sins against God's creation

Historical Reflection

Well-meaning Christians have different interpretations of the science surrounding today's environmental concerns. They often disagree about how the Bible and Christian theology speak to a Christ follower's moral responsibility in stewarding creation and responding to environmental needs. Some see technological advancement as an appropriate way for humanity to bring glory to God. Others assert that the environment and creation should be approached with greater sensitivity and an ever-growing understanding of environmental justice on behalf of the kingdom of the Creator. This chapter reviews some of the historical perspectives of American Christians toward the stewardship of the environment and creation in North America.

European settlers imported their faith to the Americas in ways that often had a negative impact on the environment. Otsego settlers in New York, inspired by their Protestant faith, believed that "conquering the forest and its wild animals was a service to God." These early colonists believed stewardship of the creation meant conquering the unredeemed landscape and destroying whatever was dangerous, including wild animals. Society at that time gave special honor to settlers who destroyed such beasts as wolves, panthers, and bears. Settlers encouraged the killing of wild animals in part because of their need for safety and security, but an excessive destruction of wildlife was not only commonplace but lauded in early Colonial American society. According to historian Alan Taylor, early settlers "assailed the wild plant and animal life with a vengeance born, in part, from the memory of recent sufferings," and thus, deforestation, as one manifestation, became a mark of pride and status. The conditions were harsh, and mere survival was part of the daily struggle for many colonists. As Protestant Christians, most of them saw their transformation of the forest as creating permanent communities and a fulfillment of their religious duty rather than an abuse of the landscape.

In a highly debated essay about the environment, "The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," renowned historian William Cronon writes about the deep roots of the "wilderness ethic" in American history. Before the eighteenth century, the word wilderness had largely negative connotations, often denoting hostility—such connotations as deserted, savage, desolate, barren—all words used to describe the early American settlers' experience of the wilderness. This explains some of the hostility toward vegetation, nature, and the animal kingdom.

Furthermore, Cronon asserts that the origin of the colonists' views were significantly informed by the King James Version of the Bible. Such verses as Genesis 1:28 became powerful justifications for the settlers: "Replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

Of course some early Christian settlers viewed the continent's vast resources as a manifestation of God's creative power and believed the abundance surrounding them to be worthy of appreciation and praise. Still, their wonder was balanced against such biblical accounts as Moses' forty years of wandering and Christ's temptation by Satan—events that occurred in "the wilderness." According to Cronon, "Wilderness ... was a place to which one came only against one's will, and always in fear and trembling." The wilderness, in early American Christian thought, was where God conquered the sinful nature of man, the devil was overcome, and temptations were faced by the triumphant nature of Christ. Thus, the wilderness had little inherent value other than needing to be conquered and overcome.

The religious obligation that some early colonists felt to subdue the animal kingdom continued well into the nineteenth century. Antebellum Americans took seriously their perceived commitments to conquer nature and often recorded their conquests as a mark of pride and a sign of victory. In 1850 one old hunter in New York "calculated that in his lifetime he had killed 77 panthers, 214 wolves, 219 bears, and 2,550 deer." Animals were not always killed for such practical reasons as protection, food, or the use of their fur or hides; rather they continued to be viewed as "beasts of the field" whose destruction was an expression of the power and "dominion" of man, as an agent of God, over creation. Little did they know that by killing the most dangerous predators, like wolves, those lower on the food chain, like deer, were able to overpopulate, which caused disease and other problems by throwing the local ecosystem off balance.

While eighteenth-century Americans perceived nature and the wilderness as "the antithesis of all that was orderly and good," as Cronon puts it, this notion began to shift with the rise of the Romantic movement in the decades following the establishment of the United States of America. The possibility of viewing the wilderness as somehow sacred had been present even when Europeans settled the Americas; however, this attitude became more widely adopted in the nineteenth century. Cronon asserts there were now fewer perceived boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, between the material and supernatural worlds, than when the settlers first pondered the idea of wilderness. As communities grew more stable, the need to overcome the evil forces of the wilderness diminished, and the redeemable qualities of nature began to be acknowledged and admired.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, as Romanticism continued to spread, American Christians came to be strongly influenced by the movement's idea of the sublime. The sublime refers to whatever is otherworldly, beyond human comprehension, reflecting a power and grandeur that could even be supernatural in origin. Christians who viewed nature as sublime began to view animals and plants as divine expressions of God's manifestation on earth. Rather than being viewed as evil, creation became increasingly understood as a doorway to the divine. For Christians, God's presence began to be increasingly associated with nature. They came to see and experience God in natural phenomena such as mountains, fields, valleys, and rivers, and also in natural acts of creation such as the sunrise, storms, the wind, and waves.

