On borrowed land
In early February the Washington Post ran a story on “The Greening of Evangelicals,” detailing the slow move toward conservationism by some members of the Right. In the past some members of the Christian community have taken Genesis 1:26-28 to an extreme and unjustified level. There God commands His new creation, man, to have dominion over the earth and to rule and subdue it. In unfortunate cases people have used the scripture as an excuse to exploit the natural environment. But the view is inaccurate, for nature has value in and of itself because God created it. Its value is intrinsic, but it also carries practical value for the very same reasons environmental groups so often espouse.
Indeed, the Christian actually offers justification for more conservation than most, on theological and practical grounds. For reasons not entirely clear, this view toward more conservation is gaining ground among evangelicals. A poll conducted by the University of Akron found that in 2000 45 percent of evangelicals supported strict environmental regulations. Last year that jumped to 52 percent. From my own experience many on the right prefer the label “conservationist” to “environmentalist” because of various connotations that come with each.
Under a proper perspective, man’s rule and dominion over the earth is that of a steward or a caretaker, not an exploiter. We are simply stewards for property that ultimately belongs to a higher power.
12 Responses to “On borrowed land”
That’s how TR looked at things. He started promoting national parks when he realized that his grandchildren might not have the opportunity to hunt the same big game he had. (I know that’s oversimplified, but it’s not bad for two sentences.)
at the extreme other end of this:
Rush Limbaugh once approved the idea that we should burn as much fossil fuels as possible, as God had put it in the grounds for us to use, wouldn’t have put it there otherwise, and might well be adding to supplies on an ad hoc, ongoing basis.
Like Get Your War On say: “who cares if we f*ck up the Earth? It’s only 6,000 years old, right?”
that aside, its prima facie good news that so many people agree that conservation is important, as long as that this does not just mean, in practice, “Not in My Back Yard”.
what does “strict environmental regulations” mean? does it, as the mercury poster on the link implies, mean ‘dont put crap in my river’ (worthy but not enough). Or does it mean: “we have a global emergency regarding mass extinction; habitat destruction; depletion of resources and climate change and must address it”?
As Rush often points out, the radical right loves conservation and the environment (sweeping up leaves on the sidewalk & cutting the grass in the park) but disagrees with ‘enviro-wackos’, (who are statists/ communists in a new guise). Despite the vicar saving electricity, I won’t hold my breath whilst the Christian Right endorses action against climate change.
Best bumper sticker evar:
“If you love the Creator, take care of His Creation.”
Josh,
You may want to check out Francis Schaeffer’s little book on enviornmentalism: “Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology”.
Short, but a great read.
pax,
Dale
I’ve already read it, along with most of Shaeffer’s work.
Okay, but then why do you reject Kyoto and the other environmental accords? The bottom line is that the U.S. produces more pollution than any other country. We are a rich-enough nation that we can do without some of the luxuries whose production leads to high levels of pollution.
I Should Leave This Alone…
I like that fact that Clayborn is trying to alter the vocabulary by calling it conservationism instead of environmentalism, but after that he gets a little too general for my taste.
Just because something calls itself an environmental accord doesn’t mean it’s good for the environment. Each accord should be weighed on its own merits, and should assess the indirect as well as the direct results. Industrial advance may create pollution, but that pollution replaces other forms; compare 19th-century London – when every home had a coal-burning fireplace, and the streets were polluted by disease-ferrying manure instead of carbon monoxide – to the London of today. It also creates new pollution-fighting technologies; forest fires would be a lot worse without the internal combustion engine to get firefighters to the scene.
One of my pet peeves with Pleistocene Liberation Organization environmentalists is their anject paranoia regarding nuclear energy. Waste stockpiles can be vastly reduced thorugh recycling (do a Google on “mox nuclear”), and pebble-bed reactors show promise of safer (and cheaper) nuclear plants. We could, maybe in a decade or two, reduce emissions and increase power output at the same time. But the “enviro-whackos” won’t let us.
The claim that the US is the biggest polluter is highly debatable, as this blogger points out:
http://www.tradingtimes.co.uk/blogging/archives/2005_02_13_archive.html#110861927118501267
Thanks for this discussion. I will link to it this weekend at “It Takes a Church.”
I personally think that God gave us the power to have dominion over the earth, unfortuantely too many people assume that means they can abuse it. Having power over something implies the responsibility of caring for it, as well.
We have a created world, and it is good as are all the created creatures and features in it. The people who inhabit the created universe were also created in the image and likeness of the creator and so are good. Their understanding of the Creator, limited as it always has been, did involve the creation of the term, “person”, an old theological term of the Catholics. We do not find much, if any, discussion of persons as persons prior to the Christian era nor was there any foundation for their worth and dignity as such. They achieve that dignity through being created in the image and likeness of their Creator. Man’s relationship then, to the created world is that of a good to a good.
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