God's Wounded World

American Evangelicals and the Challenge of Environmentalism

Melanie Gish

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781481311755
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia del cristianesimo

Although evangelicals and environmentalists at large still find themselves on opposing sides of an increasingly contentious issue, there is a counternarrative that has received less attention. Since the late 1970s, evangelical creation care advocates have worked relentlessly both to find a common cause with environmentalists and to convince fellow evangelicals to engage in environmental debate and action.

In God's Wounded World, Melanie Gish analyzes the evolution of evangelical environmental advocacy in the United States. Drawing on qualitative interviews, organizational documents, and other texts, her interdisciplinary approach focuses on the work of evangelical environmental organizations and the motivations of the individuals who created them. Gish contrasts creation care with mainstream environmentalism on the one side, and organized evangelical environmental skepticism on the other. The religiopolitical space evangelical environmental leaders have established "in-between but still within" is carefully explored, with close attention to the larger historical context as well as to creation care's political opportunities and intraevangelical challenges.

The nuanced portrait that emerges defies simple distinctions.Not only are creation care leaders wrestling with questions of environmental degradation and engagement, they also must grapple with what it means to be evangelical and live faithfully in both present-day America and the global community. As Gish reveals, creation care advocates' answers to these questions place moral responsibility and cultural mediation above ideology and dogmatic certainty. Such a posture risks political irrelevance in our hyperpartisan and combative political culture, but if it succeeds it could transform the creation care movement into a powerful advocate fora more accommodating and holistically oriented Evangelicalism.

1

Evangelicalism and Environmentalism

A Contextualizing Overview

The current U.S. environmental movement is a confusing patchwork of overlapping discourses and organizations that, over 150 years, have developed into communities with disparate goals, issue focuses, and organizational structures. Despite attempts by conservationists and reform environmentalists, no master frame has emerged that can unite all these factions into a cohesive political movement.

Robert J. Brulle1

We are troubled by the fact that the confusions and corruptions surrounding the term Evangelical have grown so deep that the character of what it means has been obscured and its importance lost. Many people outside the movement now doubt that Evangelical is ever positive, and many inside now wonder whether the term any longer serves a useful purpose.

“An Evangelical Manifesto”2

Environmentalism has been called “the most significant social movement in America.” Likewise, Evangelicalism passes as the most socially important religious movement in America. Within their larger historical contexts in the United States, both Evangelicalism and environmentalism have been predominantly white and predominantly shaped by men rather than women. Both share a transnational orientation; environmentalism because ecological problems do not stop at national borders, Evangelicalism because the saving of souls is an equally global endeavor. While environmentalism has been compared to a religion, Evangelicalism has been criticized for its overt politicization over the past forty years.3

Despite a generally prevalent tendency to view both of them as universal or unified phenomena, American Evangelicalism and environmentalism are both internally diverse and fluid in terms of doctrine and ideology. As the quotes cited above underscore, there is an element of “confusion” in both the definitions of what it means to be evangelical and in what it means to be an environmentalist. In addition, both movements have long and complex histories that cannot be unrolled by quick pulls on single skeins, much less woven together seamlessly as one singular tale. Although there are points of contact and convergence before the rise of a few pronounced evangelical environmental organizations late in the twentieth and early in the twenty-first centuries, the longer part of environmental thinking and acting in the United States has not seen much explicitly expressed overlap with evangelical Christianity. If anything, philosophical disagreement and ideological clashes have become the norm after the emergence of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and evangelicals’ intense politicization in the opposite direction since the late 1970s. Hence there is the need to outline some of the major developments in the histories of both Evangelicalism and environmentalism up until the 1980s within a contextualizing frame in order to establish the necessary background for the later chapters.

Evangelicalism and Environmentalism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Evangelical Christians have played a crucial role in shaping American culture and politics since the early eighteenth century, when “the three P’s” within Protestantism (i.e., Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, Continental Pietism, and New England Puritanism) came together, and believers started to discover a “true religion of the heart” during the First Great Awakening. This religious revival movement—yielding between twenty-five thousand and fifty thousand converts in New England in the years 1740–1742 alone—is most closely associated with preachers such as Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) and George Whitefield (1714–1770) and their fiery sermons condemning rationalism and human depravity. A second, more populist awakening, the Great Revival, followed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and turned Evangelicalism into the dominant religion of the 1800s. In the South, Methodists and Baptists “‘colonized’ the frontier regions . . . so thoroughly and effectively that the region bears the unmistakable stamp of evangelicalism to this day.” In the North, evangelicals got zealously involved in the various reform movements of their time, such as abolitionism, the temperance movement, and women’s suffrage.4

