The Southern Baptist Convention and global warming

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" brought light to the issue of global warming. Still, there are people and organizations out there, such as the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), that say that global warming has not been proven. In a TIME article, Jonathan Merritt, a seminary student with the SBC, talks about his efforts to get the SBC to change its stance:

'I was an enemy of the environment,' he says. 'I approached it with disdain. And then I was sitting in a classroom and I felt like God spoke to me and put this idea in my heart.' The idea — encapsulated in the 'Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change' — is a strikingly potent challenge to his denomination's official stance on global warming and to his own previous scorn. Yes, he says with a chuckle, 'You could say the scales fell from my eyes.'

Merritt's declaration already has 44 signatories including the current SBC president, two of his predecessors, and the heads of three well-known Baptist-affiliated colleges and divinity schools.