God's Greenhouse: Eco‐Evangelicals, Rhetoric, and the Public Sphere

Abstract

God's Greenhouse: Eco‐Evangelicals, Rhetoric, and the Public Sphere Elizabeth Lowry Introduction In February 2006, the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) launched the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), a nationwide campaign for climate change awareness. The initiative began with a publication in the New York Times of a statement entitled “A Call to Action.” This statement had been penned by a group of Evangelical Christians deeply concerned about the destructive potential of climate change. In “A Call to Action,” Evangelical environmentalists (or “eco‐Evangelicals”) asserted their belief in the validity of climate science and used passages from the Bible ostensibly to appeal to the broader Evangelical community to join them in acting against climate change. With the placement of the New York Times ad: “The ECI clearly aimed to broaden the traditional evangelical Right agenda of personal morality issues—abortion, homosexuality, and pornography—to include environmental or ‘creation care’ concerns, specifically climate change” (Wilkinson 89). But, a rhetorical analysis of “A Call to Action” reveals that perhaps the “traditional evangelical Right” was not the ECI's target audience after all. For instance, placing “A Call to Action” in the New York Times, which most Evangelicals consider to be a secular (and liberal) publication, was an unexpected choice if the ECI hoped to reach conservatives. I argue that, in publishing “A Call to Action,” politically moderate eco‐Evangelicals’ primary goal was to join forces with secular environmentalists in order to build a visible Evangelical environmental movement. Although moderate Evangelicals achieved their goal of cooperating with the secular public in order to address environmental destruction, “A Call to Action” also provoked a conservative backlash against environmentalism, fomenting correspondingly visible discourses of climate denial. Indeed, if “A Call to Action” was intended to persuade politically conservative Evangelicals to join moderate Evangelicals in acting against climate change, the publication of this document appeared to have undermined this intention by further polarizing the climate change debate. However, I argue that if we apply Michael Warner's theory of counterpublics to public discourse on religion and the environment, we can see that significant cultural work has taken place as a result of “A Call to Action” and the Cornwall Alliance's counterstatement to it. An examination of these documents reveals how the union between secular and Evangelical publics has been dramatized, particularly with respect to morality. This dramatization contextualizes the ideological rifts we see today, not only within the Evangelical community, but also within the secular public sphere. Drawing on the scholarship of Willis Jenkins, Steven Bouma‐Prediger, Michael Hulme, and Katharine Wilkinson, I consider the implications of increased Evangelical attention to the climate change debate and speculate as to ways in which high‐profile Evangelical involvement has affected the terms of the debate. Who and what are “Evangelicals”? In contemporary America, there are many Evangelical communities, meaning that the word “Evangelical” refers to a multiplicity of discourses. In an effort to define Evangelicalism, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) claims that “Evangelicals take the bible seriously and believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.” Further, the NAE explains: “The term ‘evangelical’ comes from the Greek…meaning ‘the good news’ or the gospel. Thus, the evangelical faith focuses on the ‘good news’ of salvation brought to sinners by Jesus Christ.” But Evangelicalism can be distinguished more specifically by what historian David Bebbington refers to as “four primary characteristics.” These characteristics are as follows: “conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and ‘crucicentrism,’ a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Bebbington's definition has become a standard baseline for most scholars” (NAE website). While Evangelicals today are often associated with political and social conservatism, the Evangelical Manifesto of insists: “Evangelicalism should be distinguished from two opposite tendencies to which Protestantism has been prone: liberal revisionism and conservative fundamentalism” (8). Likewise, the authors of the Evangelical Manifesto see themselves as occupying a centrist position, insisting that they are not aligned with any particular political party and nor are they “unquestioning conservatives and unreserved supporters of tradition and status quo” (10). While the majority of Christians who identify as...