God's Greenhouse

Abstract

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. 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 2008 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 Evangelicals are politically conservative, many Evangelical communities are comparatively moderate or centrist in their political views. However, organizations committed to the environment (such as the ECI and the EEN) are frequently labeled as being socially and politically liberal and are therefore summarily dismissed by more conservative Evangelical groups. Since Evangelicalism is an umbrella term, it is frequently conflated with fundamentalism—and in fact, fundamentalist churches may often identify as Evangelical. Fundamentalists tend to be intensely politically inclined and perceive climate change as being a liberal hoax. Although the (centrist) Evangelical Manifesto of 2008 was evidently intended to clarify who and what Evangelicals are (and are not), the authors of the Evangelical Manifesto cannot control how churches self-identify nor in which political direction certain theological communities may swing. By and large, Evangelicals comprise much of the Christian Right, and since (generally speaking) they do not believe in a separation of church and state, their theological beliefs are overtly political: They are against abortion, they believe in creationism rather than evolution, and they are suspicious of a scientific establishment that appears to undermine their religious beliefs. The fact that so many self-proclaimed climate change deniers come from within self-identified conservative Evangelical ranks leads to a general impression among the secular public of Evangelicals as being obstacles to implementing environmental initiatives. “A Call to Action” is a five-page document. The first three pages are comprised of the ECI's argument for taking action on climate change, while the last two pages contain the signatures of 86 Evangelical leaders. A Call to Action begins by stating: “As American Evangelical Christian leaders, we recognize both our opportunity and our responsibility to offer a biblically based moral witness that can help shape public policy in the most powerful nation on earth and therefore contribute to the well-being of the entire world” (1). The document goes on to detail how, after much “study, reflection, and prayer,” the authors and signatories of A Call to Action have determined that “climate change is a real problem…that it ought to matter to us as Christians.” As such, the ECI presents its Call to Action based on “four simple but urgent claims.” The first is that “Human Induced Climate Change is Real.” The second is that “the consequences of Climate Change will be significant and will Hit the Poor the Hardest.” The third is that “Christian Moral Convictions Demand our Response to the Climate Change Problem,” and the fourth is that “the Need to Act Now is Urgent.” The first and second claims are heavily footnoted, referencing documents published by leading climate scientists. The second claim—that climate change will hit the poor the hardest—contains a bolded sub-claim “Millions of people could die this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors” (2). This section is emphasized no doubt because the biblical directive to serve the poor is of central importance to the broader Evangelical community. Moderate Evangelicals use this argument, suggesting that caring for the environment is tantamount to caring for the poor. The third claim is similarly strategic in that draws on passages from the Bible that specifically emphasize caring for God's creation as a moral imperative (2–3). The fourth claim highlights the need for political action, stating that “In the United States, the most important immediate step that can be taken at the federal level is to pass and implement national legislation.” This paragraph ends by again referencing a commitment to the poor and the argument closes by invoking the larger Christian community: “In the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord, we urge all those who read this declaration to join us in this effort” (3). To a secular reader, the document appears to appeal to Christian concerns. Wilkinson explains how leaders in the EEN and ECI framed their arguments to try to appeal to Evangelicals: “recasting this environmental issue in evangelical terms and telling its story using biblical language and central theological tenets—love of God, love of neighbor, and the demands of stewardship” (42). The ECI's focus on anthropocentrism appeals to the Evangelical idea of helping the poor in an attempt to emphasize how the poor would be harmed by the effects of climate change. However, conservatives remained unconvinced by this argument and unmoved by “A Call to Action.” If they had aimed to persuade conservatives, the authors of “A Call to Action” might have been more successful had they deployed a different strategy. Scholars such as Willis Jenkins and Steven Bouma-Prediger have argued that centrist and right-wing Christians draw on entirely different rhetorical models to consider relationships between humans and the earth. Centrists typically use “ecojustice” arguments, whereas conservatives tend to use “stewardship” arguments. Further, while some climate science is acceptable to centrists, conservatives categorically reject it. “A Call to Action” did attempt to deploy stewardship arguments to appeal to conservatives, but it also relied on ecojustice arguments, which conservatives repudiated. According to Jenkins, the stewardship model is framed as a form of direct service to God. In Genesis, when man is given “dominion” over the earth, it is understood that he will care for the earth, as an expression of his servitude to