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 opinion on the issue seems at once sharply divided and in a period of some transition. In this connection, the publication Christianity Today highlighted environmentalism in a 1994 series, noting that the principal point of controversy comes down to whether environmentalism, with its sources in non-Christian social advocacy, is consistent with the concerns of evangelical Christianity (i.e., manifestly biblical) or opposed to it (pagan, as it were) by reason of ...