Ecoguilt
Forests have been felled and fed to presses to print a host of books in which Christians—Catholic, liberal, mainline, and evangelical—beat their breasts and admit their “ecoguilt.” Many feel guilty for not being in the forefront of the environmental movement, or embarrassed by their theology that places people before animals, or exceedingly uncomfortable because their Scripture authorizes humankind to subdue the Earth.
The more charitable theologians argue that Christianity is not the problem; rather, the faith has been misunderstood through the ages, its doctrines twisted to justify ecological rape. “Though individual Christians may have held [a] bulldozer mentality,” contend the evangelical authors of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (edited by Loren Wilkinson, Eerdmans), “the whole weight of biblical teaching and Christian thought is against it.”
But others, like Lewis Regenstein in Replenish the Earth (Crossroad), believe the problem runs deeper, arguing that “there is little doubt that Christian theology is partly to blame for the churches’ apathy.” Ian Bradley, in God Is Green: Ecology for Christians (Doubleday/Image), goes even further: “Anthropocentric thinking … has made the church in the western world at least one of the prime aiders and abetters of the exploitation and pollution of the earth’s resources.”
Thus, we are witnessing a concerted campaign to make not only individual Christians, but also the church and even God, “green.” Bradley, for one, contends that “the Christian faith is intrinsically Green” and that “Christians have a positive and distinctive contribution to make to the salvation of our threatened planet and the preservation of the natural environment.”
Adding urgency to the efforts of the ecotheologians is precisely this perception that the world is hurtling toward disaster. “A crisis of degradation is enveloping earth,” writes Calvin DeWitt in the collection of essays he edited, The Environment and the Christian: What Can We Learn from the New Testament? (Baker). His position varies little from that of Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, who, writing for a secular audience in Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Houghton Mifflin), describes a host of looming disasters.
Equally uniform are the proffered solutions. First, individuals must become more Earth conscious. Loren and Mary Ruth Wilkinson tell us in Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant) that they want us to buy less, drive less, and use less of almost everything. “Learn how to be comfortable at a lower temperature,” they intone. In Earth Keeping: Making It a Family Habit (Zondervan), Sydney Donahoe provides endless suggestions, including keeping lawn-mower blades sharpened, removing lint from dryer filters, and, of course, using cloth diapers. And everyone says that we must recycle.
Second, the ecotheologians contend that government must act decisively in order to save God’s creation. James Nash, in Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Abingdon), argues that lifestyle changes are not enough, since “the political process is the only place where the rules of relationships for a given society are officially established and where sufficient power might be mustered to match the current scale of the ecological crisis.” And he thinks the church has a duty to involve itself in the policy debate: “Every political issue that affects biospheric welfare is simultaneously a moral and spiritual concern.” The church cannot separate personal regeneration from political activism: “Politics is a critical context for the expression of Christian love.” His list of specific regulations ranges from stricter fuel-economy standards for autos to mandatory reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions to special protection of agricultural land to limits on population growth to energy conservation—and much more.
Muddying The Waters
Critiquing the many proposals for a green Christianity is no easy task. The desire to infuse the doctrine of dominion with a sense of stewardship is positive. Humanity should not wantonly destroy God’s creation, which has value to God as well as to us. Nevertheless, one cannot simply explain away God’s command that we “subdue” the Earth and “rule” over it.
At the same time, some strands of the new ecotheology pose risks, particularly a sacralization of nature that verges on pantheism. Bradley, for example, promotes panentheism, a doctrine of God’s immanence that can easily lead beyond respect and love for creation to idolatry and nonsense. Some environmentalists explicitly worship the Earth (called Gaia), which they consider to be a living creature.
Unique in her willingness to take on the unpopular task of warning Christians about the pantheistic pitfalls of the environmental movement is Berit Kjos. In Under the Spell of Mother Earth (Victor), she views spiritism and Gaia worship, pagan mythmaking and mysticism, witchcraft as ecological spirituality, goddess theology, global oneness, and more. Particularly disturbing are the paganistic “Mother Earth” public-education programs being used to indoctrinate school-children. Although Kjos accepts the conventional wisdom about the severity of environmental problems, she is acutely sensitive to the snares set by the issue for Christians.
