[Return to Part I]

[... continued ...]

Green Cross is the official publication of the Christian Society of the Green Cross. According to its publishers, their magazine is intended to help "readers care for Creation in a way that is faithful to Jesus Christ, biblical revelation, and scientific analysis." The product of their good works taken together they call "creation care."

Creation care is also what Evangelical Environmental Network hopes to elicit from those who sign on to its Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation. "Committed to the full authority of the Scriptures," and acting to "extend Christ's healing to suffering creation," the Declaration urges "individual Christians and churches to be centers of creation's care and renewal."(2) It's hard to know at first what this might mean. Luckily, the document is more explicit elsewhere when it speaks to a growing crisis in the "health of the creation" resulting from various forms of environmental degradation. The Declaration sums up this state of affairs with the odd formulation, "because we have sinned, we have failed in our stewardship of creation." As it turns out, the material world is suffering for man's spiritual deficiencies.

Make no mistake about it, this way of talking subordinates religious belief to a materialistic view of the world. Oddly, it is in fact scientific talk unhinged from its religious origins. It only takes a single paragraph of the Declaration to prove this point:

Many of these degradations are signs that we are pressing against the finite limits God has set for creation. With continued population growth, these degradations will become more severe. Our responsibility is not only to bear and nurture children, but to nurture their home on Earth. We respect the institution of marriage as the way God has given to insure thoughtful procreation of children and their nurture to the glory of God.

Throughout the Declaration all of the appeals to scriptural authority are a ruse. All of the pious inflections are a sham. The only concern here is for how the genius of human science will overcome the finite limits of God's creation. Interestingly, one of the chief expressions of that genius are the contraceptive methods necessary to "insure thoughtful procreation."

The reference to extending Christ's healing is particularly telling. In the same way Christ redeemed Man, now man has to redeem the Earth. Needless to say, in all of man's saving activity, God is made redundant. Ashamed of his sinfulness, man wants to restore to wholeness the world that he has polluted -- in the meantime, however, God is apparently powerless to help him out.

The last observation is key. In so many works of Christian environmentalism, God is celebrated as the creator of a pristine world now deteriorating under the pall of man's industrial activity. God, however, is always surprisingly absent from the world as it is today. Regardless of all the allusions to God's saving grace, it will take man's activity to return the world to its primeval beauty.

It doesn't take much to see that something here has gone awry. Earth is not the proper object of man's religious longings. But when a man is taught to care for the Earth with a zeal reserved for the love of God, a few things are sure to be misplaced: God and man for starters.

Calvin B. DeWitt, co-founder of the Evangelical Environmental Network, recalls the story of Noah, "Deluges--in Noah's time of water, and in our time of floods of people--sprawl over the land, displacing God's creatures, limiting the potential to obey God's command, 'be fruitful and increase in number'"(3)

According to DeWitt, people are a plague. It doesn't matter that in the Bible all creation was made for man, man is now obviously in creation's way. Like all the other creatures, man too was told to be fruitful and multiply. But in addition, man was told to fill the Earth and subdue it. DeWitt would rather that man die. It doesn't matter that DeWitt would exempt himself from such population control measures, one only needs to know that he cites God's command in order to undermine God's purpose.(4)

Stan LeQuire, one of DeWitt's colleagues, is also fond of the Noah story:

God wants us to save all creatures, every slug and salamander. And so we say, let God decide which creatures shall survive. It is ours to help; it is not ours to decide. If creatures become extinct on our account, because of our greed or neglect, we're playing God, and that is blasphemy. That is sin.

LeQuire is playing God more than he knows. He wants to salvage salamanders, but for him people are pollution. If here is blasphemy to be found, it is in his own contempt for the human race made in God's image.

But since they mention it, let's remember the point of Noah's story. Noah does not enter upon the stage uninvited or without precedent. Rather, he comes into a world ever increasingly more violent since the temptation and fall of man. Woman now gives birth in labor; man toils in the field for his sustenance. Cain slays his only brother and is banished to wander the Earth forever. For generations man's wickedness grows until finally God is determined to destroy all that he has made.

Except for Noah, nothing and no one is spared God's damnation before the flood. In addition to man, God set out to destroy all the beasts, the creeping things, and the birds of the air, because he was sorry he made them. The story of the flood in other words is not a story about the beauty of created order salvaged by God in the face of man's moral wickedness. No, it is a story about the chosen people, about baptism, about rebirth, and about man's salvation that only comes about through a covenant with God.

Reading the Bible outside of Christian tradition, DeWitt and LeQuire extract whatever doctrines they wish to find. Neither of them has any interest in discerning the four fold sense of Noah's ark floating on the waters of destruction. Although the Church teaches that everything in Scripture carries a literal, an allegorical, a moral and an anagogical sense, DeWitt and LeQuire are only looking for a rhetorical billyclub with which to beat their opponents into pious submission.

As it was said in the beginning, Christian environmentalists have turned the world on its head. In using language reserved for God to show their concern for the Earth, they have only bread contempt for man and made a mockery of real religion. What they have not done is to make the Earth a proper object of worship. It can't be. But more to the point, theirs is not a genuine religious concern. They have simply invoked religious rhetoric to give urgency to their worldly agenda. Sadly, for those who don't discern this agenda, this manner of speaking will make an idol of the Earth.

The world is God's creation and as such it cannot be "cared for" or praised in a manner that is reserved for God alone. That God is in all things, does not make all things into God. This simple error, however, makes paganism possible. That man is called to protect the planet, does not make the protection of the planet the singular calling of man. Yet, it is precisely this move that tempts environmentalists to invoke certain forms of religious language. When these words miss their mark, it is the world they hope to save that will pay the greatest price. Bad environmental science fueled by fake religion can only hope to hurt everyone and everything involved.

When the Lord God revealed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai, he commanded all Israel to have no false gods before him. In their fidelity to the Lord God, the people Israel kept the Lords words in their hearts, on their wrists, before their eyes, and upon their door posts. When later they crossed Jordan to take possession of the land that the Lord God had given them, they were careful to observe all the statutes and decrees that he had set before them.

Should they ever follow false gods, they would lose the land that the Lord God had given to them for their benefit.

Samuel Casey Carter is the executive editor of Crisis, a magazine of religion, culture, and public policy published in Washington, D.C. A former student of biblical languages at St. Benet's Hall, Oxford, he is now completing his doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of mathematics for the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.

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1. Robert Whelan, "Greens and God," The Cross and the Rainbow, (Grand Rapids: Erdmans, 1996), p. 18.

2. Evangelical Environmental Network, An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation

3. Calvin B. DeWitt, Christian Environmental Stewardship: Preparing the Way for Action

4. Jeffrey Smith, "Evangelical Christians Preach a Green Gospel," High Country News, April 28, 1997 (Vol. 29, No. 8)