Climate Change and “Christians against the World”

This is the first in a series of weekly Lenten pieces on environmentalism aimed at an Evangelical audience.  If you know me personally or have read other posts on this blog, you probably know that my relationship with the Evangelicalism I grew up with has been rocky, but Evangelicals are still my spiritual family whom I love in spite of everything.  These posts represent an attempt to communicate ecological science and theology to my brothers and sisters in the language of Evangelicalism.

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Climate Change and “Christians against the World”

The following passages are likely familiar to any Evangelical and are often a closely-held part of our identity, symbols of faithfulness to Christ, regardless of what others say:

Matthew 5:11-12

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.  Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

1 Corinthians 1:18-27

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
    and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.  For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.  For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise…

These passages and others are often used to justify what Robin Globus Veldman refers to as the “Embattlement Mentality”, a sense that Christians and the Christian faith in America are under constant attack, leading to the suspicion of science and academia as part of a secular liberal elite determined to undermine Christian faith.  “But wait,” you may be thinking, “biblical Christianity is under attack in Western society!”  Let’s set the question of how true that sentiment is aside right now.  The extent to which our culture has or hasn’t turned against Christianity is beside the point of this series of posts.  What I am arguing is that environmental concerns are not foreign to Christianity but are a fundamental part of our relationship with God and the rest of His creation.  Before we can talk about our spiritual duty to be good stewards of Creation, we need an honest assessment of the state of Creation, and to do that, we need to leave culture war-conditioned, knee-jerk skepticism of science at the door.

There is an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that the earth is warming rapidly because of our actions and that if we don’t do something now, we will face – and we are already beginning to see – catastrophic consequences.  For a list of nearly 200 international scientific associations, agencies, and institutions that hold this position, see here.  

This overwhelming consensus says that we are precipitating an unprecedented mass extinction event, with scientists estimating that around one million of the planet’s eight million species will soon face extinction from manmade causes, primarily the rapidly warming climate caused by greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in various forms.  While we have known about the dangers of greenhouse gasses for decades, we have almost completely ignored the problem in practical term.  Around 50% of the carbon dioxide (one of the most common greenhouse gasses) that has been released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been done so since 1992.

Though we may continue to exist as a species created in the image of God, we will not escape the consequences of our destructive practices.  Climate change is not only warming the atmosphere and the ocean, killing marine life and rapidly melting ice and permafrost, but it is already altering weather patterns, magnifying the severity of heatwaves, drought, storms, and flooding, making coastal areas increasingly uninhabitable and contributing to rising global food insecurity.  Furthermore, these consequences fall most heavily on the poor and marginalized, “the least of these” with whom Christ identifies.

These are not partisan talking points, these are conclusions based on decades of rigorous, peer-reviewed research.  I’m not trying to make you liberal or vote for Bernie Sanders.  What I am doing is trying to give you a sober and honest assessment of our situation so that you can care for the earth in a way that honors and glorifies God and loves our neighbors as ourselves.

Think of all the things we trust scientists for.  The device you’re reading this on is a masterpiece of science and engineering.  So are the cars we drive and the airplanes we fly in.  We put men on the moon.  If it wasn’t for the state of medical science when I born, I wouldn’t be here to write this today.  Every time we drive to work or go to the doctor or check our email or look at distant galaxies, we lean on generations of scientific investigation.  To quote Isaac Newton and Bernard of Chartres, we “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

We certainly have no trouble believing scientists when they offer evidence for things that we already believe.  Those scientists are suddenly impeccably trustworthy.  So why do so many of us doubt something so universally accepted by the scientific community as climate change?

Some will say, “We don’t have the ability to change something as fundamental that God has made as the climate.”  Says who?  Does the Bible?  Not in any clear way.

Rather, we have the need for humility.

The late fourth- and early fifth-century Church Father, Augustine of Hippo wrote,

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

“But God is in control.  If He is allowing this to happen, who are we to try to stand in the way of His will?”

Think about that logic, though.  Should we stop trying to cure diseases?  Stop trying to prevent or ameliorate the impact of natural disasters?  If we could safely prevent earthquakes and hurricanes or cure cancer, wouldn’t we do that?  

Of course we would.  

Then why not do something about climate change?

Ultimately, our greatest reasons for doubt likely have little to do with theology or the examination of scientific evidence.  

A large part of Evangelical climate change denial is, at its root, simple political partisanship.  The close association of conservative Evangelicalism with the Republican Party for the last four decades have led to a number of politically conservative policy positions taking on a status akin to religious orthodoxy with the increasing polarized nature of American politics making the situation ever worse.  A pro-business, anti-environmental regulation stance is one of those positions, and its propagation is anything but passive.

In 2013 Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle found that, beyond direct corporate lobbying, over 90 think tanks with a combined budget of nearly a billion dollars annually operate a well-orchestrated effort to create doubt about climate change and influence environmental policy.  Among the think tanks are a who’s who of conservative organizations, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity.  

While the conservative credentials of these organizations may suggest their trustworthiness to many Evangelicals, these groups and their lobbying campaigns regularly obscure widely understood scientific facts in order to put corporate and individual profits over the good of God’s creation and, by extension, His people.  We have to remember that our duty is to God, not political allies. 

Again, this is not about partisan politics – I’m not here for that right now – it’s about God’s creation and God’s priorities.

Whatever one thinks about the overall appropriateness of Evangelical Christianity’s alliance with the Republican Party, I hope that the following weeks’ posts will convince you that the actively anti-environmentalist agenda that has come with it is not only unbiblical but profoundly anti-biblical.

Next week, we’ll launch into ecological theology, exploring Genesis and the role of stewardship for which we are created.