‘Creation Care’ is the buzzphrase that is causing schism amongst evangelicals – which has to be a good thing, in my opinion.
It seems a number of evangelical Christians who haven’t swallowed all the koolaid and have yet to lose their ability to percieve what’s actually happening around them, have decided to ignore the Bush party line and acknowledge global warming. Even more surprisingly, they plan to try to combat it:
“Creation is being depleted by billions of small, unthinking actions,” said Larry Schweiger, former Vice-President of National Wildlife Federation (NWF is a secular environmental organization, Schweiger is a Christian). “With faith underpinning our conduct, we Christians must first confront our own worldly attitudes, destructive behaviors and over-consumption habits. Such life changes must be rooted in deep spiritual convictions. They spring not just from intellectual understandings of creation, but from a deeper love for our neighbors-present and future.”
Schweiger is not the only one to express these feelings. Across the nation, Christian creation care ministries, retreats, and camps are arising, growing and expanding, from Earth Ministry in Washington state to Evangelical Environmental Network in Pennsylvania. Many Christian college biology and environmental science departments actively engage their students in creation care projects as an integral part of their education. Together, these ministries inspire people to take an active role in protecting and respecting creation. And because students often carry such a deep passion for life and their convictions, they form the heart and soul of many of the projects and organizations.
The more politically connected fundies have set their faces against ‘creation care’ and refuse to even acknowledge there is an issue.
Last month, the NAE came under pressure not to take a position on global warming from its most conservative members, including James Dobson and Oral Roberts University president Richard Roberts. The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance sent a letter signed by Dobson, Roberts and 20 others leaders declaring that “We are evangelicals, and we care about God’s creation. However, we believe there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue.”
Calvin Beisner, an associate professor of historical theology and social ethics at Knox Theological Seminary, who was one of the signers and authors of that letter, says that many evangelicals continue to have serious doubts about global warming. “Such a policy of mandatory CO2 emissions reductions as a means of combating global warming rests on three major assumptions, all of which we think are debatable, if not downright false,” he said.
The assumptions that Beisner sees as debatable are that global warming will have catastrophic effects, human emissions of CO2 are a large enough part of the problem that reducing them could significantly reduce global warming, and mandatory emission reductions would have more beneficial than harmful effects on the global environment and human economy.
Unfortunately the latter group has much more money and power, and the will to push it, and to silence their critics.
Calvin B. Dewitt, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is also evangelical, compared the silencing of Rev. Richard Cizik on climate change to the recent muzzling of Dr. James Hansen at NASA. “Here is a person who has not changed [his position], he is just being silenced. People are asking what kind of truth-seeking this is, when a person who is a principal leader in bringing an awareness of climate change to the whole evangelical world — what is going on that’s compelling the NAE executive committee to say you cannot speak for us?” Dewitt predicted that the tactic would backfire on the NAE, since evangelicals have an ideological distaste for church hierarchy, dating back to the Reformation: “It’s raising the issue even higher than it was before.”
I really don’t think schism is going too far here. The root of the disagreement, leaving aside the political pressure, seems to be a clash in theological approach. The creation care fundies appear to be advocates of free will as a gift from God, and the naysayers appear to think that since God supposedly created all things and has a Plan, then anything that’s happening, however negative, must be part of that plan, and you don’t question God’s will, oh no ( or at least ‘God’s will’ as interpreted by James Dobson) – and besides, the rapture’ll happen soon so what does it matter anyhow?
Dobson et al may have the ear of the Administration, but their stock is falling fast, what with Ralph Reed’s shenanigans with Abramoff, but the Evangelical Climate Initiative is deadly serious and increasing its support, even if it is a day late and a dollar short to the climate debate.
Could we be seeing the final fragmentation of the fundies? A little early to tell, but we can hope, and in the meantime it’s good too see they’re not as vile and mendacious as the likes of Dobson and Reed. This sounds more like the Christianity I was taught.
Lets not be too optimistic. Welcome as this development is, they are still working from a creationist, anti-scientific standpoint. But if they can moderate that anti-science stance even a little, I guess it’s a start.
