Death of Environmentalism (Creation Care Edition)
by Lowell Bliss,
Director, Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership,
This is a reprint of a paper presented at meeting of American Scientific Affiliation at the University of Toronto Mississauga, 30 July 2023
I first met Katharine Hayhoe—IPCC climatologist and University of Toronto alum!— at the Urbana student missions conference in 2009. Urbana is a conference held every three years during the Christmas break that in its hey-day drew over 20,000 students from across the US and Canada. I last saw Katharine at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt last November and I told her, “Hey, they invited me back to Urbana after a decade and they want me to speak on the exact same subject I spoke on ten years ago.”
“Don’t do it, Lowell!” she said, “The world’s changed. You’ve changed. Students have changed. For one thing, they all know the science now.”
I went back to Urbana looking for signs of how the evangelical creation care movement has evolved, at least over the last decade. There was little about creation care in the plenary sessions and only five creation care breakout seminars. In one of the talks, the presenter started with “the biblical basis for creation care,” slides where she could read from Genesis 1, 2, and 3, Colossians 1. Those were the exact same slides that I heard Ed Brown and Ben Lowe, myself for that matter, use back at Urbana 2009. Nothing wrong with repetition, but back then those verses felt like conferring biblical legitimacy on those Christian students, many of them in the sciences, who had a yearning to come out as environmentalists. Or it felt like evangelism. Or it felt like milk to the movement. At Urbana 2022, where was the discipleship? Where was a deeper dive into Scripture for the sustenance we need now that the global outlook appears more despairing? When the presenter quoted Psalms 24:1—“the Earth is the Lord’s and all that it contains”—to tell you the truth, it sounded to me like the Land Acknowledgement that we read every Sunday morning at my parish: “we live on the traditional territory of. . . God, I suppose,” but how have we grown in our capacity for environmental truth and for ecological reconciliation?
In another presentation, they played a YouTube video about “What is Environmental Engineering?” in which the narrator claims the profession “boils down to three main things.”[1] The third thing is “Improving the overall quality of the world around us.” Sounds good. But #1 was “protecting people from the environment” and #2 “Protecting the environment from people.“ Why would we continue to perpetuate a distancing framework between people and the environment, and then why characterize it, in the mission of God, as something inherently conflictual?
In 2004, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus famously presented a paper entitled “The Death of Environmentalism.” “Over the last 15 years,” they wrote, “environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combatting global warming. We have strikingly little to show for it.” They conclude, “What the environmental movement needs more than anything else right now is to take a collective step back to rethink everything. We will never be able to turn things around as long as we understand our failures as essentially tactical, and make proposals that are essentially technical.”[2]
My paper today takes its title from their title but it is the “Creation Care Edition,” or more specifically a collective step back to rethink the evangelical creation care movement particularly in North America. It’s been 17 years since the Evangelical Climate Initiative, or nine years since the Lausanne WEA Canada/US Consultation on Creation Care at Gordon College. ASA has been there from the beginning, and I fear that I will offend someone by failing to mention a particular success over the last twenty years. I certainly intend to sidestep offense by not referring to the “Death of Creation Care-ism,” but I will employ a more urgent metaphor: the root-boundedness of the evangelical creation care movement. On one hand, a house plant that has grown enough to become root bound is a house plant that has been faithfully and lovingly attended. At that moment right before root-boundedness, it is a successful plant, but root-boundedness is a pathology, and the only solution is for the horticulturalist to turn his or her attention away from the plant, if only for a season, to the container. For the sake of this paper I’ll mention only three capacities that, in my experience, evangelicalism has denied the creation care plant over the last two decades, namely: 1) a capacity for integration with the environmental justice movement, 2) a capacity to confront Christian nationalism and political conflation, and 3) a capacity to evolve that next step theologically: we abandoned Dominionism for the concept of faithful “stewardship”—thank God for Francis Schaeffer and Cal DeWitt—but now we need to develop a new, but biblical, anthropology of our creatureliness and interconnectedness.
What I mean by “capacity” is: they didn’t let us go there. Evangelicalism didn’t let us go there.
