What is an appropriate Christian response to climate change? My response would be to do very little about climate change. I think it is mostly a lot of hot air. (*grin*) Instead of addressing global warming, I think we should be about finding more efficient and cost-effective ways to reduce pollution and CO2 emissions and new cheap and sustainable energy sources. Confused?
I recently wrote a review of Al Gore's movie called An Inconvenient Truth, where I spelled out my skepticism about climate change science. I will not recapitulate all that here. Here, I want to focus on the convergence of two powerful political agendas over the past few years.
TWO AGENDAS
The first is the agenda of a scientific community deeply entangled in highly politicized government research funding. I blogged at length about this in my previous post, so I will not go into detail here. In short, there is a nexus of (1.) politicians who want to be seen as dynamic, visionary leaders, (2.) scientists whose livelihood depends on the perpetuation of a climate change crisis and the government money that perceived "crisis" generates, and (3.) media outlets that find sensational stories about climate change generate viewers and readers.
The second agenda in the convergence is the agenda of the politically left-leaning religious community. Except for a brief time during the Clinton administration, the religious left has felt increasingly marginalized in the political arena over recent decades. A highly symbolic event happened in 1998 when President Clinton went to China to talk to President Jiang Zemin about religious persecution. He took a rabbi, a Roman Catholic archbishop, and two National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) representatives. No mainline or National Council of Churches (NCC) representatives were included despite their appeals to be a part of the diplomatic mission. I suspect President Clinton knew that the NCC was captive to the Democratic coalition and the NAE represented a powerful and growing constituency that could be courted.
Over the past generation, conservative and fundamentalist religious leaders have articulated fears of their communities about a decaying social order and motivated them into political action. For better or worse, politically conservative Christians ("Religious Right" would only be a subgroup of conservative Christians, by which I mean a large, diverse group of people who are right of center politically and devoted Christians) are now driving much of the political agenda either by their actions or by the opposition their actions provoke. Liberal Christians (by which I mean a diverse group of devoted Christians who are to the left of center politically) have frequently found themselves in the role of defensive critics.
I suspect environmentalism is viewed by many on the Religious Left (politically liberal Christians who are thoroughly engaged in the political realm) as a political opportunity to regain a voice and set an agenda. They intuitively sense that many Christians have some sense of earthly stewardship as a part of their heritage, and they are correct. Tapping into this issue is a way to regain power. This raises interesting questions. Is the driving force a profound theological and scientific concern about the environment seeking a political voice? Or is the driving force of a weak political voice manufacturing an exaggerated concern to get a larger voice? Both are present, but the latter is the stronger force.
Understand that I am not alleging a conspiracy. No conspiracy is needed. It is almost an almost instinctive emergence. The twentieth-century evangelical DNA seems to contain an apocalyptic gene. Dispensational theology has widely instilled the vision of an imminent rapture and apocalypse in theological strands far from Dispensationalism. Any overly vigorous sneeze heard within five hundred miles of Jerusalem signifies the rapture is coming any second. The rise of the much vaunted and rivaled (though somewhat fuzzily defined) Religious Right in the late 1970s to early 1980s was due in part to apocalyptic visions of a moral collapse within the nation or of being conquered by godless communists from without.
Science has had its own Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye types. Paul Ehrlich released his book "Population Bomb" in the late 1960s predicting imminent global catastrophe from overpopulation. Unlike Hal Lindsay, he just keeps printing new editions after predictions fail to materialize, showing things are actually even worse than he first forecasted. The Club of Rome published its "Limits to Growth" report in the 1970s showing how we were about to run out of everything, including petroleum, by the century's end. From the late 1970s until at least as late as the mid-1990s, we heard that fossil fuel emissions created global cooling and would plunge us into an ice age. Since the late 1980s, global warming replaced global cooling as the crisis, and the area of study became known as "climate change." (I can only presume the name change was made so that if we need to return global cooling, we won't have to adjust all the jargon again.)
