Why Evangelicals Make Sucky Environmentalists

Mark Galli at Christianity Today posted an essay entitled Judgment in The Gulf: Woes and Blessings of the Oil Spill.

The very title (there are blessings of the oil spill?) puts me on my guard, here.

Unfortunately, my wariness winds up being more than justified.

He writes this as a prophetic oracle and a lamentation, and I think the hollowness of his essay captures the reasons why evangelical environmentalism is a little thin, if not downright cynical.

There are good moments in his essay.  Money quote:

Woe to you, O consumers, who drive when you could walk, who lust for goods that must be flown and shipped from far away in oil-consuming ships of land and sea and air, whose way of life must be preserved no matter the cost to my planet or to those whose lives depend on its health.

Woe indeed.

He likes to keep it balanced though, an instinct I understand in a world where getting pegged as "liberal" or "conservative" is the death-kiss.

But what he winds up saying is that the environment is not the issue. 

Woe to you, O environmentalists, who lose sleep over shrimp that will vanish and do not remember the eleven created in my image who died in the explosion, who wax eloquent about the suffering salamander and are blind to the plight of those who suffer most when my earth suffers.

Well, the environment is the issue.   The eleven are dead.  There still might be a chance to save the shrimp and the salamanders. 

And let's keep perspective: the fact that BP has killed eleven humans is morally significant.  The fact that they're about to kill off whole species and an entire rich and amazing ecosystem is also morally significant.

But the problem is worse than that.

Evangelicals like to keep focus on The Eternally Urgent.  I get that.  But it means that they're uniquely unqualified to say anything interesting about the earth.  Galli succumbs to the compulsive Evangelical need to say that the here and now misses the point.

Consider this:

Blessed are those who know that "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," that they cannot ultimately destroy anything good I have created and over which I rule, who know that I am almighty and they are not, that I am the Lord still!

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but bullshit.

The earth is Yahweh's and the fullness thereof, and yeah, if you tar it and poison it, no, you don't get another one.

You don't have to be almighty to destroy a human life or a finite earth.

You just have to bugger the well in the right way, and you're good that way.

Then there's the WTF moment of the century:

Blessed are those who know that soon this earth will indeed be burned up, that the sea will be no more, and that the environment will pass away, not because of the folly of man but only in my gracious providence.

Oh.  Well, by all means.  Let's look after the place, then.

The incoherence here is remarkable, but it's also systemic and writ exceeding large. 

I find Galli's essay desperate and more than ordinarily bald in its conflict between eternity and time.  He cannot say "It doesn't really matter," because, well, he doesn't want to.  But how is one to read this burning-up-of-the-earth as anything but the erasure of all we do in this life?  We are judged for doing what makes no difference?

Here is eternity as Leviathan.

Comments

[Natalie]

People who think like this scare the f*ck out of me, quite frankly. We don't work for posterity's sake because Jesus is coming again soon! Welcome, extremists who have bombs - you'll bring on Armageddon!

Woe to you, O environmentalists, who lose sleep over shrimp that will vanish

The arrogance and stupidity of this kind of thinking is astounding. As someone who expects to vanish with the shrimp, I think it's deplorably irresponsible and immoral.

(And some people think that nonbelievers are the ones living only for today.)

[Otter]

Natalie, thanks for your comments.