Politics & Power Quote by Jim Clyburn

Clyburn is doing something slyly bipartisan here: he frames climate stewardship not as a coastal liberal cause, but as a moral awakening inside a constituency often cast as its antagonist. “In particular” signals he’s selecting evidence for a larger argument about political possibility. He’s not praising evangelicals in general; he’s spotlighting an “emerging call” because emergence is leverage. If a new voice is rising, it can be amplified, courted, and converted into votes.

The phrasing “our nation’s evangelicals” is equally strategic. It domesticates a group frequently treated as a parallel political nation, pulling them back into a shared civic “our.” That matters for a Democratic leader like Clyburn, whose coalition typically relies on Black churches while white evangelical institutions are associated with Republican power. By separating “evangelicals” from a single party identity, he opens a door for cross-pressure: if you’re an evangelical, you can keep your theology and still break ranks on environmental policy.

“Protect God’s creation” is the masterstroke. It avoids the culture-war term “climate change” and replaces it with a biblically fluent frame: stewardship, responsibility, accountability. The subtext is: you already have the language to care about the planet; you don’t need permission from scientists or activists to do it. Calling the shift “substantial” isn’t just description; it’s a prompt to donors, legislators, and organizers that this isn’t fringe “green” religion, but a potentially consequential bloc. It’s persuasion dressed as observation.