture and theology into conversation with ecology and environmental studies.

When I had the ears to hear him, the descriptions of his learning and growth mapped perfectly onto the Christian values and worldview we had already been given. For him, becoming a vegetarian, joining the Sierra Club’s mailing list, and memorizing the bus routes to and from his Christian college campus did not constitute a rejection of our Christian values but were an expression of them. He had not jettisoned his Christian identity. He was living more fully into it.

So why was I so unprepared to accept these choices? Why was I so blind to the deeply Christian values informing them? Why did I have memory verses at the ready to spark thankfulness, to offer comfort, and to cultivate trust but none that called me into deeper relationship with God’s creation or helped me make sense of the existential crisis of climate change? What had my Christian formation omitted, and why? Which scriptural passages and themes had been sidelined? What biblical truths had been suppressed? Did my commitment to following Jesus actually permit me to care about things like species extinction, pollution, and climate change? More than that, did it require it?

After my brother first forced me to confront these questions almost fifteen years ago, they have consumed me. They have taken me across the world, from the maize fields of Kenya to the bayous of Louisiana, from the mountaintops of West Virginia to the vaunted halls of international climate negotiations in Paris. They have forced me onto my knees in prayer and propelled me into the streets in protest.

It is these questions that this book seeks to answer. Across my hundreds of conversations with young Christians about climate change over the last decade, one theme looms above all the rest: silence. Countless millennial and Generation Z Christians—particularly those who were formed by White, conservative evangelicalism1—simply haven’t been told that their faith has anything to say about such questions. Those of us who have come to Christian climate action have come to it circuitously, via some combination of lonely epiphany, painful deconstruction, and growing isolation from friends and family who view our Spirit-breathed conviction as political radicalization rather than Christian discipleship.

This book is for every Christian who has walked this lonely journey. It is for every Christian who has looked out at a world ravaged by the impacts of climate change, at the inability of their seemingly oblivious faith community to do or say anything about it, and quietly wondered if they’re losing their mind.

The need for the church to wake up and act is urgent. Since 2004, seven major studies have been conducted to measure the level of scientific consensus among climate experts. Depending on the various methodologies used, these studies have found that anywhere from 90 to 100 percent of climate scientists agree that the climate is warming at an alarming rate—about a hundred times faster than natural warming trends in the past—and that the primary cause is the extraction and burning of fossil fuels on an industrial scale. The average level of consensus across all these studies is 97 percent. What’s more, the studies found that the higher the level of climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the level of consensus on human-caused warming.2

This makes sense. While the odd geologist or chemist may have their doubts about human-caused climate change, they don’t have the same level of training and expertise in the field as physicists and climatologists. A podiatrist might be able to diagnose a cancerous tumor, but wouldn’t you rather trust an oncologist?

Yet, research shows that even though 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is real, it’s bad, and it’s us,3 the US population remains largely in the dark about the scientific consensus on climate change. Only 59 percent of US adults understand that scientists “agree” that global warming is happening, and only 24 percent know that the scientific consensus on climate change is over 90 percent.4 This matters because on complex issues that require significant expertise—like medicine, law, or the climate system—people defer to experts. Studies have shown that when people understand that experts are unified in their findings regarding climate change, people are more willing to support policy solutions to address it.5

This consensus has been a long time coming because, in science, consensus is achieved slowly. It emerges over time as thousands of studies are conducted, peer reviewed, replicated, and either rejected or affirmed. Very slowly, common results begin to rise to the surface as certain results are tested and affirmed and others are tested and found lacking.

Many skeptics of the scientific consensus of climate change accuse climate scientists today of “group think” and want to see more robust scientific debate and disagreement in pursuit of the truth. These arguments ignore the simple fact that the scientific debate they crave has already occurred. The study of the composition of Earth’s atmosphere, the properties of heat-trapping gases, and the warming of Earth’s surface dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Scientists have been having their debate for over 150 years, and the results are in.

This uniform alarm among the world’s leading experts, achieved slowly over a century and a half of rigorous study, is reflected in their increasingly dire warnings to the world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a global, independent body of scientists from all over the world—has been issuing reports since 1990 on the state of climate change and what policymakers must do to avert its worst impacts. As climate science has gotten more precise and policymakers have continued to do little to slow climate change’s death march, the warnings have gotten more strident.

In 2015, when the landmark Paris Agreement was reached at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21), the world agreed to limit “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.”6 This represented a compromise between more ambitious nations and those who would have preferred to keep the target vaguer. However, due to the creative activism of nongovernmental observers to COP21 and the tireless advocacy from small island nations, the agreement also committed to pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”7

This more ambitious target was affirmed in 2018 when the IPCC released an updated report, just three years after the herculean diplomatic effort of striking the Paris Agreement. The new report said that a 2° Celsius rise was still unacceptably dangerous and that government and industry must do all that they can to achieve the lower target of 1.5° Celsius. This would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in energy, land, infrastructure, and industry on a scale never before seen in human history.8 Yet, according to the World Resources Institute, current emission-reduction commitments from the world’s nations aren’t up to the task and put the world on a...