Creation Care and Evangelical Christians

Evangelical Christians often tend to be followers of cultural trends rather than shapers of them. This charge has been leveled frequently against believers with conservative political views but our friends on the evangelical left are not immune to this phenomenon.

An excellent example is the headlong rush of many evangelicals to embrace “creation care” which turns out to be the secular environmentalist agenda dressed up in religious garb.
Here is a quote from Ron Sider, well-known evangelical Christian ethicist, regarding the environment:

“Our present behavior threatens the well-being of the entire planet. We are destroying our air, forests, land, and water so rapidly that, unless we change, our grandchildren and their grand­children will face disastrous problems.We pollute our air, contribute to global warming (climate change), exhaust our supplies of freshwater, overfish our seas, and destroy precious topsoil, forests, and unique species lovingly shaped by the Creator. In many countries, chemicals, pesticides, oil spills, and in­dustrial emissions degrade air, water, and soil."

A similar view is expressed by Daniel Migliore, the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Seminary:

“… every exposition of the doctrine of God as creator and of the world as God's good creation is profoundly chal­lenged by the ecological crisis. Evidence mounts almost daily that the crisis is of daunting proportions. The earth and the network of life that it sustains are in peril. In the view of some experts, the damage to the environment is already se­vere and in some cases perhaps irreversible. Nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; the frequent reports of oil spills and leaking chemical dump sites; the ominous warming of the earth and increased acidity of rain; the harm done to the ozone layer; the reckless pollution of air, streams, and fields; the decimation of the great rain forests of the earth; the loss of thousands of species of life; the development and use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons — these are but some of the items in the now familiar litany of the degradation of the earth and the growing threat to all its inhabitants.” (Emphasis added)

But let’s contrast these views with a dissenting point of view from a secular European atheist and college professor at the University of Copenhagen, Bjorn Lomborg, who writes:

“We are all familiar with the Litany: the environment is in poor shape here on Earth." Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and the water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct is vast numbers -we kill off more than 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are col­lapsing and the coral reefs are dying. We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the bio­sphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world's ecosystem is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability, and the limits of growth are becoming apparent.We know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring. There is just one problem: it does not seem to be backed up by the avail­able evidence.” (Emphasis added)

I find it fascinating that Sider and Migliore can recite the “litany” so accurately. Migliore even uses the word “litany” in his description of the desperate condition of the environment! This is profound testimony to the power of a propaganda machine that churns out an environmentalist orthodoxy which goes unquestioned and from which no dissent is tolerated.

Equally telling is the disturbing fact that Sider and Migliore don’t provide a single footnoted reference to back up their assertions about the disastrous state of the environment. Yet this allegedly looming catastrophe is the departure point for their views on Christian obligations related to the care of the creation. Sider’s book is heavily footnoted with no other chapter having fewer than 29 footnotes. Yet his “Creation Care” chapter has only three footnotes and two of them are Sider quoting himself from other books he has written!

In contrast, Lomborg heavily documents his contention that the Litany is not true. His book is over 800 pages and has 2,709 footnotes. Almost all of his conclusions are drawn from the analysis of reports issued by the United Nations, not exactly a conservative, right-wing think tank.

These issues are a matter of life and death. Sider and Migliore contend that "creation care" is part of the gospel's mandate and that the gospel shows special concern for the hungry and the poor and the marginalized. In fact, this concern is central in both of their theologies. I believe that both men are completely sincere in their concern.

Yet Lomborg argues, persuasively I believe, that basing environmental, economic and political decisions on the mirage of the Litany will actually end up hurting the hungry and the poor disproportionately. He points out ways that the hungry and the poor have already been hurt by misguided environmental policies in the developed world. For example, the banning of DDT, which was demanded with an almost religiously moral fervor by secular Western environmentalists, has actually led to a massive increase in death from malaria in developing nations.

I do not believe that there will not be an increase in justice or a decrease in poverty if we follow the secular Western environmentalist agenda. We need to have accurate facts before we start moralizing and pontificating. Moral mandates applied to bad facts will produce injustice just as surely as the most blatantly immoral acts like robbery, rape and murder.

And a good place to start getting some perspective on environmental issues and their interplay with pressing matters like hunger, disease, oppression and death is at The Copenhagen Consensus web site. This small European think-tank, composed of imminent scholars from around the world, provides an alternative viewpoint to the one that Sider and Migliore have absorbed from the popular culture.

