Creation Care and Evangelical Christians

Evangelical Christians often tend to be followers of cultural trends rather than shapers of them. This charge has been leveled frequently against believers with conservative political views but our friends on the evangelical left are not immune to this phenomenon.

An excellent example is the headlong rush of many evangelicals to embrace “creation care” which turns out to be the secular environmentalist agenda dressed up in religious garb.
Here is a quote from Ron Sider, well-known evangelical Christian ethicist, regarding the environment:

“Our present behavior threatens the well-being of the entire planet. We are destroying our air, forests, land, and water so rapidly that, unless we change, our grandchildren and their grand­children will face disastrous problems.We pollute our air, contribute to global warming (climate change), exhaust our supplies of freshwater, overfish our seas, and destroy precious topsoil, forests, and unique species lovingly shaped by the Creator. In many countries, chemicals, pesticides, oil spills, and in­dustrial emissions degrade air, water, and soil.”

A similar view is expressed by Daniel Migliore, the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Seminary:

“… every exposition of the doctrine of God as creator and of the world as God’s good creation is profoundly chal­lenged by the ecological crisis. Evidence mounts almost daily that the crisis is of daunting proportions. The earth and the network of life that it sustains are in peril. In the view of some experts, the damage to the environment is already se­vere and in some cases perhaps irreversible. Nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; the frequent reports of oil spills and leaking chemical dump sites; the ominous warming of the earth and increased acidity of rain; the harm done to the ozone layer; the reckless pollution of air, streams, and fields; the decimation of the great rain forests of the earth; the loss of thousands of species of life; the development and use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons — these are but some of the items in the now familiar litany of the degradation of the earth and the growing threat to all its inhabitants.” (Emphasis added)

But let’s contrast these views with a dissenting point of view from a secular European atheist and college professor at the University of Copenhagen, Bjorn Lomborg, who writes:

“We are all familiar with the Litany: the environment is in poor shape here on Earth.” Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and the water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet’s species are becoming extinct is vast numbers -we kill off more than 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are col­lapsing and the coral reefs are dying. We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the bio­sphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world’s ecosystem is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability, and the limits of growth are becoming apparent.We know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring. There is just one problem: it does not seem to be backed up by the avail­able evidence.” (Emphasis added)

I find it fascinating that Sider and Migliore can recite the “litany” so accurately. Migliore even uses the word “litany” in his description of the desperate condition of the environment! This is profound testimony to the power of a propaganda machine that churns out an environmentalist orthodoxy which goes unquestioned and from which no dissent is tolerated.

Equally telling is the disturbing fact that Sider and Migliore don’t provide a single footnoted reference to back up their assertions about the disastrous state of the environment. Yet this allegedly looming catastrophe is the departure point for their views on Christian obligations related to the care of the creation. Sider’s book is heavily footnoted with no other chapter having fewer than 29 footnotes. Yet his “Creation Care” chapter has only three footnotes and two of them are Sider quoting himself from other books he has written!

In contrast, Lomborg heavily documents his contention that the Litany is not true. His book is over 800 pages and has 2,709 footnotes. Almost all of his conclusions are drawn from the analysis of reports issued by the United Nations, not exactly a conservative, right-wing think tank.

These issues are a matter of life and death. Sider and Migliore contend that “creation care” is part of the gospel’s mandate and that the gospel shows special concern for the hungry and the poor and the marginalized. In fact, this concern is central in both of their theologies. I believe that both men are completely sincere in their concern.

Yet Lomborg argues, persuasively I believe, that basing environmental, economic and political decisions on the mirage of the Litany will actually end up hurting the hungry and the poor disproportionately. He points out ways that the hungry and the poor have already been hurt by misguided environmental policies in the developed world. For example, the banning of DDT, which was demanded with an almost religiously moral fervor by secular Western environmentalists, has actually led to a massive increase in death from malaria in developing nations.

I do not believe that there will not be an increase in justice or a decrease in poverty if we follow the secular Western environmentalist agenda. We need to have accurate facts before we start moralizing and pontificating. Moral mandates applied to bad facts will produce injustice just as surely as the most blatantly immoral acts like robbery, rape and murder.

