The title of this post comes from a rather truculent comment from fellow Blue Voice writer Dave (Buddhagem) on a previous post of mine, Not Easy, Being Green. Here's the whole comment:
Does it matter if god is green? I mean these people--religious fanatics--are so sure the end is near and that Jesus is coming back and going to fix anything that how on earth could we ever convince them to actually be concerned about the planet they inhabit now?
Here in California it's common to see cars and trucks with "Not of This World" stickers on the back windows and bumpers. They don't believe they are of this world, so why should they care about it?
Instead of trying to convince them that god is green we should simply get serious about education in this country.
Although I haven't seen any of the stickers here that Dave mentions, I certainly see his point. And exactly the situation he describes has depressed me for quite some time now. Which is why I felt the Moyers documentary would be important. And it was. With 85 percent of this country identifying as Christian, and many of that huge percentage voting the way their pastors and churches instruct them to vote, when it's the environment we're talking about - our fate hangs in the balance. If you watched the Moyers program, Is God Green?, you saw the relief and joy on the faces and in the hearts of the congregants whose churches had "given them permission" to care about the environment, or about "creation," in the preferred-speak of the evangelical churches.
The "religious fanatics" in Dave's comments, those who are convinced the Rapture is at hand, may not be reachable, but there is ample evidence that many evangelical Christians are seeing the light. Or the warmth, as the case may be, since it seems to be the mounting evidence of global climate change that has jumpstarted this movement. Sir John Houghton, the British climatologist and evangelical Christian, is in large part responsible for convincing church leaders of the necessity of turning our human efforts towards reversing the damage we have caused. His briefing paper, The Christian Challenge of Caring for the Earth, is a beautiful document, and a clear call to his fellow evangelicals to avoid the Gnostic belief that we will leave creation behind when that final trumpet sounds:
So there is a future for the Earth! We need a theology of creation which includes as central themes both Incarnation and Resurrection - rocks on which a theology of creation has to be built. Jesus Christ is central to all our thinking about creation - and creation is part of the future that he came to establish.
This guy is, mind you, a scientist: co-chairman of the Scientific Assessment Working Group for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a member of the Government Panel on Sustainable Development, and from 1991 to 1998 was Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. He has written several books including ‘Global Warming - the complete briefing’ and ‘The Search for God: can science help?’.
Another interesting document that is moving the evangelical church towards involved stewardship of the earth is On the Care of Creation: An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation. This, as well as many other documents and discussions can be found on the webpage for this segment of Moyers on America. Here much evidence is to be found that, to return to Dave's comment, no one is "convincing them" of anything. This is entirely a movement developing from within the evangelical church itself.
Bill McKibben, one of the earliest environmental writers to take on the subject of global warming, and himself a devout Methodist and sunday school teacher, has an article on this whole issue in the current edition of OnEarth, the NRDC member magazine: The Gospel of Green: Will Evangelicals Help Save the Earth? He sees quite a bit of hope in this movement, as well as here and there expressing some healthy scepticism.
...given that 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian, and that we manage to emit 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide -- well, the future of Christian environmentalism may have something significant to do with the future of the planet. (...) ... there are increasing hints of future activism: Planning for possible widespread nonviolent civil disobedience to draw attention to global warming, for instance, was widely discussed at a recent National Council of Churches meeting in storm-wrecked New Orleans. Protests at Ford headquarters? Blocking the entrance to the EPA? Sitting on the tracks of coal trains? Whatever the strategy, it will play better on TV if there are some clerical collars near the front. (...) Still, there are continuing signs of progress -- what Christians might call evidence of the Holy Spirit at work. In August, after the hottest early summer on record in the United States, even Pat Robertson announced his conversion -- people were heating the planet, he said, and something needed to be done.
In the end, it's clear that this battle is not only for the preservation of creation. In certain ways, it offers the chance for American Christianity to rescue itself from the smothering embrace of a culture fixated on economic growth, on individual abundance. A new chance to emerge as the countercultural force that the Gospels clearly envisioned. And also a chance to heal at least a few of the splits in American Christianity. Fighting over creation versus evolution, for instance, seems a little less crucial in an era when de-creation has become the real challenge.
McKibben's own view of Christianity is clearly set forth in an article he wrote last fall for Harper's Magazine, in a critique of American Christianity, The Christian Paradox. The gist of that paradox is this: "America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior." His fear for the future of American Christianity is not very hopeful, in the end:
Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly market-tested lives, the co-opters—the TV men, the politicians, the Christian “interest groups”—have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves—become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come.
So, only time will tell which of McKibben's visions plays out, whether secular environmentalists and evangelical creation caretakers are able to join hands to heal this devastated planet, concentrating on what they hold in common, without philosphical rancor, rather than on that which divides them. To those to whom it matters whether God is green or not, it matters. To those of us who care for the planet earth without theological recourse, it matters that more people find motivation to join in the healing effort.
