a christians concern for the environment

Kelsey Anderson

In class this week, not only in Religion and Ecology, but also in my Visions of Christianity class, a disagreement within the Christian churches was brought to my attention. When politics are brought into the church it seems that is impossible to find a united front on any issue and the environment is no outlier.
In recent news it was announced that some scientists and evangelical Christians have come together to fight global warming, however not all Christians want in on this fight. When I heard that some Christians did not find the protection of our environment to be important I began to wonder if an answer to whether or not Christians should care could be found in scripture. Did God tell us to take care of his creation, or can we as Christians take an apocalyptic view towards the worsening environment and take this as a sign that we are moving closer and closer to the end of times, or does it matter either way, is apathy the real answer?
In my class Wilderness as Sacred Place we were told to look up what is sacred. Through many definitions I found that there were three parts to the idea of being sacred. The first is that the adjective implies that whatever it is describing is deserving, and commanding of respect and it is entitled to religious respect due to its association with divinity. The second part is that, because of what the word sacred implies we respond to or interact with whatever is sacred in certain ways. These ways are that we make, believe and declare it to be holy, we honor it and we secure it from destruction, violence, infringement or desecration. The last characteristic of something that is sacred is that it is “often intimately connected with God or a divinity.” After this my next question was “is the environment sacred?”
The first two characteristics of sacred do not tell us how to know if the environment is sacred so I immediately looked at the final characteristic. Is the environment intimately connected with God? My initial reaction is yes, because God created the environment, and on earth it is quite possible that the most intimate relationship is that between a mother and a child. A mother carries a child inside of her for 9 months and then raises that child. The mother however did not get to artistically create what this child would look like and how this child would act and the mother though she may try does not control the actions of her child. However God does have all of that with the environment he has created.
After this I thought for sure the environment must be sacred, however then I thought well God created everything really, so does that make everything sacred? I therefore became slightly skeptical and decided that to prove that the environment was sacred I would need to find another example. I then opened up the scriptures and turned to Exodus and read about the Israelites escape from Egypt and being stuck in the desert for 40 years. In this story I found a new and more intimate depiction of God’s interaction with the environment. I found that God not only created the environment but the environment was a part of him. He spoke to Moses through a bush, he became a cloud during the day for the people to follow, he rained down bread to feed them, and he spoke to them through the thunder and the lightning. After this example I could not deny that God had an intimate connection with the environment.
If we at this point refer back to the definition of sacred and apply parts one and two to the environment, we will find that Christians can not be apathetic nor can they take the apocalyptic view, Christians have to “secure (the environment) from destruction, violence, infringement or desecration.”