The immediate impetus for this critique is the COP28 climate summit scheduled for Dubai in December of this year. This year, the big item on the agenda is the first Global Stocktake. The parties to the Paris Agreement are going to “take stock” of how much progress they have made, aggregately, on reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases, how much progress they have made toward the Paris targets of preventing no more than a 2.0°C warming, or ideally a 1.5°C one. If the Global Stocktake is conducted with any degree of honesty, accuracy, and transparency, the COP will have to admit that in 2022—seven years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement--greenhouse gas emissions reached a record high, as did ocean temperatures. 2022 proved that the emissions did not peak during the pandemic, as we had hoped the data was showing.[3] It is a mind-blowing thing to talk, as we did in just this month, about the “hottest single day in recorded human history!”
I will be in Dubai at COP28, Lord willing, as the co-director of the Christian Climate Observers Program, an annual partnership of evangelical creation care organizations that brings “emerging leaders from under-mobilized constituencies” to the climate summits as credentialled observers for an immersive and discipled experience. My main function during the Program is teacher and discipler. Every morning I conduct the debriefs and the devotionals. I always reserve the Tuesday and the Thursday sessions to issues related uniquely to that particular COP. For example, at last year’s COP27, the topic was Climate Loss & Damage, and I had the challenging chore of shepherding the participants through an understanding that Loss & Damage is NOT the same thing as climate finance, moving money from developed nations to developing ones for the sake of climate mitigation and adaptation. No, Loss & Damage is straight-up reparations, paying money back for past harms and past irresponsibilities. If an American Christian isn’t willing to discuss reparations for slavery, if a Canadian Christian isn’t willing to discuss reparations for residential schools, it would be—in my opinion, as a Christian discipler—“morally dangerous” to take up a sign and shout out “What do we want? Climate Justice? When do we want it? Now!”
My sense is that the great temptation for North American evangelical Christians at COP28 will involve the global stocktake, if we are quick to challenge others but fail to critique ourselves: what’s working, what isn’t, where we’ve grown, where we haven’t, what new “denialisms” are we ourselves perhaps indulging.
In 2017, in a paper entitled “The Greening of Christianity? [Question Mark] A Study of Environmental Attitudes Over Time," a University of Indiana researcher concluded from 20 years of Gallup Polling, that the needle had hardly moved at all on concern for the environment among evangelical Christians.[4] The news story that announced the study includes this comment: “The current lack of enthusiasm comes despite high-profile calls for action such as the encyclical letter on the environment released by Pope Francis in 2015 and despite initiatives led by Evangelical Protestant groups, such as the formation of the Evangelical Environmental Network.”[5]
I remember when I floated that paper in an e-mail group of my colleagues. One of the first responses was from a well-known Christian activist in the UK who claimed: “That’s not true of what’s happening globally!” I reassured him that indeed, this was an American study, but even among global evangelicals, it’s been a decade of lamenting the overwhelming evangelical support for such planetary ravagers as Bolsonaro of Brazil or Scott Morrison of Australia. When Katharine Hayhoe weighed in on the Indiana University study she said, to the effect of, “If they knew how much well-funded and organized opposition we’ve had to overcome, they would know that ‘breaking even’ is quite the victory.” And it is. But we are left with the fact that “breaking even” on our mobilization of our fellow humans, evangelical or otherwise, means nothing to an atmosphere that was most recently measured at 421 ppm of CO2.
