Environment reveals evangelical rift

Posted: 9/01/06

Environment reveals evangelical rift

By Hannah Elliott

Associated Baptist Press

DALLAS (ABP)—Al Gore’s controversial documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has revealed a diversity of opinion among Christians when it comes to the environment.

On one end of the spectrum are evangelicals who accept the scientific evidence for global warming and hold a thoroughgoing com-mitment to more regulation and “green living.” At the other end are conservative Christians skeptical of the science and willing to trust free-market solutions and incremental change to protect the environment.

In a recent Entertainment Weekly article, Gore said climate change isn’t a political issue but a moral issue. Gore, who attends New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in Carthage, Tenn., has said he will donate the profits from the film—now the fourth-highest grossing documentary—to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

“This isn’t a political film,” Gore said in the article. “It’s about the survival of the planet. Nobody is going to care who won or lost any election when the earth is uninhabitable.”

John Houghton was one of the first evangelicals to take those threats seriously. A former professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford University, he was knighted in 1991 by Queen Elizabeth II.

Houghton, whose work helped shape the Christian environmental movement, provided a framework for many evangelicals who came after him. He focused mostly on awareness and credible science in verifying the effects of global warming. That approach paved the way for a progressive, long-term view of environmental consciousness.

Many of Houghton’s concerns are reflected in Gore’s film. In a 2005 presentation to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Houghton said a rise in sea level would cause disastrous problems for people living in low-lying areas like Bangladesh and southern China.

Furthermore, extremely high temperatures in central Europe during the summer of 2003 led to the deaths of more than 20,000 people—an event that could indicate the ramifications of future increasing temperatures.

And a warmer world would lead to increased evaporation of surface water and more precipitation in general, Houghton continued. A greater frequency and intensity of floods and droughts would prove especially traumatic for developing countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where events like these already occur. Gore’s documentary mirrors these concerns.

Many Christians have embraced the film as a welcome, if sobering, call to environmental action. But the response has not been uniform. Although many evangelicals now take environmental threats seriously, their approaches differ widely.

Some accept the scientific evidence for global warming and embrace a thoroughgoing commitment to environmentalism. Others are less convinced by the science and more pragmatic about solutions.

“The economist in me has to look at the issues, but my take is that I doubt I would be as alarmed as Al Gore is,” said P.J. Hill, a professor of economics at Wheaton College, an evangelical school in Wheaton, Ill.

Hill agrees global warming is real. But unlike Gore, Hill says he’s not ready to claim “scientific consensus” on the causes and consequences.

Hill is a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, a Montana-based think-tank that uses market principles to address environmental problems. While materialism and consumption most often are blamed for degradation of the environment, Hill says such market forces also can be used to solve the problem. He wants to show people that attention to the environment will in fact benefit them and the economy in the long run.

Environmental protection should be “about doing careful work with the environment, with respect to the poor, the marginalized, and the people without a political vote,” said Hill, who co-wrote Eco-Sanity: A Common Sense Guide to Environmentalism and Who Owns the Environment?

Glen Stassen, a Baptist who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., falls on the progressive side of the spectrum. He believes government should create just policies that give incentives for “green” living. But he also contends inner change is the best remedy for consumerism and materialism.

Christians must, in their minds and hearts, follow the example of Jesus in order to produce change in the environment, said Stassen, noting that greed, consumerism and materialism lead to environmental destruction.

Stassen, co-author of Kingdom Ethics, says careful stewardship of God’s creation is not only a nice thing to do but is a biblical mandate. Once Christians realize they’re actually a part of creation themselves, they may decide to stop exhausting resources and start cultivating them, he said.

Hill, the economist, sees things quite differently. When it comes to economics and the environment, he said, stewardship means different things to different people. “It has trade-offs. One of the most important things people can do is encourage economic growth,” he said. Part of Hill’s work is done through the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship, which emphasizes care for the poor through environmental conservation. Critics have said the group endorses “free-market environmentalism” and prioritizes the needs of humans over nature.

But Hill said the group started as a way for Christians to “seriously think about the environment and make sure the issues were well-grounded and that we were doing good work.” Christians have a responsibility to care for “God’s good creation” in a way that doesn’t penalize poverty-ridden countries, Hill said.

It’s presumptive for “rich Americans” to impose environmental standards on countries that can’t afford them, he insists. For instance, smoldering, abandoned coalmines in China cause massive air pollution. But local governments don’t have enough money to close the mines, Hill said. A solution, he added, could be that Americans help create economic systems that fund clean-up efforts.

Good work is the bottom line, Hill maintains, whether it means rejecting materialism, living in smaller homes, conserving water or simply driving fuel-efficient cars.

Other Christians aren’t so sure humans are culpable for global warming at all. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a Presbyterian and chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, famously contended that global warming is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Environmental “extremists” go too far and current environmental regulations “are not based on science,” he has said.

“As a result, they usually do harm and put undue restrictions upon the freedoms of many Americans,” Inhofe wrote on his website. “The political agenda of extremists must not dictate our efforts to provide common-sense protections that are based on science.”

As part of his work against “extreme” environmental action, Inhofe uses the Oregon Petition—an assertion that scientific consensus about global warming does not exist—as proof that “natural variability, not fossil-fuel emissions, is the overwhelming factor influencing climate change.”

The petition, issued by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, was signed by more than 17,000 scientists and was used to oppose the Kyoto Protocol, an international environmental agreement.

Despite the lack of total consensus on climate change—and on Gore’s film—evangelicals inspired by John Houghton continue to build what Houghton called “a sufficient sense of urgency and resolve” to produce solutions.

“People often say to me that I am wasting my time talking about global warming,” Houghton said in his report to the Senate. “I reply that I am optimistic. … I believe God is committed to his creation and that we have a God-given task of being good stewards of creation—a task that we do not have to accomplish on our own because God is there to help us with it.”