Evangelicals are known for our skepticism of science. We’re also a tad bit prone toward conspiracy theories. I was a biology major at a state school known for agriculture, so I spent to much time listening to the dynamics of global warming to shrug it off as a hoax. Yet, we still have a fair number of folks in our tribe who deny the idea that climate change is even happening. Many think it’s happening, but humans aren’t contributing to it. Although many evangelicals are waking up to Creation Care and the responsibility we have in regard to taking care of the planet (Genesis 2:15), we’ve still got quite a few who are not so sure about this global warming mumbo-jumbo. It always mystifies me, because it seems to me that Christians should be at the forefront of any conversation about stewardship.
The most basic human vocation is to steward creation so that everything on it can flourish. We are on the hook for what happens to the planet. It’s our responsibility, and we ought to take it seriously. Maybe just the off chance that we might causing global warming with the burning of fossil fuels could be enough to convince us to change.
Creation is God’s first text, the first revelation of God. Wendell Berry thinks that God is teaching us a new lesson via this text, and the lesson is about limits. Here are some great quotes from the video. I hope you’ll watch it. He’s a wise man:
“What I am waiting for is for somebody to come along and say, ‘Look, we’ve got to use less.’ This thing that we’re calling our standard of living can’t be maintained, and so this means that we’ve all got to make a criticism of our lives and of our standard of living.”
“We’re getting the scale wrong… We’re putting too much at stake. Nobody thinks about anything little.”
“Finally we’re coming into a time when the context is beginning to speak back to us very knowledgeably, very loudly. We live in the world, and we’ve been pretending like we don’t. Now we’re hearing from the world.”
“To assume that all experiences like that [Deepwater Horizon] oil well, it can only be handled by experts at great expense, is a mistake I think. What we need to do is to get it to where we can have a say in it, and we can I think. If we don’t then we lose the personal ground of hope. And the next thing is we’re all going around saying things like, ‘it’s inevitable… there’s nothing you can do about it.’ I’m so tired of that word inevitable – that’s part of the vocabulary of very lazy people.”
I think this news report on evangelicals and climate change is a good sign:
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