And a good place to start getting some perspective on environmental issues and their interplay with pressing matters like hunger, disease, oppression and death is at The Copenhagen Consensus web site. This small European think-tank, composed of imminent scholars from around the world, provides an alternative viewpoint to the one that Sider and Migliore have absorbed from the popular culture.

The Copenhagen Consensus proposals are based on the reality that the one resource that is always in shortest supply is money. Thus, where we spend money becomes vitally important – spending money on popular agendas that do little good means that money is not available for other projects that would do more good. As they say on their web site,

“… when financial resources are limited, it is necessary to prioritize the effort. Every day, policymakers and business leaders at all levels prioritize by investing in one project instead of another. However, instead of being based on facts, science, and calculations, many vital decisions are based on political motives or even the possibility of media coverage.”

We desperately need a more informed discussion of the facts before we start adopting policies that might actually have disastrous unintended consequences for the poor and the disadvantaged that we claim we to want to help. Jesus warned us that it is always possible that we are doing harm when we think that we are serving God (John 16:2). We should take that warning to heart.

5 comments

  1. Others may want to poke a “Mikey” doll full of pins, but not me. You are right on here!

  2. Mike,

    If my memory serves me well Bjorn Lomborg used to speak The Litany as well. I believe he was once a leader of Greenpeace.

  3. From Bjorn Lomborg, of the Copenhagen Commission: “Helping poor countries to get richer is the most compassionate, moral action the rich world could take. It would give us all greater ability to combat the globe’s significant problems, and make everybody better prepared to tackle the future.” It seems that he’s not denying the problem of, for example, global warming, but claiming that we can do something significant about it if we’re all on a more level playing field, economically speaking of the third world.

    Can we really believe that if the third world was wealthier, they would altruistically contribute very much themselves to finding a solution to the problem? I’m not so sure. Seems like we’re not very altruistic with our wealth. In general, though, I like not being bullied by popular opinion on issues like this, and I think Lomborg is onto something. Thanks, Mike, for raising our collective consciousness.

  4. A friend sent an email with these comments:

    Thanks Mike. I personally see the latest push on global warming as a man-made religion. If one were to review the tenets of a religion and the tenets of global warming there would be great similarity. In the 70’s there was a great push on limiting population because we were going to run out of food. This led to mandatory abortions in China and an Western European society to low birth rates so they are not even replacing themselves. If it were not for immigration we would probably have a zero population growth.

    The current global warming policies have led to using food for fuel so that there is less food for people and animals. It is not clear that the bio-fuels are any better. I heard a research group in California was about to rule that bio-fuels were worse than oil. Additionally, I expect increase taxes for global warming will actually take money away from the poor and make more people poor. What will happen when people can not afford to heat or cool their houses? The richer countries actually do a lot more in terms of medical breakthroughs, improving the environment than poorer countries. What will happen if we push “dirty” manufacturing out of this country and to places like China and India? The pollution will actually get worse in the world as a whole.

    We need take care of the environment, but we need to use wisdom from God. We cannot go down a path of serving a man-made religion. The people who are most passionate about global warming tend to be people who believe in evolution and atheism.

  5. Hey Mike,

    Hard hitting piece here. It is a significant point that the familiar “litany” of doctrine is often accepted unchecked. It has reached such a tipping point of acceptance that anyone who questions that the environmental litany of opinions are facts are viewed as naïve if not heartless (present company excluded). It is also often assumed that anyone who wants to have the honest conversation is anti-environment.

    By the way, it should be noted that Dr. Migliore would not be considered an evangelical by himself or others. Most would consider him a moderate at best (including me as one who sat in one of his seminary courses many years ago).

    I believe we do need to be good stewards of God’s gift of creation in anticipation of Him making all things new at the redemptive consumation of His new heaven and new earth. For me, there are far more compelling, healthy, unifying, theological and sustainable ways to think about and steward the environment than the polarizing scare tactics commonly being employed today.

Comments are closed.