Christianity & Environmentalism

The purpose of this research is to examine the effect that Christianity has had on environmentalism and environmental movements. The plan of the research will be to set forth the social, political, and religious context in which the connection between Christianity and environmentalism can be discerned in the current period, and then to discuss the positive and negative effects of Christianity on the environment and environmentalism; the manner in which Christianity has assimilated or created grassroots environmental movements; the connection between work done by Christian churches in the environmental arena; the "greening" of Christian rhetoric since the mid-1970s in various Christian sects; and the role of the church as a possible nonpolitical and moral anchor of debate and public policy regarding global environmental conditions and resources.

Among evangelical and fundamentalist Christian sects, environmental issues appear to be charged with politics. That is, controversy surrounds questions of whether environmentalism as such, which has since the 1970s been associated with secular or otherwise non-Christian social advocacy, belongs properly to the range of concerns appropriate to Christian teaching. In other words, controversy surrounds the question of whether environmentalism has any legitimate claim to moral standing for Christians. This question seems of special significance to Christian sects popularly associated with social and political conservatism; among such sects

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a feminist perspective that an unremittingly progressivistic view of the natural and technological world is also consistent with Christianity's traditionally hierarchical and patriarchal anthropomorphism, coupled with its tradition of authoritarian value structures. These very value structures, Kwok further argues, need to be questioned; in the process of such questioning, the manner in which the environment will be viewed--not as something that is subject to the vicissitudes of unremitting "progress" but as a part of a larger cycle or system of experience of the natural world. The "integrity" of creation, on this view, not simply its susceptibility to human manipulation, is meant to govern the future development of a Christian perspective of natural ecology. In other words, this is a reinterpretation of the concept of stewardship. Along the same lines, Dyrness urges the view that it is inappropriate from a spiritual standpoint to relegate environmental problems to the general topic of technology and progress. That is, environmental problems are not divorced from values or from spiritual consciousness but rather are fundamentally spiritual, not physical in nature. Axelrod and Seudfeld attack this issue from the standpoint of s

Category: Science - C