For God So Loved the World

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As a pioneer ecoproselytizer, Illyn must keep his biblical bona fides on constant display, lest his listeners dismiss him as the devil in disguise. In evangelical circles, environmentalism still carries the taint of loose-moral liberalism. There’s a suspicion that Illyn’s message could be the thin end of the wedge: tree-hugging today, gay marriage tomorrow. Lions may one day lie down with lambs, but can the beef-eating, pro-life, Jesus-is-Lord soul savers lie down with the tofu-frying, pro-choice, proudly pagan flower children long enough to save the earth?

Illyn believes that evangelical Christians will accept environmentalism as they’ve come to accept racial equality. 'Thirty years ago people were openly justifying their bigotry,' he says. 'Fifteen years ago there was silent bigotry. Now, these younger Christians find tremendous value in racial diversity. Ten years from now we’ll look back on the issue of environmental stewardship and go, ‘Why was there even a question?’ '

Environmental Destruction Is a Way to Beat Paganism

'During the 1980s,' says the NRPE’s Paul Gorman, 'the environmental movement didn’t show a lot of concern for issues of racism, economic justice, inadequate health care, stuff that our people [in the faith community] know about, because we run hospitals, we have people in poor neighborhoods. It was more about wetlands, wilderness, life, and less about poor children and the distribution of resources. And information about the issue came from the scientific community, with which we hadn’t been engaged.'

Yet perhaps for good reason. Christianity and Judaism have had serious problems with the natural world. In his classic 1967 environmental work Wilderness and the American Mind, historian Roderick Nash points out how the Bible often depicts wilderness as an accursed, arid wasteland, an anguished place of banishment. The Judeo-Christian cosmology became the dominant worldview in the West by replacing pagan nature deities with a single He who dwelt above—not in—the things of earth. 'Do not love the world or anything in the world,' commanded the apostle John. 'For the love of the Father cannot be in any man who loves the world.' As Christianity spread across the Western world, wild lands were cast as unholy lands. The forests of medieval Europe harbored the last strongholds of pagans, a.k.a. witches. 'Christians judged their work to be successful when they cleared away the wild forests,' writes Nash, 'and cut down the sacred groves where the pagans held their rites.'

'By destroying pagan animism,' Lynn White Jr. wrote in a famous 1967 essay, 'Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.' The faith of our fathers, White argued, which set man above the beasts and the flowers of the field, also set in motion two millennia of environmental degradation. 'Christianity,' he concluded, 'bears a huge burden of guilt.'

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