Why were Pentecostal churches absent from climate debates in Belém? Priscilla Cagnoni Garcia, a social anthropologist teaching at the University of Cambridge, explores.
Brazil recently hosted COP30. For two weeks, Belém, a city entangled by the river and the forest and a symbol of Brazilian Pentecostalism, became the central stage for urgent discussions on how to postpone the climate catastrophe. As delegations delivered speeches about urgency and ritualised the global sense of alarm regarding the climate crisis, in a country where roughly a quarter of the population identifies as Evangelical[1], Pentecostal churches were noticeably distant from these debates. Their voices did not echo through the halls of COP 30. They were elsewhere.
It is tempting, and why not say lazy, to interpret this absence as indifference. It would be even easier to assume climate denialism, by analogy with the so-called American Christian Right and their current position on climate change. But Brazil rarely gives us the satisfaction of simple analogies. Brazilian Pentecostals, despite sharing certain theological positions and sensibilities with the American Christian Right, do not refute climate science. They often speak of environmental collapse with a moral clarity that would impress any activist. They do not deny destruction or decay: they attribute it. Humanity is responsible for the current state of affairs through neglect, greed, sin, and a failure to care for the world entrusted to humans by God. This belief is neither marginal nor new. It was a recurring trope I heard during my fieldwork among the Pentecostals of the Assembly of God Victory in Christ church (ADVEC), one of Brazil’s most vibrant and politically active megachurches. This idea is also reported by social scientists working on Evangelicals and environmentalism in Brazil.
During my 18-month fieldwork, I witnessed ADVEC’s efforts to become more environmentally engaged. The church rebranded its “Social Assistance Department” as a “Socio-environmental Department”, hoping to educate church members and the population living in the vicinity about the importance of recycling. They offered workshops that engaged in the heroic task of transforming waste into decorations; some of which were used at church special events. These gestures are modest, almost fragile. Yet, they are an embodied declaration that Pentecostals, too, care for the environment.
In our tendency to linear cause-and-effect thinking, we are quick to juxtapose conviction with action. Responsibility with remedy. It comes as a shock to us that such an elaborate moral sensibility about the environmental crisis does not translate into any form of activism or, at least, public engagement with the theme tout court. They do not attach their name to environmental coalitions. They do not treat the climate as a political summons. Contrary to other issues, their care stops at the threshold of activism. Why? The obvious answer, that Pentecostals are politically conservative, is again insufficient. Conservatism does not fully explain why a community that sees environmental destruction as human failure refuses to act collectively to address it. Nor does distrust of progressive movements, although this is indeed part of the story. The point is both simpler and more interesting: Pentecostals do not mobilise around issues that do not distinguish them.
The environmental crisis belongs to everyone. In Brazil, awareness of climate devastation does not divide the population; it unites it: humans are to blame for the environmental collapse. From Catholics to atheists, from Indigenous activists to evangelical middle-class families, the idea that humanity is responsible for environmental degradation is practically a national consensus. Pentecostals, then, occupy no special position here. Their diagnosis and sentiment are deeply shared. And because their view does not set them apart, it does not activate what is essential to Pentecostal public action: collective identity. There is nothing particularly Christian about advocating for the environment; instead, this speaks to their Brazilian collective identity, rendering environmental activism not a Christian duty but a national one.
Pentecostal activism emerges through an ethos of distinction. It arises when believers feel that their identity and “values” as “the people of God” demand a public defence (against other groups and against the State). This explains why Pentecostal political force concentrates on themes where their moral imagination diverges most sharply from the mainstream: sexuality, education, family, religious freedom, and abortion. These are the domains where Pentecostalism becomes visible, confident, assertive. Activism is, in this sense, a public statement of difference. It is manifested through the uniqueness of their Christian identity. The environmental cause does not offer such a difference. It offers continuity and inclusion. And continuity does not animate collective action.
There is also something else, something which concerns the structure of Pentecostal subjectivity. Pentecostalism, among believers, privileges the interior and church life. The most meaningful transformations it demands are personal, not institutional or political. Public mobilisation and political choices among them occur less through individual initiatives than through pastoral authority and denominational hierarchies. Pentecostals do not often join protest as individuals; they enter the public sphere mostly when authorised, summoned, and represented as a collective “Christian unity”. Environmental concern, being private and universal, remains largely devotional. It does not acquire the institutional mandate required to become political. Instead, it is experienced as one of the myriad individual convictions that are not mediated through the church or pastoral authority. This pattern is corroborated by political scientist Amy Erica Smith, who has recently discussed how church congregants and pastors, along with their political allies, often hold different attitudes on environmental issues.
Finally, we must address the suspicion that surrounds environmental movements. Pentecostal leaders often perceive environmentalist organisations not as guardians of creation but as carriers of a political agenda; an agenda associated with progressive causes they do not embrace and find morally objectionable. The result is a paradox: Pentecostals agree with environmentalists on the diagnosis, but distrust their companions in analysis and the solutions. They do not question the crisis; they question the company. What emerges is a form of church leadership that fails to animate mobilisation, and a flock that over-moralises the climate crisis, keeping it private. Pentecostals care, but they do not see themselves reflected in the modes through which caring is publicly expressed by those most vocal about the environmental crisis. And the political alliances of church leaders with anti-environmentalists are an essential part of this rift.
The lesson, however, extends beyond Pentecostals. Their stance holds up a mirror to the world that gathered in Belém. The assumption that awareness or conviction should naturally lead to activism is not only optimistic; it is historically naïve. Knowing is not acting. Feeling is not mobilising. Even those who marched at COP30 live in the familiar contradiction between concern and inertia. The planet is burning, and we continue to fly, consume, and defer responsibility. In fact, the absurd environmental costs of COP summits are alarming. Pentecostals simply articulate and enact this contradiction differently: they translate concern into prayer and small acts of repair rooted primarily within church and private life. Perhaps, then, their absence from COP30 should not be read as a failure but as a reminder. A reminder that care, in our time, has become diffuse, fractured, mediated by suspicion and identity. A reminder that activism requires not only conviction but belonging. A sense that one’s action participates in a collective story. For Pentecostals, environmental activism offers no such story: their collective narrative lies elsewhere.
And yet, as the world left Belém and COP30 became another divisive summit added to the archive of climate urgency, the Pentecostal posture invites a quieter reflection. Maybe the real divide today is not between those who care and those who do not, but between those who insist that caring must take a specific political form and those who believe that caring is, first, a moral and spiritual disposition, one lived through a new kind of Christian apoliticism. But understanding why care sometimes stops at the threshold of activism, and how communities like Pentecostals give shape to that threshold, may help us imagine climate politics that are deeper and less dependent on the assumption that conviction inevitably becomes action.
In Belém, Pentecostals organised a series of events and prayed in their churches for a successful climate summit. They meant it. And perhaps the challenge before us is to learn how to interpret that sincerity not as indifference or denialism but as another mode of inhabiting the global catastrophe we all share.
Photo by Italo Melo
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Religion and Global Society nor the London School of Economics and Political Science.
[1] The terms Evangelical and Pentecostal in Brazil have been used interchangeably in the recent specialised literature, albeit important differences remain. To learn more, please refer to SWP Research Paper by Claudia Zilla, which can be found here.
