Love Your Mother Care for His Creation

Published on February 7, 2005

How do you get evangelicals behind conservationism when their idea of environmentalist is a tree-hugging pagan? In part, writes Blaine Harden in a two-part report for The Washington Post, by changing all the names associated with green living, from environmentalism, to Creation Care, and environmentalist, to Good Steward. According to Harden, would-be stewards are popping […]

How do you get evangelicals behind conservationism when their idea of environmentalist is a tree-hugging pagan? In part, writes Blaine Harden in a two-part report for The Washington Post, by changing all the names associated with green living, from environmentalism, to Creation Care, and environmentalist, to Good Steward. According to Harden, would-be stewards are popping up all over evangelicaldom. On the right, from Ted Haggard and the National Association of Evangelicals, Jim Dobson, Chuck Colson and Richard Cizik. On the more liberal side, the National Council of Churches, which just released a frustrated statement titled, “God’s Mandate: Care for Creation,” that denied a Bush mandate to change any existing environmental protections. But that’s not say that Harden takes both sides seriously: the article on the greening of the Christian Right is four times as long as that on the N.C.C. statement. More pronounced than the question of how to make environmentalism attractive to conservative evangelicals is the foregone conclusion that they’re the only signifiant players left on the field, and therefore the only hope of saving the environment depends on how skillfully conservationists can tie Creation Care to evangelical concerns about the family or abortion and the survival of the unborn.

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