I believe the crystallizing moment that sealed the convergence was the 2004 presidential election. Democrats and the media widely attributed Bush's victory to "values voters" who were put off by the Democrats' seemingly secularist and antagonistic posturing on faith issues. Jim Wallis' God's Politics was released just after the election. It offered Democrats a religious rationale for much of their political agenda. Democrats needed religion, and the Religious Left needed power. A perfect marriage. Apocalyptic global warming "science" is a key piece of this alliance. The Spiritual Activism conference held last May by left-leaning religious and political leaders was clear evidence of just such a strategy in progress. They repeat the same perilous acts of the Religious Right in placing faith perspectives at the service of political powers.
The apocalyptic climate change movement is not based on either good theology or good science. Therefore, the theological and scientific/political/economic responses are not good either. First, let us look at the theological response.
A THEOLOGICAL RESPONSE
The theological response Religious Left is incomplete. The religious left equates Christian environmental stewardship with "protecting," "healing," "preserving," and "restoring." There is no question these are aspects of environmental stewardship, but this is a grossly incomplete conception of stewardship. It seems to have more in common with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's environmental romanticism than with the biblical narrative. According to Rousseau, human beings are in their most exalted and virtuous state when uncorrupted by civilization. It is civilization that corrupts both humanity and nature. Much of the environmental movement, including the religious versions, view humanity entirely as consumers and environmental parasites. Consequently, stewardship is equated with keeping every aspect of nature as pristine and untouched as we can.
Human beings are not parasites. They were intended to be producers. Reviewing Scripture, I am hard-pressed to find passages that speak directly of humanity's relationship to nature as "protecting" and "preserving." We do find in the Genesis Chapter 1 account of creation that God pronounced the created order good. For that reason, if for no other, creation has value beyond a purely utilitarian value. Psalms 8:5-6 says:
Yet you have made them [humanity] a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet … (NRSV)
While we tend to think of Kings exercising "dominion" as tyrannical, this would not have been so for readers in biblical times. The monarch was to be God's instrument for building up his domain, making it prosperous, bringing order, and protecting it from harm. It was not just for keeping the status quo but about seeking ever-increasing good for those under his domain. They were to make their domain productive and prosperous. Thus, when Psalms 8 speaks of giving dominion, this image is in mind. I maintain that the biblical vision of stewardship envisions human beings getting the most output for the least input while doing the least damage to the created order, all the while enhancing the fruitfulness of the human and natural order.
The creation stories hardly view the earth as some fragile reed. It is a wild, untamed beast that must be harnessed and subdued. Genesis 1:28:
God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue [kabash] it; and have dominion over [radash] the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." (NRSV)
According to Strong's Concordance, the key words here mean:
OT:3533 kabash (kaw-bash'); a primitive root; to tread down; hence, negatively, to disregard; positively, to conquer, subjugate, violate.
OT:7287 radah (raw-daw'); a primitive root; to tread down, i.e. subjugate; specifically, to crumble off.
Genesis 2:15
“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till [`abad ] it and keep it.” (NRSV)
According to Strong's Concordance, the key word here means:
OT:5647 `abad (aw-bad'); a primitive root; to work (in any sense); by implication, to serve, till, (causatively) enslave, etc.
These are not passive words. They conjure up images of humanity that is bending the forces of nature toward some purpose, not preserving all its pristine glory. The very act of "filling the earth" would militate against this. We must remember that the biblical narrative begins in a garden but does not end there. God's purposes are not restoring us to a garden but bringing us into a city, the ultimate symbol of human civilization, filled as it is with commerce, learning, and government. The Religious Left almost uniformly ignores passages like these in their presentations of environmentalism.
Our relationship toward creation is not purely utilitarian. We are stewards of resources entrusted to us and are to use those resources as the owner would use them. The owner of those resources created them and pronounced them good upon creation. Therefore, wanton destruction of resources and beauty for selfish ends would violate our stewardship role. However, like the servant with the one talent in Jesus' parable from Matthew 25, simply preserving and protecting resources entrusted to us also violates our stewardship role. If the environmentalism of the Right (or lack thereof) has veered too close to the error of wanton destruction, then the error of the Religious Left is to fall into the trap of the one talent steward. We need biblical environmentalism that leads us to neither of these errors.
So, the first response to climate change is an appropriate theological response. We need to look at a proper scientific/political/economic response.
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