God. Thus, the emphasis is not on the value of the natural world per se; rather, it is considered a means to an end: a way for the individual to cultivate a relationship with God in order to achieve salvation. By contrast, ecojustice arguments tend to eliminate a focus on caring for the environment as a route to personal salvation—rather, ecojustice arguments emphasize caring for the earth as an end in and of itself. Conservatives who focus primarily on their relationship with the creator are put off by ecojustice arguments that they believe conflate creation with creator. Further, ecojustice suggests that caring for the environment is important because global and local ecosystems are interconnected. Since poor people are hardest hit by environmental damage, caring for the environment is a way of advocating for social justice and helping the poor. But in her study of conservative Evangelical congregants’ responses to “A Call to Action,” scholar Katharine Wilkinson asserts that conservative Evangelicals do not necessarily acknowledge a connection between macro- and micro-structures. Stewardship appeals to conservatives because of its focus on individual salvation and direct practical action; ecojustice arguments are considered to be too abstract. To conservatives, ecojustice arguments are seen to undermine a direct relationship between God and the individual because the concept of God is (undesirably) conflated with the earth itself. This in turn suggests a kind of nature-worship or paganism that is deeply offensive to the conservative Christian sensibility. To critics such as Jenkins, the stewardship model can be used to further arguments for communities that wish to preserve and protect the environment, but it can also become an excuse to do otherwise. Stewardship models are open to interpretation and manipulation. Jenkins writes that the stewardship model essentially “amounts to religious license for anthropocentric domination—and this criticism constitutes the chief challenge a stewardship theology must disprove” (Jenkins 80). To address this, advocates of the stewardship model explain “creation care” which means sustainable treatment of the earth, rather than the exploitative practices associated with domination. But the “stewardship model still separates humanity from the rest of creation, making humans inattentive and irresponsible to the earth. Moreover, the stewardship model justifies interventionist controlling dominion by appealing to a picture of God as a distant monarch” (Jenkins 80). Critics of stewardship rhetoric consider it problematic that nature is not seen as valuable on its own terms and that humans aren't held more accountable to the earth itself. As Jenkins puts it, “either stewardship is shaped by nature and so, despite its contrary rhetoric, really develops by the same practical logic as ecojustice, or it is not and God's call generates environmental practices without regard to environmental feedback” (84). Simply put, if God and nature are only loosely connected, whose cues are to be followed? Nature's or God's? Because of these gray areas “stewardship is a remarkably malleable concept, claimed by those defending industrial agriculture and those impugning it, those in favor [of]…the Endangered Species Act and those against it. A successful stewardship theology has to do better then, than list environmental problems and invoke biblical curses against earth's destroyers, it must specify the soteriological relations between obeying God's call and God's relationship to the natural world” (Jenkins 90). In short, the stewardship model is too nebulous to be used to great effect and can be appropriated and interpreted in ways that are at worst and destructive to the environment and that (even at best) do not necessarily create a more sustainable way of life. Shortly after the release of “A Call to Action,” the Cornwall Alliance (or Interfaith Stewardship Alliance) offered what it has termed variously as “an open letter to the signers of a Call to Action,” as a “counterstatement,” or as a corresponding “Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor.” The Cornwall Alliance describes itself as an organization “devoted to the stewardship of creation.” To the Cornwall Alliance, stewardship means increasing fossil fuel consumption rather than diminishing it—arguing that reducing CO2 emissions would stymie the development of impoverished countries. The Cornwall Alliance rejects climate science on the basis that God—not people—is responsible for the environment. The Alliance also argues that caring for the poor does not mean caring for the earth; instead, it means encouraging energy consumption in the service of expanding industry. “A Call to Truth” asserts that global warming is due to natural causes (rather than human activity) and that it can have helpful as well as harmful consequences. This section is preceded by the following statement: “We present extensive evidence and argument against the…existence of…the scientific consensus on catastrophic human-induced global warming. Further, good science…is not about counting votes, but about empirical evidence and valid arguments.” However, although the Alliance does present its arguments, those arguments are not supported by empirical evidence. The Alliance references theologian Wayne Grudem who believes it impossible “that God would set up the world to work in such a way that human beings would eventually destroy the earth by doing…ordinary and morally good and necessary things” (2). The Alliance then closes its statement proclaiming: “we believe it is far wiser to promote economic growth, partly through keeping energy inexpensive than to fight against potential global warming and thus slow economic growth” (3). Finally, the