In the history of environmentalism, on the other hand, the nineteenth century is closely associated with the discourse of “Manifest Destiny,” arguably the dominant American “environmental” narrative to this day. Conceptualized as a discursive frame, Manifest Destiny is used by sociologist Robert J. Brulle as a summary term for the overarching economic and moral rationale that has guided and justified Americans’ “exploitation” of nature since 1620. As such it roughly corresponds with what environmental historian John Opie calls “American triumphalism” and political scientist John Dryzek refers to as “Promethean” or “cornucopian discourse”—a confident understanding of the limitlessness of nature and human progress. According to this rationale, nature has no value in itself, and the sole purpose of natural resources, which are perceived as abundant, is to assure human welfare.5

Overall, American environmentalism can be seen as rooted in protests against the discourse of Manifest Destiny. A growing concern with progress and modernity interlaced with a nostalgic reverence for nature dates back at least to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic countermovement it inspired. As the American landscape changed from an agricultural to an industrialized one, transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were among the first to identify the problematics of those changes. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the transcendentalists were joined by early conservationists like George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), who published Man and Nature—“the first comprehensive description in the English language of the destructive impact of human civilization on the environment”—in 1864, as well as preservationist and Sierra Club founder John Muir (1838–1914), to name only the most prominent examples.6

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, three ecologically more sensitive counter-narratives to Manifest Destiny could be discerned: Wildlife Management, Conservation, and Preservation. The efficient management of wildlife had become necessary due to uncontrolled hunting practices and a decreasing wildlife population. As a reaction to these problems, the newly evolving discourse framed wildlife as a crop that could be harvested; thus, Wildlife Management became popular as a scientific attempt to manage ecosystems. Similarly, the utilitarian frame of Conservation sought to find ways in which natural resources could be technically managed to assure human health and welfare.7

Preservation, on the other hand, comes discursively closest to the transcendentalist movement and differs from Wildlife Management and Conservation mostly in its ethical orientation. Being biocentric rather than anthropocentric, it acknowledges an intrinsic value of nature and emphasizes its spiritual importance. As its signature trait, Preservation stands for the promotion and the development of national parks and other areas where wilderness and wildlife should be preserved without being disturbed by human activity. Not in line with the overt Republican anti-environmentalism of today, the first national parks and forests in the United States were established under Republican presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Benjamin Harrison. Still existing environmental organizations that were founded by preservationists are older than the ones that employed the discursive frames of Wildlife Management and Conservation, respectively. However, Conservation was the dominant discourse of the Progressive Era, hence the sometimes sole reference to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conservationism vis-à-vis twentieth-century environmentalism.8

Nineteenth-century transcendental thinkers, nature enthusiasts, conservationists, and preservationists were all loosely connected in their appreciation of America’s “wild places,” their concern with diminishing forests and wildlife populations, and their overall skeptical stance toward Manifest Destiny. Unlike modern, twentieth-century environmentalism, though—and with a few exceptions like John Muir’s founding of the Sierra Club in 1892, for instance—this early movement largely remained an intellectual one and did not consolidate as a program of political reform that expressed and demanded clear environmental policies.9

Science, Modernity, and Fundamentalism

Dominated by a generally evangelical religious consensus in America, the nineteenth century also gave birth to the term “ecology” and to modern science as a profession. As is known, tensions ensued. In particular Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, challenged believers’ focus on biblicalism and orthodoxy. In the United States the forces of modernity thus not only prompted rising environmental sensitivities but eventually also the unfolding of the “Great Reversal” of Evangelicalism’s previous societal dominance.10

Positivism and evolutionary theory in particular, and an increasing theological liberalism triggered by German higher criticism in general, made it difficult for some Protestants to maintain the biblical view of human origins, the Genesis account of creation, and other essential tenets of their faith. Another group of Protestants reacted in the opposite way, though, emphasizing that a strong focus on the Scriptures and their infallibility was more important than ever in those modern times. The tensions between these two currents eventually led to a split between “modernists” and “fundamentalists.” Modernists read the biblical books more critically, welcomed modernity, and became overall more religiously liberal and worldly oriented. Fundamentalist Protestants, on the other hand, rejected modernism and concentrated on The Fundamentals and the “truth” of their faith, hence the name. They largely embraced a premillennial dispensational eschatology that emphasized the nearing end times and the importance of evangelism and conversionism as opposed to the social reform efforts of their theologically more liberal modernist brethren.11

