Divorced from nature

“For those not already familiar with Christian, and especially conservative Christian, metaphysical claims about the nature of God, some historical background is critical to understanding contemporary environmental debates within American Christianity. According to Hebrew Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, the ancient Israelites produced the first enduring monotheism—the belief in a single god. The difference between Israelite monotheism and the pagan religions of that era was not a simply a “matter of arithmetic: one God rather than many … . Pagan religion personified [nature’s] forces, ascribed a will to them, and called them gods” (Friedman, 1995: 87). In contrast, ancient Israel, for the first time in recorded human history, conceived of a God above and beyond the now-desacralized forces of nature.”

“This divorce of God from nature had other ramifications. It allowed biblical writers to imagine that humans occupied a more exalted position in the natural order than the nature-based pagan religions conceived. One example is a passage from the Hebrew Bible’s book of Psalms declaring that God made humanity “a little lower than God,” with “dominion” over God’s creation, putting “all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas” (Psalm 8: 6–8, New Revised Standard Version). Another Psalm asserts: “The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings” (Psalm 115: 16). Environmental historian Clarence Glacken noted that one of the key ideas in the religious and philosophical thought of Western civilization, which is derived from Christianity, is that humans, sinful though they are, nevertheless occupy “a position on earth comparable to that of God in the universe” (Glacken, 1967: 155).”

“Church father, missionary, and theologian Paul of Tarsus carried forward into early Christianity this Hebrew Bible concept of human superiority to, and dominion over, the rest of nonhuman nature. In his New Testament Epistle to the Romans, Paul wrote that God had abandoned pagans because they “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25), thus incorporating from first-century Judaism, into movements that would eventually become early Christianity, the idea that there is an absolute separation between an external supernatural God and the natural created order, and that to venerate nature was to engage in idolatry. Crucially, this passage is one of the most cited whenever conservative Protestant Christians discuss human responsibility for the environment, and it is why the famed Protestant theologian Paul Tillich noted that, within Christianity, the term pantheist is “a ‘heresy’ label of the worst kind” (Tillich, 1951: 233).

“These ideas were uncontroversial standard Christian theology across most of American Protestantism and Catholicism until the 1960s. From medieval times to the present, there have always been minor strands of mystical nature veneration within Christianity, but none had much impact on the major denominations of European or American Christianity. Lynn White had this history in mind when he wrote his seminal, controversial essay.”

“The first major Christian response to White came from Francis Schaeffer, a then-prominent thinker within evangelical Christianity who is still widely cited. In Pollution and the Death of Man(1970), Schaeffer acknowledged the intensifying problems of environmental pollution, but denied that these problems stemmed from Christian arrogance and anthropocentrism. He affirmed that only humans were created in “the image of God” and were therefore uniquely exalted. According to Schaeffer, however, humans only held nature in stewardship for the true Owner. When we have dominion over nature, it is not ours, either. It belongs to God, and we are to exercise our dominion over these things not as though entitled to exploit them, but as things borrowed or held in trust, which we are to use realizing that they are not ours intrinsically. [Humanity’s] dominion is under God’s dominion and under God’s Domain. (Schaeffer, 1970: 51, 70; emphasis in the original)”

“This strand of Christian environmental thought became known as the stewardship school, because wise “stewardship” is its watchword. From the Cornwall Alliance on the right (Cornwall Alliance, 2009a) to Pope Francis (Pope Francis, 2015: 87) on the left, stewardship is the preferred trope for environmental care in most wings of American Christianity. But “stewardship” can be, and has been, interpreted in wildly different ways.”

“The United Methodist Church, for example, last year stated: “As a matter of stewardship and justice, Christians must take action now to reduce global warming pollution” (General Board of Church & Society of The United Methodist Church, 2014). More recently, Pope Francis’s encyclical called climate change “a global problem with grave implications” and stated that “our concerns for the environment [direct] us to be stewards of all creation” (Pope Francis, 2015). For liberal Christians, the call to be a better steward is urgent, unequivocal, of the highest priority, and not to be subject to negotiation or compromise. For conservative Christians, however, the commitment to stewardship has become increasingly hemmed in with certain reservations and qualifications.”

“The Southern Baptists’ struggle to find an acceptable definition of stewardship offers an excellent example from the conservative side. In the early 1970s, likely under the influence of Earth Day and the rise of modern environmentalism, the Southern Baptist Convention passed several resolutions on the environment. The first, passed in 1970, warned “man has created a crisis by polluting the air, poisoning the streams, and ravaging the soil” (Southern Baptist Convention, 1970). The 1974 resolution continued in a similar vein: “We have recently been made more conscious of our selfish and nearsighted use of our resources … [therefore, Christians now must] assume our individual and corporate responsibilities as faithful stewards.” The resolution “urge[d] Congress and concerned governmental agencies to take aggressive action to conserve our diminishing resources” (Southern Baptist Convention, 1974). This was a definition of “stewardship” that was practically indistinguishable from what modern environmentalists were saying: Pollution is the problem; government regulation is the answer.”

“By 1990, though, the tone had shifted. The resolution that year still condemned the sinfulness of the human race [that] has led to the destruction of the created order … as evidenced by the endangerment of the earth by pollution, human extravagance and wastefulness, soil depletion and erosion, and general misuse of creation and it affirmed “our responsibility to God to be better stewards of all of the created order.” But a new theme appeared: Southern Baptists should care for creation but “are forbidden to worship the creation” (Southern Baptist Convention, 1990; emphasis added), a point seemingly intended to distinguish Baptists from pantheistic, neo-pagan environmentalists.”

“Along these same lines, the Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s Policy Statement on Global Warming (Lewis, 2005) defines stewardship as lying somewhere between two extremes, “using nature without any reservations, leading to environment destruction” on the one hand, and “a pantheistic view of the world [that puts] nature at the center of the universe rather than God” on the other. Similarly, a new resolution, passed in 2006, made it crystal clear that a Christian understanding of stewardship is not the stewardship of neo-pagan environmentalists who “have completely rejected God the Father in favor of deifying ‘Mother Earth’” (Southern Baptist Convention, 2006).”

Having distanced themselves theologically from what they saw as pre-Christian religion, these two documents went on to present more purely secular anti-environmental and climate denialist talking points. The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s Policy Statement on Global Warming stated that “tens of thousands of scientists agree that there is no conclusive evidence for the manmade global warming theory. Records prove that climates have changed in the past without human interaction.” The statement warned that the Kyoto Protocol, if implemented, “would have disastrous effects on the economy” including job losses and increased poverty (Lewis, 2005). The 2006 Southern Baptist Convention resolution repeated climate skeptics’ favorite arguments but went even further, approvingly talking of “respecting ownership and property rights” and opposing solutions that “bar access to natural resources and unnecessarily restrict economic development.”

See: (Oreskes and Conway, 2010).

Beyond explicit policy statements, could there be something else in Christianity that suppresses environmental concern? A trailblazing study conducted in 2014 by the Public Religion Research Institute provides a clue. Almost half of all Americans attributed the severity of recent natural disasters to biblical “end times.” Among white evangelicals, that number jumped to 77 percent (Jones et al., 2014: 23).

See: (Barker and Bearce, 2013)