The Copenhagen Consensus proposals are based on the reality that the one resource that is always in shortest supply is money. Thus, where we spend money becomes vitally important – spending money on popular agendas that do little good means that money is not available for other projects that would do more good. As they say on their web site,

"... when financial resources are limited, it is necessary to prioritize the effort. Every day, policymakers and business leaders at all levels prioritize by investing in one project instead of another. However, instead of being based on facts, science, and calculations, many vital decisions are based on political motives or even the possibility of media coverage."

We desperately need a more informed discussion of the facts before we start adopting policies that might actually have disastrous unintended consequences for the poor and the disadvantaged that we claim we to want to help. Jesus warned us that it is always possible that we are doing harm when we think that we are serving God (John 16:2). We should take that warning to heart.

Economic Woes and My Texifornian Roots

Some snippet that I caught on the news recently got me thinking about red states and blue states – the states that tend to vote for Republicans and Democrats respectively.

Somewhere in my aging brain cells, I remember learning that one of the arguments for strong state governments with a weak federal system is that the states provide laboratories for public policy. States can adopt different polices in regards to minimum wages and health care and tax structure and social services. We then have a chance to see which policies are most effective in promoting the general welfare. Even more importantly, the impacts from bad public policies that end up hurting people are limited in their extent. Less successful states can learn from more successful states and the general welfare is promoted.

In this state of mind, I started thinking about California and Texas. I’m a native son of the former and an adopted son of the latter. By the time I had graduated from college, I had spent just about equal time living in both states – 12 years in CA and 10 years in TX. My dad was a native Californian and my mom was a native Texan. So I’m a Calixan or, if you’re a feminist, I’m a Texifornian. I love both states.

Both states are large in terms of geography and population. Both are rich in oil and other natural resources. Both have long borders with Mexico and face similar immigration issues. Both states are proud of their social/cultural traditions and each is somewhat dismissive of the stereotypical image of the other.

In contrast, both states are in drastically different economic situations at the moment. California is a mess with a $40 billion shortfall on a $100 billion budget. Texas is running a surplus. California is losing jobs while Texas is adding them. California has a total state and local tax burden at $5,028 per capita while the comparable tax burden in Texas is $3,580 per person (10.5% of per capita income in California and 8.4% of per capita income in Texas putting the states as the 6th highest versus the 7th lowest of the 50 states).

I started looking on the internet and there is a lot of discussion devoted to red state versus blue state differences. The gist of it all is that red states tend to be doing better than blue states on a whole host of measures.

Here is an interesting one – red state residents give a higher percentage of their per capita income to charity. Twenty eight of the twenty nine most generous states voted for Bush in 2004 while 17 of the 21 least generous voted for Kerry. Texas ranks 22nd in per capita income but has the 4th highest per capita giving. The numbers are almost the exact opposite in California. It has the 6th highest per capita income but ranks 19th in terms of per capita giving.

If state governments were a for-profit business, everyone would be studying what is going on in Texas and figuring out how to apply it to their states. Texas would be holding seminars and other states would be paying big bucks to come and learn how to do it right.

But just the opposite is happening. At the federal level, we are adopting public policies that are much closer to those in California than those in Texas.

Even worse, federal money is going to be spent to bail out the failing blue states. It’s a kind of weird co-dependency where the responsible adults keep coming to the rescue of the irresponsible teenagers. It is the exact opposite of what the founders envisioned.

(By the way, is the Obama administration going to advocate all kinds of conditions on the receipt of “bailout” money by these economically troubled states like he is proposing for private businesses that receives federal money? If he wants to limit CEO pay in the private sector to 10% of what is typical, should all governors and state legislators be required to reduce their pay to 10% of normal? Shouldn’t these states be required to follow more productive policies like drilling for oil off the coast of California instead of expecting other states to pay for their high-brow environmental tastes?)

When I have a chance to read more on the red state/blue state issue, I’m sure that there will be layers of complexity and people will argue that the differences between blue and red states are due to all sorts of factors unrelated to political philosophy. Feel free to weigh in if you know of some of these kinds of issues.

In the meantime and for reasons cited above, I’m not a big fan of the various stimulus bills and bailouts. I think it is just going to enable the irresponsible states to continue their irresponsibility. Instead of learning from successful states, we are going to reward the unsuccessful ones. It’s all backwards and the solution to just about every problem I can think of is to do the exact opposite of what we are doing. It’s time to start seeing red and avoiding the blues.