Taking Care of God's World

May 26 2005

Question:

Do you think we might be on the road to destroying the world?  I’m very concerned about things like global warming and pollution, and I’m even thinking about a career in environmental science.

Billy Graham’s answer:

I believe Christians especially should be concerned about the environment – and the reason is because we know this is God’s world, not ours.  God created it; it isn’t here by chance.  And God put us here to be stewards or trustees of the world – to take care of it and use it responsibly.  …  Why haven’t we done this?  Why are we so careless about the way we treat the world?  The reason is because we’ve forgotten that this is God’s world.  We act as if we are the center of the universe.  Our lives are ruled by greed and selfishness, and we don’t care what happens to others or to our world. 

Jen’s response:

This is an interesting response.  Yes indeed, there is a strong environmental movement within the Christian evangelical world.  I am glad that Billy is apparently part of this movement.  But the reality is that the biggest group working to prevent the USA from adopting good environmental policies (ie: a policy of sustainability that works towards a clean environment) is also a Christian evangelical group, a subset of the Dominionists.[1] 

Basically, Christian Evangelicals fall into three categories when it comes to environmental policy.  The first, like Graham believe that God made us stewards of the earth and we should do a good job of keeping things clean.  The 2^nd believe that God gave us dominion over the earth and the sooner we use up the resources of the earth, the sooner Armageddon will occur, and therefore, the sooner all the chosen ones can go home to heaven. (I’m not making this stuff up).  The 3^rd group is like Cal Thomas (the syndicated columnist) who believes that the end of the world is already here because gay marriage has been legalized, so why are the 1^st two groups arguing when they should be out converting people’s souls.

My question is this.  Why aren’t the environmentally minded Christians denouncing the lunacy of their Dominionist breathren?  Why have they allowed these wacky people bent of destroying the earth (quite literally) to become part of the most politically powerful of all the Christian movements?  Why do they keep voting for people based on the fact they believe in God when the people they are voting for clearly also believe in bringing on Armageddon as soon as possible? 

Yes, a Graham points out, there is some greed at play here.  And the greedy oligarchy in this country have gotten into bed with the Dominionists as the Dominionists make excellent political foot soldiers and aren’t prone to ask pesky questions. 

Taking Christ into your heart is fine, but it has nothing to do with whether you believe in having a sane environmental policy.  Those who are working very hard to destroy everything in their messianic fervor believe in God very strongly (otherwise they wouldn’t be have the guts to commit suicide on such a global scale).

It is time to re-introduce the concept of rationality into our public discussions.  And when a group of loonies says that we should destroy the earth to bring on Armageddon so that they can go to heaven and to hell with the rest of you, the rest of us should not be afraid to tell them that we disagree.  And the sooner we acknowledge that a form of religious lunacy is preventing us from having a sane environmental policy, the sooner we can overcome this particular obstacle.  Of course, we still need to deal with the oligarchs, but that is a different lesson entirely.