Introduction to:  Should Christians Be Environmentalists?

I rushed into young adulthood during the turbulent years of the 1960s. I remember it well. On November 22, 1963, my first year in college, I was cutting classes with two buddies to escape to the mountains when we heard on the car radio that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. A few years later, in 1968, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were also assassinated. The Vietnam War became enormously unpopular in the late 1960s, and student protests erupted on university campuses. Race riots rocked American society. The 60s spawned the “flower children” in Height-Ashbury, San Francisco, the countercultural music at Woodstock in New York State (1969), and a burgeoning drug culture that threatened to hemorrhage the moral values of America’s youth. Thousands of disillusioned young people became hippie dropouts.

Historians report that no society in the history of the human race has changed as dramatically or as quickly as American culture during the last decades of the twentieth century. It all evolved out of the sociological upheavals of 1960s. Within a mere forty years, American society shifted from a largely Christian world-and-life view to a secular worldview.

April 22, 1970—barely into a new decade—marked another event that arose out of the 1960s: the first “Earth Day.” Twenty million Americans assembled across two thousand colleges and universities, thousands of primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of local communities to create a grass roots groundswell for an environmental movement unprecedented in its scope and enthusiasm. A new awareness of the interrelatedness of all life—plants, animals, and humans—and the deterioration of our air, water, land, and natural resources galvanized America’s youth. And I discovered my calling.

Unlike my brother, who lived part of the 1960s in a commune on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, I didn’t become a hippie. I didn’t protest the Vietnam War. I didn’t get into drugs. My wife didn’t wear flowers in her hair (although she put flower decals on the body of our 1966 Datsun station wagon). But I did plunge into the environmental movement of the 1970s with all the passion and zeal of youth. My wife and I joined the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation. We backpacked, photographed wildlife, and supported environmental causes. We volunteered at a wildlife rescue center. I published more than thirty wildlife and nature related articles in magazines and other periodicals. My music of choice was John Denver. I was energized and inspired by “Rocky Mountain High,” “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” and “Blow Up Your TV.” I spent countless hours listening to Denver’s music in my study and on the tape player in my car. We lived in Southern Californian but craved to live in wild country. I seriously considered quitting my job and moving my family to the outskirts of Zion National Park. My wife was all for it. In short, as a non-Christian, nature was my life.

This changed dramatically in 1981 when I became a Christian. My love for nature was quickly overshadowed by my love for the Creator. It was not that my love and enthusiasm for nature diminished—it was just no longer the center of my life. In fact, my thesis for a master’s degree in Christian apologetics was a 330-page tome entitled Environmental Stewardship: A Biblical Approach to Environmental Ethics. After graduating in 1988, however, my focus in writing changed. Instead of nature themes, I took up the case for Jesus Christ and began to write books and teach classes on how to defend the Christian faith.

During the ensuing years, I periodically yearned to resume writing about nature, wildlife, and the environment. I envisioned that a book on a subject like “Encountering God in the Wilderness” or “Is God an Environmentalist?” would be a great apologetic point of contact with secular nature lovers and environmentalists. But the time never seemed right to begin such a project. Nor could I imagine such a book having broad appeal in the Christians community, which historically has shown little interest in environmental matters and have often opposed environmental activism.

In recent years, however, there has been a growing concern over environmental issues within Christendom, including among evangelicals. In part, this is because diverse political and scientific views on climate change (global warming) have spawned much confusion and misinformation, intensifying environmental debates and adding to the hostility that already existed between conservatives and left-leaning environmentalists.

This, however, is not a book detailing environmental issues; nor is it a doomsayer’s appraisal of potential environmental catastrophes. Enough is already being written on those topics. Rather, the primary purpose of this book is to encourage godly environmental stewardship by systematically developing a Bible-based theology of nature, including an environmental doctrine and guidelines for environmental ethics. What does an environmental doctrine reveal? Among other things, it reveals that the Bible instructs the human race to be God’s caretakers over creation. It provides moral principles that can guide mankind’s activities in nature so that people utilize the earth’s resources without exploiting the land and its wild inhabitants.

A second purpose of Should Christians Be Environmentalists? is to present an apologetic response to anti-Christian environmentalists who claim that Christianity is the “root cause” of environmental exploitation and degradation, and that other religious traditions are better suited morally and theologically to push for environmental stewardship.

In answer to these and other challenges, we’ll discover that every culture, regardless of religious beliefs, has exploited and despoiled its natural environment. We’ll establish that God directed the entire human race to be His caretakers—His stewards—over nature. He didn’t give mankind carte blanche to use nature with no concern for the land and other life forms. I’ll demonstrate that Christianity, more than any other worldview—secular or religious—is equipped to implement and institutionalize worldwide environmental ethics. The book includes strategies for how the church can engage corporately in proactive environmental stewardship activities and how individual Christians can put into practice sensible measures that will contribute solutions to local environmental problems. We’ll also explore the potential evangelistic opportunities embedded in Christian environmentalism.

Let me comment further on this last topic; it’s another purpose of this book.

Evangelistic and apologetic techniques that were effective thirty years ago, such as rational arguments and historical evidences for the Christian faith, are not as effective in the twenty-first century. In particular, people under the age of thirty have been conditioned by postmodern relativism to reject moral absolutes and to be skeptical of all religious truth claims. Accordingly, Christian evangelists and apologists are urgently seeking relevant “points of contact”—areas of common concern to both Christians and non-Christians—that can be starting points for conversations, often leading to opportunities for sharing the gospel message. I’m convinced that Christian environmentalism can be a tremendously effectively point of contact with this generation, especially among college students and other young people.

I conclude the book with a special word to non-Christian readers. I share more about my journey from a zealous non-Christian environmental advocate to an even more zealous Christian environmentalist, and the impact this journey had on my life. My story can become the reader’s story. ©

Should Christians Be Environmentalists? (Kregel Publications) is available in both paperback and Kindle.