This view of nature was deeply influenced by the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Fenimore Cooper, among others. Their romantic ideologies challenged the assumption that wilderness was a force that needed to be overcome. Cronon writes of this phenomenon, "Wilderness fulfills the old romantic project of secularizing Judeo-Christian values so as to make a new cathedral not in some petty human building but in God's own creation, Nature itself." Wilderness came to be associated with the natural order of things and goodness, like the Garden of Eden itself. This shift in Christian thinking had a powerful impact on Americans' views of the environment.

By the late nineteenth century, the United States government had begun to establish the first national parks, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Mackinac National Park. Following this momentum, Theodore Roosevelt was the first American president to make conservation a prime campaign issue for his administration. In 1906 he signed a bill that consolidated the control of Yosemite National Park under the ownership, management, and regulation of the federal government. A decade later the National Parks Service was established.

In the twentieth century, this attitude of awe and admiration for the environment shifted to a modernist framework, stressing utility and functionality. The country's vast open lands came to be thought of as a direct gift from God, providing abundant natural resources—coal, natural gas, minerals, or other products. This new theological emphasis focused on "stewardship"; that is, the land provided resources that God intended humans to exploit. It was not only a privilege but an obligation for Christians to use and steward those resources by securing the greatest value from them.

This shifting idea of Christian stewardship had devastating effects, however, in regions such as Appalachia which are often characterized by their extreme poverty. By the 1960s, government programs such as the War on Poverty were significantly engaged in Appalachia. That program was part of President Johnson's Great Society, which endorsed the goal of ending domestic poverty. Many economists viewed such poverty as a "deviation from the norm" and believed it could be eliminated by continued growth and economic development—in other words, by even more effective stewardship of the earth.

Two predominant assumptions influenced the development of Appalachia and the significant poverty that was, and continues to be, significant throughout the region. First, Appalachia was viewed "as a place of cultural backwardness in a nation of progressive values." Many people believed that the region's poverty was the result of "cultural deficiencies, antiquated values, and low expectations." In other words, poverty was not the result of outside forces, but the outcome of fundamental deficiencies in the people themselves and their communities. Christian leaders supported this view, often identifying the people of the Appalachia as "backward" and ill-prepared for the modern world. Jack Weller, a Presbyterian minister from New York, summed it up: "The greatest challenge of Appalachia, and the most difficult ... is its people."

To address this perceived backwardness, missionary efforts were aimed at the region and became an integral part of the area's history since the late nineteenth century. Catholic and Protestant groups alike sent young people as teachers, ministers, and social workers. While many of these efforts brought about significant progress in the lives of individuals, they failed to address systemic economic issues affecting the community. Religious workers, guided by the belief that the people of the Appalachia were the problem, sought to help them "pull themselves up by the boot straps" while at the same time failing to address holistic issues of societal transformation.

A second predominant assumption was that Appalachia, like the rest of America, would become more productive and successful if it was only subjected to more technology and industrial advancement. Again, this ideology was deeply rooted in the notion from Genesis that people could best steward God's creation by subduing it. Historian Ronald Eller writes in his book Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945 about this phenomenon:

As a result of the rapid expansion of modern technologies after World War II, difficult terrain could be breached to promote commerce with the larger world. Streams could be relocated, rivers damned, and hillsides developed for housing, recreation, and business use. Most of all, entire mountains and ranges of mountains could be leveled to extract their mineral resources and to create a landscape more suitable for manufacturing and retail expansion.

Often the exploitation of the land for natural resources did not directly benefit the community, instead creating cycles of dependency in which local workers were paid minimum wage, subjugated to poor working conditions, and could do little as their social systems became increasingly dependent on the corporations that controlled the industries. This dominance of industrial influence even extended to the local churches, which were themselves largely dependent on a company's financial support.

