For God So Loved the World

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A third of a century after White’s fundamental essay, Christian environmentalists are still dealing with the fallout. 'In deep green environmental cultures, White’s thesis has been widely accepted,' says Bron Taylor, a professor of religion and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. 'It’s only recently come under question, precisely because of the emergence of this new Christian-environmental activism.'

Pope John Paul II, who had seen firsthand the environmental ruination of Eastern Europe, broke the Roman Catholic Church’s long silence on environmentalism with a resounding call to heal the earth in his 1990 World Day of Peace message, 'The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility.'

'Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment,' the pontiff declared, 'people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past.' Look at what happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he said: They destroyed the existing harmony by choosing to sin.

The next few years saw a flurry of activity among Christians of all stripes. Tony Campolo, a leading progressive evangelical who would later work on Bill Clinton’s post-Monica atonement team, chastened his fellow Christians in a controversial book whose title addressed evangelical envirophobia: How to Rescue the Earth Without Worshipping Nature. 'We ‘Bible-believing, born-again, Spirit-filled Christians’ more than any others seem to have turned deaf ears to the pleas to save God’s creation,' he wrote.

Nobody better embodied the new envirofriendly Christianity than Bartholomew I, who became spiritual leader of the world’s 300 million Orthodox Christians in 1991. Bartholomew has established so many environmental programs that he’s known as 'the green patriarch.' At the conference at which Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope apologized for ignoring the religious world, Bartholomew made a public statement that might have been unimaginable a decade earlier. 'To commit a crime against the natural world,' he declared, 'is a sin.'

Of God and Man and the Columbia River

Looming over the political debate is one simple question: What is humanity’s place in the universe, anyway? Deep ecology, a concept that first took hold among radical environmentalists in the 1970s and has since been adopted by many mainstream greens, holds that humans are merely one among millions of species sharing the earth—and to some, a particularly toxic one. But according to Genesis, God fashioned our species alone in his image.

Bishop William Skylstad of the Roman Catholic diocese of Spokane, who chaired the steering committee that prepared a pastoral letter on the state of the Columbia River, recognizes the conflict. 'That all has to be balanced out,' he says. 'God gives us creation to support ourselves, but we also need to be wise stewards and look at the sustainability of the creation about us.'

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