Not only is much of the greening of the church theologically flawed, but the hysteria fueling the synthesis of religion and ecology is often either unwarranted or misdirected. We do face some very real environmental problems, but the issues are far more complex than commonly thought.
For instance, the most dramatic models of global warming have never been able to explain past temperature patterns and have been discredited. The threat of acid rain has been shown to be largely false by the government’s own multimillion-dollar NAPAP study. The recent news accounts on increased concentrations of stratospheric ozone-destroying chlorine monoxide ignored the one-time role of last year’s Mount Pinatubo eruption; the amount of chlorine monoxide has since fallen, and no “ozone hole” has opened.
Moreover, the draconian solutions advanced by many environmentalists could create new and even worse problems. Well-intentioned advocates tend to ignore the tradeoffs inherent in all of their proposals.
For instance, the primary way manufacturers improve the gasoline-efficiency of autos is by shrinking them. Thus, government-mandated improvements in fuel efficiency put people into smaller cars that suffer greater damage in accidents: the result is as many as an extra 3,900 traffic deaths for every mile-pergallon improvement per model year of a car. Nor is the much-praised cloth diaper really environmentally friendly. Rather, cloth diapers have to be washed and dried. Human wastes go into the wastewater system. And growing the cotton used to make the diapers likely uses pesticides, fertilizers, and water.
Indeed, recycling, the panacea that is advocated by virtually everyone in the books reviewed, is no bargain: Many jurisdictions spend far more on recycling programs (using extra energy to collect and transport the waste along the way) than they would to compact it and place it in landfills, which seem in short supply because of popular resistance to new facilities, not a shortage of land.
But advancing bad policy prescriptions is a less serious offense than perverting the role of the church. To argue, as does James Nash, that political involvement by the church is an outgrowth of Christian love is to misunderstand both the nature of government and the task of the church. While individual Christians surely have an obligation to participate in the debate over the environmental policies, there is no biblically derived political agenda that should be advanced by churches. Religious leaders should urge their followers to be informed and involved; they should avoid advocating specific policies that may mix bad theology with factual misunderstanding.
All Americans—indeed, all peoples around the world—would benefit from responsible Christian participation in the debate on environmental policy. But the conventional ecological wisdom that seems to be creeping into evangelical as well as mainline churches reflects as much unreasoned guilt as reasoned reflection.
By Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).
Inefficient Prayers
The Awakened Heart,by Gerald H. May (HarperCollins, 208 pp; $16.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Timothy K. Jones.
In a story psychiatrist Gerald May relates in The Awakened Heart, May asked a young woman what she most wanted. She responded immediately that she wanted a happy home and family, and a sense of being worthwhile. “Then,” recounts May, “I asked her to sit in silence for a moment and try to be open to what desires she could really feel.… After a while she looked up with tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t know what to say. What I actually feel is that things are okay right now. Better than okay.’ ” May had her look deeper still, and then asked her what she experienced. She concluded, “I feel really blessed, and I feel gratitude; I want to say thank you to someone. Is it God? If it is, I want to give God a hug and say thanks.”
May, author of the well-regarded Addiction and Grace, contends many people wait to be nudged into a “wakefulness” regarding God’s presence in everyday life. But he wants people to go beyond mere experiences and feelings, so prized by pop psychologists and New Age gurus. “It is healthy and humane to seek a deeper sense of who we are,” writes May. “But the search has become frantic, a maze of blind passages. As I write this, the addiction recovery movement has itself become a major addiction for thousands of people.” He believes that our desire for love—a supreme longing at the core of every life—finds its fulfillment only in the Source of love.
For May, this means encouraging people to identify the habitual ways of thinking that dull our efforts to be “attentive” to God. But May is no harsh prophet. He gives his advice with the gentleness of a kindly uncle. Indeed, this is no primer on the theology of prayer; rather, it is more a book of hints—on making prayer a part of everyday practice, on moving toward what May calls “simple prayer and gentle awareness.”
