Can God Go Green?

by Josh Moody

It’s an interesting phenomenon but for many people today religion, especially of the conservative sort, is viewed as non-environmentally friendly. We look at big black Bibles, or large amphitheatres, or even stained glass, and we wonder to what extent is global warming, and the crisis that most scientists predict is just around the corner for dear old earth, even considered. Religion often seems too pietistic, too private, too personal, to come to grips with issues that affect “The World” in a global sense, when many of the messages of religious leaders appear to be concerned with having a “quiet time” or doing your devotions, or building a happy family life, and the like. Not that there is anything wrong (and everything right conversely) with any of these emphases, but that, well, does it mean that God cannot go green?

Some are suspicious of the origins of the modern environmental movement. It appears to have atheistic, and therefore explicitly non-religious roots, perhaps even New Age pagan kind of stimulus, talking of “Gaia” and “Mother Earth” in a way that does not sit happily with the Father God. Yet there is growing evidence that people are looking to religious convictions to find inspiration for green commitments. Even some evangelicals are getting on the bandwagon. There is now an Evangelical Environmental Network, a parachurch organization that is devoted to caring for the environment (www.creationcare.org). In 2005, Allen Johnson founded Christians for the Mountains, a non-profit initiative in Pocahontos County West Virginia, which exists to summon faithful Christians to act responsibly towards God’s creation. In January of this year, a group of Harvard scientists and evangelical Christians clubbed together to issue a joint statement calling on President Bush to act swiftly to meet the threat to our environment. “We believe that that the protection of life on Earth is a profound moral imperative” the strange bedfellows said in their statement to Bush and members of Congress, and they vowed to, “work together to call our nation, and other nations, to the kind of dramatic change urgently required in our day.” Dr J. Matthew Sleeth, one of the collaborators in this move, has written a book on the subject of the environmental moral imperative called Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action. In an interview, Dr Sleeth compares the urgency of the situation to someone falling over board, and not caring whether those throwing the lifebelt were religious or not in their personal convictions, but just glad to be rescued. And so we could go on. Examples abound of a growing minority interested in saving the planet because of (not in spite of) profound, often profoundly conservative, religious convictions.

I suppose if we think about it for a moment we shouldn’t really be too surprised. After all, it was God who said in the beginning that we were to rule over (not abuse), “the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth” (Genesis 1:26). And it is the Bible that depicts paradise as a Garden (in fact paradise means Garden literally), where “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). According to the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, or the Torah of the Jewish, humanity was intrinsically designed to take care of planet earth.

Of course we no longer live in paradise. And, in fact, there seems no realistic hope of returning our world to the Shire envisioned by J.R.R. Tolkien in his The Lord of the Rings. Sauron, The Enemy, has come and spoilt too much, and in this world while there can be redemption, we await for a further redemption, where, according to the Apostle Paul, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). In that hope, many people of profound spiritual commitment place their trust. But it is not an excuse to abuse the current status quo, and blithely consign our environment to the devil entropy. Tending your garden is not polishing brass on a sinking ship; it is a form of worship. For we were made to be gardeners, and even in the city hope springs eternal. Christians do not worship nature, and are not naïve about the viciousness of the natural, red in tooth and claw as much of it is, but they do worship the Creator, and in such orientation are led to reach out to other created beings too with the love and hope of a future filled with joy.

In some ways the story of the Bible is an account of a journey from a Garden (of Eden, paradise lost) to a city (of God, in the heavenly city to come). Now in the inbetween times we have a unique opportunity to point people to the Creator, and be a part of proclaiming the one through whom can come reconciliation of all things, who was the firstborn over all creation, and of which the gospel is proclaimed to every creature under heaven (Colossians 1:15-20 reflections). Now that’s what I call an environment.

Can God Go Green? Of course, after all he invented green (along with every other color in the rainbow).