I want to spend some time on the way our theology shapes our actions (and in this case our actions toward God’s world) in my next post, but I feel the need to offer a clarifying post before I do. So here is the point (that has already been confirmed by several comments to my earlier posts): The main obstacle to getting Christians to more faithfully and consistently care for the environment as part of our Christian commitment is not theology but politics.
In doing some combing of the web in the wake of the recent PBS Bill Moyers’ series “Is God Green?”, I was surprised to see an article by Rev. Jim Ball of the Evangelical Environmental Network that criticized Bill Moyers. Ball and the EEN are the group who put together the famous and highly controversial “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign aimed at guilting SUV owners to reconsider their gas guzzling choice of transportation. I naturally assumed when I opened the article that Ball would be heaping praise on Moyers. But he didn’t at all.
Last year, Moyers gave a speech laying out his belief that conservative dispensationalist (read “Left Behind”) theology was behind the lack of environmental conviction amongst evangelicals. This theme has of course been picked up over and over again and while it has some small degree of merit, it is also, Ball said, dramatically overblown.
The idea, Ball says, that evangelicals are unconcerned about creation because they believe that someday we are going to be “beamed up” out of here is like saying that evangelicals don’t take care of their bodies because someday God will give them a new one. There may be some of that neo-gnosticism at play here, but not much. And Moyers’ line of reasoning is both insulting to evangelicals and frankly naïve.
No, Ball says, most evangelicals get the fact that they SHOULD care about God’s creation. That indeed, it has been mandated to us. Most evangelicals today read the key scriptural passages like Genesis 1 and 2 identically: Humans have been given responsibility to care for the world. The problem first and foremost is not in interpretation but in identification. Our first problem isn’t WHAT, but WHO.
Most evangelicals have not turned their backs on the environmental movement because they believe in the rapture, they are against the environmental movement because they believe the environmental movement has become co-opted by theological and political liberals. In the words of some of my friends who are in marketing, "the environment has already been branded as a 'liberal' cause."
Which is Rev. Ball's point exactly:
The main reason many evangelicals have not been as engaged in caring for God’s creation as the Bible calls them to be is because in their minds “environmentalists” are liberals who hold beliefs (e.g. pantheism) and values (e.g. population control) that can be harmful and lead people astray. Indeed, becoming an environmentalist could lead one to become a full-blown liberal, and thus turn away from conservative Christian values and those who hold them. Some evangelicals are also concerned about what they regard as liberal solutions to environmental problems: big government and oppressive regulations.Because environmentalists are perceived to be liberals, anything tagged as an “environmental” concern must be liberal, too. There is an unfortunate guilt-by-association dynamic at play: if something is liberal, then evangelicals should have nothing to do with it.
I think Ball is absolutely correct here. Whenever I talk about the need for Christians to care for the environment, people assume that I am going to walk out the door and start a voter registration booth for the Democratic party. Even more, the most distressing comments in the Moyers’ show were from evangelical leaders who assumed that everything put forth by Richard Cizik and the NAE was little more than the result of liberal puppeteers pulling strings or unconsciously manipulating.
But Cizik, a pro-life, pro-Bush conservative has famously said that his biblical consistency has led him to political inconsistency. And he seems to me to be trying very hard to work out the ramifications of a biblical conviction in a deeply divided political arena (and the NAE is a political lobbying effort.) But for most of the rest of us, this isn’t the issue. We don’t have to figure out what it means to care for the Creation in Washington, but in our own hometowns.
My friends let’s not allow our politics to pollute our Christian practice. Until we realize just how profoundly our political convictions end up shaping our theological convictions and biblical practices, we will be unable to articulate a clear biblically-rooted course of action. (Yes. I realize this has implications for lots of areas, so, bloggers, have at it.)
I certainly believe that our theological convictions and our worldviews have a huge influence on how we view our obligations in the world. (In fact, I would argue that a biblically tutored worldview SHOULD be the guiding grid for helping us determine our life choices.) But for many of us, we can’t even begin to think about something like how we care for the environment until we acknowledge the degree to which our political concerns and the worldview they reveal are the tail wagging the dog.
In the future I’d like to write more about worldview and how we intentionally shape a biblical one. But in the meantime, let’s put that "political" concern on the table. Let's acknowledge that the caring for the environment can be a political quagmire and then let’s do what we evangelicals do best. Let’s go back to the Bible. Let’s let the Bible guide us on what God has said, let’s work out the theological and ethical convictions that follow from that and then determine what we should and should not do. Then let’s invite people of all political stripes to join us.
Bible first, theology second, politics last. Now there's a "slogan" for a much better "brand."
Recent Comments