The Washington Post is writing on evangelical environmentalists, of which I consider myself one, as part of their efforts to understand these strange critters called evangelicals, who’ve occupied Washington, D.C. After biting on an old chestnut, that the world is all going to be consumed upon Christ’s second coming, the Post profiles several new ecological approaches within evangelicalism, from mercury in the environment, to global warming.
The trick, the article claims, to enlisting evangelical efforts in ecology, is billing the issues in the language of family values. Pollution is a family value, because it affects children’s health. Likewise global warming, because it affects our grandchildren.
Let’s be honest: altruism won’t save the world. People will not serve the common good for metaphysical reasons. The trick for ecologists is to convince people that the common good is also the immediate good. Hence pitching to family values. The trouble lies in the boundaries to family values, as currently defined in our civil discourse. When we say family values, we mean nuclear families, and we mean privacy, not community. We mean the nuclear family’s capacity to protect its moral and physical environment.
It’s an inherently individualistic approach, and can become addictive for the impatient activist. But the family values approach to recruiting evangelicals into ecology can stunt their eventual participation.
One of evangelical’s best qualities is their orientation toward truth. They believe in truth and stick to biblical truth like glue. Significantly, they are also quite willing to change their opinions on issues, once convinced of the biblical stance on the matter. Consider justice. Evangelicals spent a century on the outside of the major justice issues, because they were convinced that God cared about people’s souls, not their temporal predicaments.
But recent years have seen dramatic changes, as evangelicals have reread their Bibles and seen God’s mandate for justice. Fairly rapidly they’ve gotten over their qualms about “liberalism” and have become leaders in several causes, including Darfur in the Sudan, human trafficking, and AIDS.
Most major ecological-social problems occur in the developing world and in poor neighborhoods of the wealthy countries. (The picture above is of a car wash in Nigeria, taken by a friend. People are washing their cars right into the creek.) These affairs are notoriously difficult to connect to everyday life. In the case of the Nigerian car wash, for example, why should I be concerned
about that polluted creek?
If ecologists truly care to add evangelicals to their ranks, they’ll need a different approach than family values. Convince evangelicals that ecology is a justice issue, and you’ll get longer-term and broader involvement.
Ecology is not a family value per se; but both ecology and family are profoundly biblical values.