Author Victoria Loorz attended some of those early creation care meetings at Au Sable. When I think about the creation care activists I’ve known, say those at the Gordon Conference in 2015, and if I bless the memory of Peter Illyn and Chuck Redfern, dear brothers whom we lost to cancer, I can’t help but affirm what Loorz writes,
Burnout is almost built into activism. The sheer amount of energy and time and money needed to pull off each campaign is incredible. We choose a particular instrumental change from the millions that need to happen, create a strategy, design the campaign, identify the enemy, come up with an easy-enough ask, raise the money, show up for interviews, write blogs, shoot more videos, shout more loudly, and measure success by the number of new names in our database and followers on social media. Because, really, can we measure our success by an aggregate CO2decline? No. That’s too discouraging. Even with all that the movement has accomplished, the CO2 imbalance keeps increasing. So we stay focused on the goals before us, measuring success by metrics that don’t matter.[6]
There’s been some recent studies among young evangelicals, studies and surveys from our friend Ben Lowe (et.al.)[7] and just last April from A Rocha Canada and Tearfund.[8] Ben believes his findings “suggest that a generational 'greening' of American evangelicals may indeed be taking place, potentially along with some decoupling of climate attitudes from political identity.” I’ve got two thoughts here. The first is the joke about the despairing pastor discussing his congregation with another pastor and declaring, “I believe we are just a couple funerals away from a revival.” The second thought is to recognize, as the researchers themselves caution, that their “young evangelicals,” in order to get a sample size above the available 26, are those undergraduate students who, as of 2021, are still identifying as evangelical and still choosing to enroll at “evangelically aligned Christian universities.” I’ll let others examine their methodology; my point is that any global stocktake that claims a generational ‘greening of,’ must also account for generational ‘abandoning of.’ And so anecdotally, I think of the intern I brought with me to the Gordon creation care conference and to COP21 in Paris. Biology student from Kansas State University. Grew up with my kids at an Evangelical Free church in Manhattan, KS. The day after the Trump election in 2016, she and her fiancé were sitting on the couch in our living room, weeping. “I just wish we could go back to Paris,” she said. Honestly now with her, I don’t know what she thinks about Jesus, but I know she doesn’t care a lick for the church. For that matter, she’s no longer working in academia or the sciences.
If you want to argue against my assessment about which metrics matter, and how the evangelical creation care movement matches up against them, I’ll let you win. I’m too grieved to do otherwise. Besides, two months into the pandemic, I felt like I landed on a helpful and hopeful metaphor. What if we’ve been more successful than it feels? What if the evangelical creation care movement has successfully mobilized everyone that God gave them, everyone that had the capacity to be mobilized. Certainly, we’ve been a hard-working faithful bunch and let’s give a special shout-out to the Lausanne WEA Creation Care Network and their successful completion of a ten-year campaign of regional consultations. (Good job Ed, Dave, Chris, and Toronto’s own, Jasmine Kwong!) But what if we’ve maxxed out our capacity? What if we’ve become root-bound?
I tried to frontload much in my introduction. My main points are:
1) We need to do our own global stocktake as a creation care movement, and not just advocate for an honest global stocktake among the Paris Agreement parties, nor just lament about the obvious obstructionism of MAGA Christianity.
2) I argue for the metaphor of root-boundedness because I believe it
a. rightly honours what has been successful for us in the last twenty years; and;
b. it suggests a way forward for growth that has been stymied: address the container, not the plant; provide something more capacious and healthy.
I also gave three examples of where creation care advocates could start in cracking open the evangelical container. I lack time to develop them here, except briefly. First, we’ve been largely incurious about environmental justice. We landed on what really did seem like a perfect term: “creation care.” “Those who believe God created the earth should be first in line to take care of it,” our old friend Fred Gluck used to say. But then we were surprised when we couldn’t recruit People of Color to attend our creation care conferences. They all seemed to gravitate around this term “environmental justice.” Talking about climate change was hard enough in our churches, but to do so from a justice frame felt like a non-starter especially when the likes of John MacArthur was publishing his screed, Social Justice and the Gospel. We were being strategic, we thought, in messaging about “providing green jobs” or “creation care is a pro-life issue.” But what if a call to justice was the very thing, maybe even the only thing, that the Holy Spirit was ready to empower? I’m burned-out over trying to provide a creation care annotation to the Republican Party platform, especially when they didn’t bother to produce one in 2020.
