Why Are Christians Reluctant to Participate in and Support Environmentalism?

The destiny of America’s wildernesses—as well as the health and sustainability of our air, water, and soil—has been embroiled in controversy and legal battles for nearly a half century. Past battles have resulted in some notable victories and some heartbreaking failures. I believe a powerful voice has been missing in this battle, one that could have a dramatic influence on the fate of America’s remaining wild lands and on the health and sustainability of our natural environments and resources. What’s been missing is God’s perspective on nature and His decree that the human family be His stewards over creation. To put it more specifically, what’s been missing is the Christian church.

The Bible reveals that God permits the human race to use nature for our own purposes, but with the understanding that all creation belongs to Him and people are His caretakers. People do not have carte blanche to use nature for their own consumption without any regard for the environment and wild creatures. Sadly, even though this truth is clearly taught in Scriptures, Christians have generally been reluctant to get involved in confronting environmental issues. Consequently, it was secular activists, educators, and organizations that alerted the country to environmental degradation and became the vanguard of the environmental movement that emerged in the mid-1960s.

In terms of stemming the tide of environmental and ecological degradation, was this movement—propelled largely by secular environmentalists—a success or failure? And if a failure, why? Would the environmental movement have been more successful if embraced by the Christian community? I’ll begin to answer this question in this article.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in environmentalism within Christendom. Sadly, however, many evangelicals have been reluctant to embrace it. The primary reason is that many evangelicals, and other conservatives, see environmentalism as political and ideological in nature and/or an endorsement of pagan nature religions. However, I would add that there is another reason for the lack of Christian involvement in ecological and environmental issues. Environmental stewardship does not jump out of the pages of Scripture, as do other social concerns. The New Testament in particular focuses primarily on spiritual and moral issues: the person and work of Jesus Christ, struggles with sin and temptation, how to be reconciled to God, church and family relationships, and moral issues. As a result, many Christians have historically failed to recognize the host of verses and passages woven throughout the Bible, especially in the Old Testament (which is part of Christian Scriptures) that have a strong ecological and environmental emphasis.

This has been the case with other major social issues in church history. Past generations of Christians (and society at large) often failed to recognize or acknowledge other social problems that later burdened the conscience of the church, such as slavery, the horrid conditions under which children often worked, and prohibiting women from voting. In the same way, harmful exploitation was seldom a concern in ancient cultures. This is understandable. The world’s population was small and mankind’s ability to plunder or destroy nature was limited by primitive technologies. So we shouldn’t be surprised that environmental ethics and stewardship were not on the church’s agenda until recently. Environmental exploitation and the deterioration of nature were not recognized as a problem until the mid-twentieth century—just as slavery and child labor practices were not recognized as unbiblical until the nineteenth century.

What is regrettable is that as the seriousness of the environmental crisis became widely acknowledged, more Christians did not get involved in the environmental movement. God instructed the human race to be His stewards over nature, and the Bible reveals moral principles on which to develop environmental ethics and guidelines for environmental stewardship. The church should have been the vanguard of the environment movement.

Be that as it may, the church failed to develop an environmental ethos because it never developed a theology of nature leading to a precise environmental doctrine. We’ll look at the primary reason for this in future articles. The point for now is that, as a secular phenomenon, the modern environmental movement was unsuccessful in terms of establishing environmental ethics in popular culture. Nor, by the way, were such ethics established through the passage of environmental laws. Without an ethical base, the environmental movement was unable to sustain the momentum it had in the 1970s and early 1980s, especially for a new generation of mostly indoor people.

Would an environmental movement within the Christian community have had more successful than the secular environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s? If God-centered, I believe it would. In later articles, I’ll build a case for Bible-based environmental ethics and stewardship and suggest practical guidelines for implementing both in the Christianity community. I’ll also give suggestions on how the church—and individual Christians—can become godly advocates and participants in ecological activities. But first, several preliminary issues must be examined. The first is the assumption that Christianity as a world and a life view is the “root” cause of the Earth’s environmental and ecological problems. This will be the topic of my next article. ©

*   The blog articles in this series are adapted from my book Should Christians Be Environmentalists?, published by Kregel Publications in 2012. The blog articles do not contain all the chapters, data, quotes, references, or my personal experiences, which the book includes. So, for “the rest of the story” you will need to purchase the book, which is available in both paperback and Kindle. This and the following articles are copyrighted material and may not be reproduced in book or article form. But feel free to send links to these articles to your personal email list, Facebook friends and groups, Twitter followers, or other people who may enjoy them. I encourage interested reader to subscribe to my blog or request to be added to my personal email list. This will ensure that you receive notices whenever I post a new blog article or other ministry related materials.