Faith and the Environment

January 2004 Column on the Environment and Faith in the Connecticut Diocesan Newspaper

What does church have to do with the environment?

A few months ago there were some irate letters to Good News suggesting strongly that concerns about the earth have no place in the work of the church.  Given the lack of involvement by the church in this area historically, it is perhaps not surprising that some faithful people might view efforts by their fellow Christians to bring issues about pollution, global warming and alternative energy into parish and diocesan conversations to be merely trendy or worse, to be pushing some form of ideological agenda.

While in some ways the environmental agenda is new territory for the church, in other ways it resonates deeply with our roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  In the first chapter of Genesis, as God finishes the work of Creation, God declares it, “very good.”    Just as you would not lightly destroy, or harm in any way, a piece of art or furniture created by a parent or grandparent, it would seem that we should be equally hesitant to harm this earth, God’s handiwork.  In Genesis, God declares that we humans should have “dominion” over the creatures of the earth.  We get to rule, we are told.  The New Interpreter’s Bible points out, however, that “a study of the [Hebrew] verb [for] have dominion reveals that it must be understood in terms of care-giving, even nurturing, not exploitation.  As the image of God, human beings should relate to the nonhuman as God relates to them.”  At the beginning of our Biblical story is a call to protect, not abuse the natural world.  The environmental movement has documented many, many ways in which we are not living up to this call, and has alerted us to ways to bring about change, to begin to live up to our God-given roles as nurturers of the earth and its creatures. 

Another roadblock for some Christians has been the sense that this earth is not truly our home.  “We are strangers in a strange land;” we live but for awhile in this veil of tears, and our real place is in the kingdom of heaven.  This attitude has been reinforced throughout the history of Christian theology and may have its roots in Greek philosophy where the truly real was in another world.  However, Christ came in the flesh, earth stuff, and we proclaim a resurrection of the body.  The earth itself may not be divine, but the divine is in it.  Many Christians believe that what we do on this earth has an impact on what happens to us eternally.  It is becoming increasingly clear that one thing we are doing on this earth is making a big mess, and that is no metaphor.

The messes we make do not land equally, though, which brings up another reason why the voice of the church needs to be heard.  Environmental degradation tends to fall most heavily on the people with the least power to prevent it. We literally dump our garbage on the poor of the world.  Those of us who are lucky enough or wealthy enough to live in places where waste is not burned and trash not deposited can easily forget that there are millions of people whose air and water are turned into poison by our waste.  This is fundamentally unjust, and justice has been one call of our tradition going back to the Hebrew prophets.

The church’s voice has come late to this conversation, but we belong there.  As time moves forward the voices of people of faith will become stronger, more influential, and, by the grace of God, will bring about real change.