A second constriction of the evangelical container for the creation care plant is Christian nationalism. Elections have consequences. For the Paris Agreement, for the planet, for evangelical mobilization, the election of Donald Trump had consequences. The research of Baylor University’s Perry and Whitehead revealed that 78 percent of white American evangelicals are either Christian nationalist ambassadors or accommodators with plenty of election data to show that they are reliable Republican voters.[9] I do believe the French delegation at the climate summits were relieved by the election of Joe Biden but they seemed disappointed that they had to retire their favorite and most snarky display at the French pavilion: # Make the Planet Great Again. The Paris Agreement is a cooperative, voluntary, goodwill initiative: “America First” makes no more sense there than “China first,” or “Qatar first.” “America First” makes no more sense at a climate summit than it does in Christianity itself.
Instead of confronting Christian nationalism directly, I think we in the creation care movement have often used it as an excuse. When an interviewer asks us about evangelical resistance to creation care, we say that it isn’t all evangelicals: look at evangelical youth or global evangelicals. This allows us to claim that those evangelicals who resist climate action are acting out of their politics more than their faith. “Correlation does not imply causation.” But then we fail to ask whether the same thing might be true of young and global evangelicals who have embraced climate action. What if they are acting more out of their politics, and less out of faith? Mostly we seem incurious to take the step back and ask Why? Is there something in evangelicalism which resulted in such a large percentage of the white American evangelical church being coopted by authoritarian and anti-intellectual movements?
My final example of attention to the container, not the plant, asks us to evolve past thinking that stewardship is the final answer to Dominionism. We need to stop fighting the battle against Lynn White, Jr. That’s so 1967! Admittedly, it is a more gracious thing to be a loving steward than a harsh tyrant, but to be a steward is to have a role, not possess an essence; to live in a hierarchy, not in a membership; to be tied by the hip, in a dualistic Platonic sense, closer to the Creator than to creatures. Even Wendell Berry in his last book, who devotes a few pages to Genesis 1:28 and the Chain of Being, prefers that we start thinking in terms of neighborliness with non-human species and the eco-sphere.
I’ll never forget listening to Jay Matenga, Maori from New Zealand, a trained theologian, giving a creation care talk to a group of evangelicals in June 2021. He dropped phrases like “matter infused with some form of life force” and “a deep sense of an indigenous connection to nature,” but at one point, he had to stop and say: “Now this is sounding very new agey and I’m coming from a fairly conservative and evangelical background and theology, and I’ve had to wrestle with this.”
It was only in the last 36 seconds of his talk, that this Fuller-trained theologian, this WEA official finally came out and said: “But what I’m saying is: Animism. . . by relegating a spiritually-infused materialism to that of pagan, low grade religion, so that it’s just all primitive, has hampered our ability to contextualize or indigenize the Gospel in such a way that it can be, not only accepted, but developed like a seedling in new soil in wonderful ways, where the grace of God is able to be experienced in ways we couldn’t dream or imagine.”
[1] “Preventing Flint - Environmental Engineering: Crash Course Engineering #29” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHUO6PrsOzg&list=RDLVuHUO6PrsOzg&start_radio=1&t=490s
[2] Shellenberger, Michael and Ted Nordhaus (2004) “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-environmental World”, Environmental Grantmakers Association https://grist.org/article/doe-reprint/
[3] Osaka, Shannon (2022) “Scientists thought carbon emissions had peaked. They’ve never been higher.” Washington Post, December 5, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/12/05/carbon-emissions-peak-record-2022/
[4] David M. Konisky (2018) The greening of Christianity? A study of environmental attitudes over time, Environmental Politics, 27:2, 267-291, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2017.1416903
[5] “IU researcher says survey results show Christians becoming less concerned about the environment” (2018). News at IU. January 23. 2108. https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24591-iu-researcher-says-survey-results-show-christians
[6] Victoria Loorz (2022) Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred Minneapolis: Broadleaf, 45.
[7] Benjamin S. Lowe, et. al. (2022) “The generational divide over climate change among American evangelicals” Ennvironmental Research Letters, 17:114020
[8] Tearfund and A Rocha Canada (2023) For All the Earth, https://arocha.ca/portfolio-items/creation-care-survey-2/
[9] Whitehead, Andrew L., Perry, Samuel L.. (2022). Taking America Back for God (p. iii). Oxford University Press.