He realizes that this is a message often discounted or even dismissed in our efficiency-oriented society. Even in his own life, he has fought the temptation so to concentrate on the “how” of life (how to function, “get ahead,” or accomplish tasks) that the “why” gets lost. He speaks of when his children were smaller how “getting to the car pool on time became more important than attending to a small fear of a hurt feeling. Too often the report card—the pre-eminent symbol of childhood efficiency—was more significant than the hopes and fears of the little one who brought it home.”
The same too often happens in the spiritual life, he believes. We become intent on mastering a technique to the exclusion of nurturing a relationship. Prayer should be inspired by love, not by a mistaken drive to “accomplish.”
May finds an exemplar in the seventeenth-century monk Brother Lawrence, author of Practice of the Presence of God, whose work is cited throughout Awakened Heart. “[Brother Lawrence’s] biographers,” May notes, “describe him as a bumbling, clumsy man who had difficulty even taking care of dishes in his monastery’s kitchen … From the perspective of popular psychology, Brother Lawrence was inefficient and dysfunctional. He never quite achieved excellence in personal management. Yet what he gave to the cause of love is too great to be measured.”
Awakened Heart is more than a dose of spiritual encouragement. The final chapter points the reader outward to a world in need. Deep, contemplative prayer, May argues, “may lead to deep trust and faith, but not to uninterrupted peace of mind. It opens us in love to the suffering and brokenness of the world as much as to its joy and beauty.”
Golden Whimsy
The Millionaire and the Scrublady and Other Parables,by William E. Barton, edited by Garth Rosell and Stan Flewelling (Zondervan, 194 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.
Things get lost and forgotten, including slight and graceful creations that give pleasure, though they are of little consequence. Such were the parables of William E. Barton, a Congregational pastor from the early part of this century. The first story, entitled “A Parable of Safed the Sage,” ran in the weekly religious magazine The Advance, which Barton edited. He went on to publish five highly successful collections of amusing, poignant whimsy; they were very well known in his time but have been almost forgotten since. Fortunately, Garth Rosell and Stan Flewelling have resurrected them and produced a volume of the best.
All are written in mock King James English, describing inconsequential events in the lives of Barton and his family—particularly his wife, named Keturah in these parables, and his granddaughter, referred to as the daughter of the daughter of Keturah. All parables end with a fanciful but thoughtful moral. This kind of writing usually comes out syrupy or contrived, so that reading one example is amusing but five is sickening. Not so with Barton. You can take a lot of these and wish for more. They would be best, I think, read aloud at the kitchen table, or over a long car trip, or on the front porch on the evening of a hot summer’s day.
The Bath Tub At The Inn
An excerpt
“Now it came to pass as I journeyed that I lighted on a certain place where there was an Inn, and I entered and Lodged there. And in the Inn was a Bath Tub, and but one; and every Saturday night each Guest did bathe himself or herself therein. And I beheld them as they Furtively Hastened through the halls, clad in Bathrobes or in something less, and they were not Naked, yet did they hasten as if ashamed.
And in time it came about that I Obtained Entrance into the Bath Room, just as Another man was Leaving it. And he wore a Ragged Bathrobe, and a Smile that said, Behold, I am clean.
And I entered, and the Water still was Running from the Tub, and Gurgling as it ran.
And I looked within the Tub, and behold, there was on the inside of it a Ridge, which marked the Level of the Water at the time the last Occupant had been within. And I liked it not.
Then I communed with my soul, and my soul said to me, Doest thou well to be Wroth with the man who last Bathed? Behold the Ridge around the tub. Is it not evidence that he hath had a bath? Yea, doth it not show that he needed one? Yea, furthermore, doth it not prove that the bath hath Wrought Well from him, and that by the Measure of whatever thou seest on the Sides of the tub, and what hath run down the pipe, the man is Cleaner than when he entered? Lovest thou not truth, and the evidence thereof? And is not Cleanliness a Virtue wherein thou shouldst Rejoice?
And I said, Yea, I rejoice in the Truth, but the Evidence giveth me no Pleasure; and I Love Virtue, and Cleanliness is a virtue, yet I would that he had given me other proof of his Cleanliness, or given me none at all.
Then I considered within myself and I meditated thus. Behold, there are many who practice their virtues in such form that they make virtue unlovely. Yea, there be those who serve the Lord as if the devil were in them.”
