Christians and the Environment

Two years ago, in a gals Bible study that I was leading, one of the gals went off on a completely unprovoked tirade against the crazies who believe in global warming.  (More details on what happened can be found here.)  That incident lead me to try to find a book that we could perhaps study in Sunday school that would help us wade through the topic of Christians and the environment. (Several of those books are reviewed here.)  After choosing the book that I thought would work best given our congregation, and then having the book shot down by the session (ruling body in the church), I decided that rather than giving up, I'd just write a Bible study on the topic.  I have high hopes that with the Bible as the primary source for the study, and our congregation as the primary audience, we might finally be able to tackle this topic in a positive way.  (I personally believe that not tackling it is only leading to disunity in our church and dealing with it will not only bring unity but a better witness of our church to outsiders as well.)

I'm just beginning the 9th chapter of the study.  I have, for the most part, kept the introductions to the chapters very short, wanting the Bible to do most of the talking.  But I'm coming to the point where I want to "pull it all together."  Part of what I hope to address in this 9th chapter is the non-Christian environmentalists' take on non-environmentalist Christians. (Wow, say that 5 times fast.)  In re-reading the introduction I've written, I wonder if my characterization of environmentalists is fair.  I "pick" on the New-Age-y environmentalists a bit, primarily because these are the only type of environmentalists that exist in the minds of many of the people in our congregation.  (You know, all environmentalists are tree-huggers and goddess worshippers right?  ... Right.  Whatever.  Let me just tell you, when they met me and my husband, and we weren't singing love songs to the flowers, they really couldn't figure out how we could call ourselves environmentalists.  We've really been a mind bend for them.) My goal, therefore, is to still "pick on" the tree huggers, but I want to do it fairly.  Does that make sense?  In other words, I want to zero in on them still, but I want to do so in a way that's still fairly accurate and fair to who they are and what they believe. 

So I thought I'd post the intro. here and get some feedback.  I'm looking specifically for first reactions.  How does what I say about non-Christian environmentalists hit you? Is it a fair representation?  Am I missing anything?  

Feel free to throw in your thoughts on the questions I ask at the end as well.  

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Peter wrote to the Christians in what is now Turkey, saying “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” (1 Peter 2:12)  

Think about the pagans (or non-Christians) that we regularly come into contact with.  Given that they’re not Christians, it’s quite unlikely that they’d know anything about how we worship or what doctrine we believe in.  Those are things that they’d really only know if they attended church events with us.  On the contrary, what they see of us is the day-to-day, mundane choices that we make in life.  Non-Christians might not know which hymns we sing on a Sunday morning, but they know what car we drive (and how much we drive it).  They might not know what topic we covered in Sunday school, but they know what food we eat (and how much we eat it).  They might not know our opinions on the fall of man and the salvific work of Christ, but they know how we treat our misbehaving kids in the grocery store and how we deal with a difficult client at work. These little things that we might not even give a second thought to go a long way toward informing non-Christians about who we are and what we believe.

The purpose of this Bible study has been to focus primarily on the environment – what the Bible says about it and how we as believers should think about it.  But it’s important to know also what non-Christians have in mind when they consider environmental issues, because more often than not, no matter why the non-Christian is interested in these issues (whether they think it’s because we’re all connected to some great Mother Earth or because they recognize that environmental issues today have physical repercussions to the future of humanity), there are certain overarching values that environmentalists hold dear and that are intimately linked, in their minds, with living a moral life.

One of these is justice.  In the mind of the environmentalist, pollution is not just a nasty by-product of industrialization, it’s morally wrong. It causes sickness, deformities, even death.  People who are being polluted against their will (such as those whose drinking water has been affected by a nearby factory or children growing up in high traffic areas with higher rates of asthma) are the recipients of injustice.  And those who contribute to that injustice are themselves unjust. So when a non-Christian sees a Christian who doesn’t seem to care about pollution, they believe right away that Christians have no care for justice.  Whether accurate or not, that is the perception.

Another important value environmentalists hold to is love. They tend to get mushy gushy when they talk about it (“We are all connected.”  “We are all children of the Earth Mother.”) but the value itself, love for one another, is admirable. [D] All people hold love to be important. Whether it's family, friends, faith or even the environment, everybody values some thing greatly.[/D] So think of what they see when their Christian neighbors spray pesticides on the peach tree in their own yard and the poisons float down onto the non-Christian’s raspberry bushes. The environmentalist non-Christian is immediately convinced that the Christians don’t even take seriously their own belief that they should “love their neighbor” because they didn’t take into consideration the damage their actions would cause to their neighbor.

So as you read through the following Scripture passages and examples from current news stories, put yourself in the shoes of your non-Christian neighbors.  What values do they see in you as they’re reflected in your day-to-day decisions and activities – especially as they pertain to the environment?  How does your church come across to environmentalists who live in the same neighborhood and see the regular meetings and activities of the church body?