An Evangelical Backlash Against Environmentalism

Over the last decade, many evangelical Christians have embraced the doctrine called creation care, which uses a scriptural basis to promote good stewardship of the earth and its resources. For these believers, problems like climate change threaten to greatly intensify third-world poverty, making actions to reduce global warming emissions an urgent Christian issue.

“We are convinced that evangelicals must engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity’s responsibility to address it,” hundreds of evangelical leaders declared in a 2006 statement on climate change.

But while a growing number of local and national nonprofit groups have formed to spread the “creation care” message, an increasingly fierce backlash against the mingling of Christianity and environmentalism has emerged from other quarters of the evangelical movement.

Leading the Christian counterargument on the environment is the Cornwall Alliance, an evangelical nonprofit that strenuously opposes action on climate change and describes the environmental movement as a “false religion” that Christians must avoid at all costs.

This December, the group released a 12-part educational video series, “Resisting the Green Dragon,” warning Christians that radical environmentalism “is striving to put America, and the world, under its destructive control ...

Polls taken in America show that as many as 70 percent identify themselves with Christianity. Merely belonging to a church or having had some kind of vague salvation experience doesn’t mean someone is obeying Christ, and following him. It also doesn’t mean they are destined to residency in the Kingdom of Heaven, and I would contend that those who denigrate the culture of the Church with pop culture probably wouldn’t want to live in the Kingdom of Heaven. Christianity is to them a matter of blending and a license for immorality, divorce, abortion, pornography, paganism, political correctness, tolerance and fitting into the world. It is very difficult to see the evil in the world while trying so very hard to belong to it.

I guess to simplify what I meant in my first response I will say that I consider Christians to be those who are making every attempt to follow Jesus Christ in their personal and public lives. That requires accepting basic truths scripture gives us about who and what we should be and who and what we shouldn’t be. Politics doesn’t have to be any part of that, but if so, then the politics have to agree with the basic principles God has given us through scripture. I’m not looking to create a dominion for God through conservative politics, nor do I want to live in a godless dominion created by liberals.

If I’m confusing the issue, I apologize. I’ve got the hired help out on a project that needs my attention, and my scatterbrain is distracted.

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