In the 1960s and 1970s significant national movements began, particularly in Appalachia, against strip mining. Support for a national ban on surface mining reached its peak in 1972 with the Buffalo Creek crisis in Logan County, West Virginia. Over the span of several years, the Buffalo Mining Company, a subsidiary of Pittston Coal Company, the largest independent coal producer in the US, had placed dams along Buffalo Creek as a means of waste disposal. These came to be known as "gob pile dams" because they appeared to be black pools located in the middle fork of Buffalo Creek. They consisted of rock debris, dirt, and other waste discharged from coal plants. These dump sites are still so common that locals often use regional slang to identify them: "colliery spoil" (if you are British), "culm" (if you are from Pennsylvania), and "Red Dog" (if the gob pile has caught fire and is burning). On February 26, 1972, one gob pile dam broke, causing a thirty-foot wave of water to descend upon a nearby town, killing 125 people and leaving more than 4,000 homeless. According to Eller, Pittston Coal Company assumed no responsibility for the tragedy. One company representative even declared that the tragedy was "an act of God."

Sadly, the Christian community often does not respond to tragedies like the Buffalo Creek disaster. Only a few young radical Christians, such as Michael Clark of the Church of the Brethren Appalachian Caucus and the Reverend B. Lloyd of the Anglican Appalachian People's Service Organization, took up the cause. Clark and Lloyd believed that the degradation of the environment was the result of the exploitation of workers in their community. One activist wrote: "People are forced out of their homes and from their farms because it is more profitable to let mud slide into living rooms and across cornfields than it is to mine coal with care. Little thought is given to farmlands which would have fed families for generations to come."

By the 1970s and 1980s, poor communities in the region, including Native American and African American communities, "began to notice that toxic mining and dumping on their lands by deregulated industries were causing elevated levels of cancer and other life-threatening ailments." The effects of industrialization and strip mining were having a devastating effect on the people living alongside these projects of so-called advancement. While many Christians remained silent, the United Church of Christ sponsored a study in 1987 called "Toxic Waste and Race," which found a direct correlation between the placement of toxic dumping sites and poor communities of color. This study was a step in the right direction, tracing the links between poverty, race, and environmental degradation. In the 1990s, following in the footsteps of the "Toxic Waste and Race" report, the environmental justice movement was born. New environmental legislation, such as the Clean Air Act of 1990, was a direct outcome of this movement and highlighted the growing emphasis for community well-being to be addressed holistically in light of proper treatment of the environment and the earth's resources.

All these stories, from the early colonists' excessive slaughter of wild animals to the Buffalo Creek tragedy, shed light on how Christian attitudes have created a climate in which sins against creation take place. Christians have not only sinned against the environment, but they have also failed to intervene when environmental degradation is perpetuated by their neighbors and others in society. In fact, because Christians often benefit financially from the very industries that have devastated God's creation, they are often those industries' strongest allies and supporters.

In the late 1990s, Vice President Al Gore became an outspoken voice on behalf of the environment. His 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, sought to educate people about the negative effects of climate change. Many prominent Christians had a heyday criticizing not only the film, but attacking Gore and his efforts personally. For example, the policy arm of Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family, "Citizen Link," published several articles seeking to discredit Gore's message. One article, titled "A Skeptics Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism" seeks to refute "catastrophe climate fears presented by the media, the United Nations, and former Vice President turned-foreign-lobbyist Al Gore." Indeed, legitimate scientific reasons may well exist to counter some of Al Gore's assertions, especially as new research is done that refines and expands what we know. But some Christians seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater by rejecting all reasonable environmental concerns simply because such concerns are seen to be associated with liberal politics or are raised by people who do not share Christians' assumptions and principles.

One of the greatest concerns of twenty-first-century environmentalists is the overconsumption of the earth's resources, particularly by people in the US. With this in mind, Michael Northcott, a Christian ethicist and theologian, sheds light on the intersection between the environment and Christian ethics. He points out the current realities of the earth's environmental crisis: global warming, pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, species extinction, overpopulation, and overconsumption. In his book The Environment and Christian Ethics, Northcott calls on Christians to acknowledge the biological limits of our planet and the ways certain Christian assumptions and theological assertions have led to the abuse and injustice toward God's creation. Northcott asserts a Christian ethic that assumes "only the recovery of a spiritual, moral, and cosmological awareness of our place in the natural order ... can enable our civilization to begin to shift priorities and its values in a more harmonious direction."