CNN has another story up about the evangelical divide over global warming. As usual, it’s the National Evangelical Association’s Richard Cizik against the usual cadre of conservative evangelical political leaders—Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, and longtime conservative activist Paul Weyrich, just to name a few. Now, I think Cizik is mistaken to suggest that global warming poses a catastrophic threat that requires government action (and not like Kyoto/cap-and-trade will do much to lower temperatures anyway), but I also think that the Dobson crowd’s resistance to environmental issues might be a little much. As the free-market environmentalism movement has shown, it’s entirely possible to be concerned for the welfare of the environment and not want to see public action taken in the name of protecting it. There’s a great case to be made that markets and property rights do a better job of protecting nature than public land ownership and top-down rule-making.

Additionally, it always seems odd to me when religious groups argue for more government. Do church leaders really want to give more power to an explicitly secular, already-powerful societal institution? If the Cizik crowd could focus their energies in the direction of free-market environmentalism, not only would they put a damper on a lot of the evangelical acrimony over the issue, they’d be advocating policies more in their interests—and, perhaps most importantly, more likely to work.