Modernists and fundamentalists were particularly divided over the Darwinian theory of human evolution, “and the rift was aggravated by the seeming rise in agnosticism among the cultural and scientific elite.” Symptomatic of “a new and profound cleavage between traditional values and modernity,” the controversy had started in the pulpit and was carried into biology classrooms of public schools by the 1920s. From there fundamentalists took to legislative lobbying in 1922, which resulted in the passage of the Tennessee Butler Act in 1925. The Butler Act forbade the teaching of human evolution in public schools and was immediately challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which found a teacher (John Thomas Scopes) in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, who was willing to purposely break the law. The controversy thus climaxed in one of the most famous and bizarre lawsuits in American history, the “Scopes Monkey Trial.”12

Defended by Clarence Darrow of the ACLU, Scopes was prosecuted by former secretary of state, three-time Democratic nominee for president, and populist evangelical, William Jennings Bryan. After Scopes, the Tennessean Butler Act was upheld until its repeal in 1967. However, the verdict was a Pyrrhic victory as the trial was a major public relations disaster for the fundamentalist movement. While the nation was listening to live radio broadcasts of the proceedings, and journalists like H. L. Mencken “mercilessly lampooned the denizens of eastern Tennessee” in the press, the intellectual foundations of fundamentalism seemed quite questionable after Darrow had asked Bryan several “village atheist questions” and concluded that “no intelligent Christian on earth” believed his “fool ideas.” The trial had ended quite abruptly with Darrow demanding that Scopes be charged guilty so that a higher court could take on the matter, while Bryan died within six days of the sentence.13

After their embarrassment in Tennessee, fundamentalists retreated from the public sphere. To fend off ridicule and compensate for their loss of cultural power and intellectual credibility, they created their own conservative Christian subculture of Bible schools, seminaries, colleges and universities, missionary organizations, radio stations, and publishing houses. Those institutions drew clearly demarcated boundaries from the rest of American society and largely concentrated on evangelism and revival efforts instead of social reform and political action. Fundamentalists’ detachment was reinforced by religious principles and biblical prophesies providing explanations for the crisis, and to this day born-again Protestants feel alienated from a culture in which they once enjoyed the status of being among the most respected members of society. Moreover, the creationism versus evolution debate has remained a source of actual social conflict in the United States since then and has impacted the creation care movement as well, as addressed in more detail in later chapters.14

(Neo-)Evangelicalism and Engaged Orthodoxy

Whatever feelings of defeat and alienation fundamentalist Protestants may have felt after the Scopes Trial, they were not intense enough to keep the entire community disengaged for long. Instead of being “true outsiders” in a culture for which they felt a strong sense of guardianship and patriotism, fundamentalists had reacted more like “wounded lovers” when they temporarily went into subcultural exile. It is therefore not surprising that roughly twenty years after Scopes, a new cadre of more moderate leaders began to emerge out of the fundamentalist movement, and they were poised to leave their resentment behind.15

Assembled under the leadership of the Rev. Harold J. Ockenga (1905–1985) in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 7, 1942, the primary motivation of those fundamentalists who initiated what is often referred to as modern “neo-evangelicalism” was the desire to develop a “more intellectually respectable, culturally engaged, and socially responsible alternative” to fundamentalism. As a first step on the way to achieving this goal, they founded the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942. Programmatically situated between the theologically liberal Protestant mainline represented by the Federal (later National) Council of Churches (FCC) on the one side, and the separatist American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC), founded by fundamentalist Carl McIntire the year prior, on the other side, the NAE strove “to present a positive testimony to the gospel without directly confronting the Protestant establishment in fundamentalist fashion.” Unlike ACCC, the NAE welcomed non-fundamentalists from other Christian traditions, such as Pentecostals and Anabaptists, in order “to pull together a new coalition of conservative Protestants.”16

Another influential figure involved in spawning and supporting this new evangelical movement was Billy Graham (1918–2018). While the NAE concentrated on networking and infrastructure concerns more than actual evangelistic outreach, Graham would become the primary evangelist and “standard bearer for the evangelical movement” between the 1950s and 1980s. In this capacity he ventured widely across traditional ecclesiastical and national boundaries with his crusades and, later, the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Together with his father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell, Graham also launched what would become “mainstream evangelicalism’s flagship journal,” Christianity Today (CT) in 1956. Apart from the NAE and CT, various other educational, evangelistic, and cultural institutions and organizations were either newly founded or drawn into Evangelicalism from within the fundamentalist subculture.17

Overall, the (neo-)evangelicals were much more reform-oriented than the fundamentalists, albeit not as strongly as their theologically more liberal Protestant brethren who had propagated the social gospel at ...