Alliance includes its own list of 106 signatories of leaders in the Evangelical community. Since the Alliance garnered more signatures on their document, many conservatives apparently believed the Alliance to have “won” the debate. According to public spheres theorist Michael Warner, “A public organizes itself independently of state institutions, law, formal frameworks of citizenship, or pre-existing institutions such as the church” (Warner 414). Specifically, Warner mentions that a public is organized independently of the church—and indeed, the eco-Evangelical public was organized “independently” of both the church and state in that the NAE did not help eco-Evangelicals to organize, and nor did any single Evangelical church. Rather, various church-affiliated individuals came together independently to address a common concern. Warner suggests that publics are also recognized, or they come “into being” when representative texts are circulated. Here, the “representative text” is “A Call to Action.” By releasing “A Call to Action,” the ECI/EEN “conjured into being” an addressable entity “in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (Warner 414). Hence, “A Call to Action” becomes a text that marks the existence of the public from whence it came. Further, the existence of this self-created eco-Evangelical public is contingent upon action—the action of signing the document and the action of making a pledge to help protect the environment. Importantly also, Warner speaks of the formation of a recognizable public as being a process of “poetic world making” meaning “not just that it is self-organizing, a kind of entity created by its own discourse, nor even that this space of circulation is taken to be a social entity, but that in order for this to happen all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, and it must attempt to realize that world through address” (Warner 422). I argue that “A Call to Action” participates in “poetic world making” by inviting its audience to envision a Christian environmentalism—a world in which Christianity and caring for the earth are seen as being compatible, rather than mutually exclusive. After creating or “making” this world, public discourse “goes out in search of confirmation that such a public exists…success being further attempts to cite, circulate, and realize the world understanding it articulates” (Warner 422). With the release of its New York Times announcement, the ECI was perhaps attempting to “cite, circulate, and realize” its mission. According to Warner's criteria, eco-Evangelicals indeed form a public—but as that public is subordinate both to mainstream secular publics and to a wider Evangelical discursive sphere—eco-Evangelicalism is aptly described as a counterpublic. “A Call to Action” is an expression of an eco-Evangelical counterpublic with respect to the dominant ideologies of a general Evangelical “public.” That is, the Evangelical community as an aggregate does not believe that climate change is a problem, so the ECI becomes a counterpublic upon finding itself in “a conflictual relation” with the general Evangelical public (Warner 423). Although eco-Evangelicals are aware of their subordinate status to the broader Evangelical agenda, the entire Evangelical population of the United States can also be viewed as a counterpublic in relation to a mainstream (secular) public sphere. Thus, identifying eco-Evangelicals as a counterpublic leads to an interesting set of complications: eco-Evangelicals form a counterpublic in relation to dominant Evangelical ideologies and discourses, but that dominant Evangelical discourse in turn becomes a counterpublic with respect to the mainstream public sphere. But, although eco-Evangelicals are ideologically allied with a dominant secular public on the issue of climate change does not mean that they are part of that secular sphere—as Evangelicals, they too function as a counterpublic in relation to secular publics. Despite the perception of having “lost” the debate on whether or not action to be taken to mitigate climate change, the release of a Call to Action had not been in vain. When eco-Evangelicalism is read from the perspective of a counterpublic, the document is revealed to have performed a variety of useful rhetorical functions. The first was to “out” the opposition. When A Call to Action was released, it was not clear which community leaders were on board to act against climate change and which were not. When the Cornwall Alliance responded to “A Call to Action,” centrists were able to map the rhetorical terrain of right-wing opinion and to gain a better understanding of power dynamics within the Evangelical community. The juxtaposition of the ideologies presented in “A Call to Action” and “A Call to Truth” served to publicly situate issues of climate change within a broader Christian agenda. The next function of “A Call to Action” was to raise the centrist Evangelical profile and cultivate a more positive reception to Evangelicals in the secular public sphere. For many politically centrist Evangelicals, “outing” themselves as being believers in climate science had resulted in ostracism from their communities. But when these centrist Evangelicals found themselves called to judgment by their more conservative peers, secular environmentalists were able to take advantage of the fissures within the Evangelical community to collaborate with congregation that supported taking action to protect the environment. Finally, “A Call to Action” helped some eco-Evangelicals to also establish themselves as an ecologically conscious public within a broader matrix of publics, and to cultivate and perform their identities as environmentalists. However, as mentioned earlier, “A Call To Action” also preempted “A Call to Truth” which helped climate deniers to establish themselves as a visible counterpublic and to cultivate their identities as deniers. Thus, in identifying themselves as environmentalists, members of the ECI essentially provoked deniers into declaring ideological warfare. Evangelicals on both sides of the climate change debate rely on “religious and philosophical doctrines” to make their arguments. However, as Bouma-Prediger and Jenkins have demonstrated, they go about doing this very differently. In choosing ecojustice arguments as the moral force driving their arguments, eco-Evangelicals deviate from the commonplaces of the wider Evangelical sphere on the basis of biblical interpretation. Generally speaking, Evangelicals on both sides of the political aisle call their counterpublics into being by repackaging as moral imperatives secular arguments about mitigating (or not mitigating) the effects of climate change. Further, as Evangelical climate deniers and believers have grown more vocal since 2006, both factions have infused secular arguments on the environment with appeals to Christian morality. For example while it may be easy for an environmentalist to dismiss secular climate deniers as being oil company shills and money grubbers, it is not so easy to dismiss Evangelical deniers who claim to be motivated by Christian values. Deniers who claim (as the Cornwall Alliance does) that increased consumption of fossil fuels would be good for the poor and should therefore be encouraged, become an attractive ally for secular deniers who are now able to imbue their arguments with a sense of moral, rather than financial concern. Thus, the debate over how to handle climate change becomes increasingly polarized. However, psychologists Markowitz and Shariff argue that the problem is not too much moralizing on climate change, rather, too little of it. In their paper, “Climate Change and Moral Judgment,” Markowitz and Shariff explain why—in reference to climate change—moral arguments are not particularly effective in terms of spurring the public to find ways to mitigate emissions. A significant reason is that climate change (both to liberals and conservatives) is still too abstract a concept to act upon. But Markowitz and Shariff argue that—when it comes to the environment—current moral arguments are mostly ineffective because the moral imperatives we are presented with are not strong enough. As such, Markowitz and Shariff assert “Enhancing moral intuitions about climate change may motivate greater support for ameliorative actions and policies” (Abstract). The authors go on to make sound and well-reasoned suggestions for enhancing “moral intuition,” one of which is to “Engage the full range of moral values that people hold; framing climate change as an issue that involves considerations of purity, respect for authority and others, and loyalty to one's community and nation, may help generate novel moral intuitions” (245). While this is excellent advice, it does not account for the conflicting models of morality that theologians have pointed out within and among various Christian communities. For instance, as evidenced by “A Call to Action,” ecojustice and stewardship models simply are not compatible with one another. Moreover, combining discourses of climate change with those of Christian morality has certainly demonstrated that Americans cannot agree on what climate change is—or on what morality is, either. Our moral cues are drawn from a multiplicity of Christian ideologies, many of which conflict. Hulme speaks of the need to “recognize that the sources of our disagreement about climate change lie deep within us, in our values and in our sense of identity and purpose. They do not reside ‘out there,’ a result of our inability to grasp knowingly some ultimate physical reality” (492). Since we can agree neither on morality nor on climate change, there is little consensus on what constitutes moral behavior pertaining to the environment. While moderates portray conservative Christians as not responding to climate change because they simply don't understand it, Hulme argues that this is not the problem. Evangelicals are perfectly capable of understanding climate science, but they choose to dismiss it because they attach different values and meanings to climate change as a concept. Hulme suggests that the real climate change debate is not based on the knowable facts of climate change, but on what climate change has come to symbolize for various sociocultural groups. Thus, in order to encourage legislation that may help to mitigate the effects of climate change, we need to steer arguments away from issues of morality and reframe the debate entirely. In a guest blog post on Big Think, Markowitz suggests that we “Highlight widely-shared, positive social norms—such as prohibitions against being wasteful—as a way to both increase pro-climate action and increase the salience of morally-relevant considerations in the context climate change” (Markowitz and Nisbet n.p.). That is, perhaps we need to focus not on climate science, but on issues of waste, overconsumption, and air and water pollution. Further, we need to broaden the scope of how we understand ecojustice and stewardship arguments in order to find common ground. For instance, we might consider how arguments predicated on ecojustice models might more readily adapt to models of stewardship. Stewardship arguments (which are quite malleable) may be broadened so as to provide alternate soteriological models for conservative Evangelicals. If we wish to move the American public to act upon mitigating the effects of climate change, we need to capitalize on where we are in agreement, rather than trying to persuade one another to rethink deeply held beliefs.