God’s Green Earth

Jesus, says Reverend Jim Ball, would definitely support public transportation. “We believe the Risen Lord Jesus cares about what we drive,” Ball writes on his website http://www.whatwouldjesusdrive.com.

“Pollution from vehicles has a major impact on human health and the rest of God’s creation. It contributes significantly to the threat of global warming… Obeying Jesus in our transportation choices is one of the great Christian obligations and opportunities of the 21st century.”

An American Baptist minister and the editor of the small quarterly Creation Care, A Christian Environmental Quarterly, Ball hit the media circuit last November when he, along with Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reformed Judaism and the Reverend Dr. Bob Edgar, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, delivered open letters to the chief executives at General Motors, Ford, and Daimler-Chrysler. “What specific pledges…will you make to produce automobiles, S.U.V.s, and pickup trucks with substantially greater fuel economy?” Ball asked. Meanwhile, television commercials sponsored by the Evangelical Environmental Network superimposed an image of Jesus rising from the clouds onto scenes of traffic jams and a child using an inhaler. “If we cherish God’s creation,” an echoing voiceover suggested, “maybe we should ask, ‘What would Jesus drive?’”

As priests and ministers preach the holy word of the scriptures in congregations across the nation, some have begun to urge their members to be not only spiritually aware, but environmentally conscious. While the WWJD caravan drives through the country’s larger cities, spiritual leaders in cities and suburbs alike turn their attention to energy conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing rates of childhood asthma.

Of course, social awareness is not new to the religious community; churches have often served as a home to soup kitchens, adult education centers, and shelters. But the connection between Christian and environmental values is less clear. How the Holy Book instructs us to treat the environment, critics say, is subject to interpretation.

The Word is Environmental

To Reverend Steven MacAusland, the answer is clear: to protect the environment is to unconditionally carry out God’s word. In 1998, MacAusland founded Interfaith Power and Light (IFPL) in Massachusetts—“a group committed to revealing the love of our Creator by working together to sustain creation.” For the past five years, IFPL’s representatives have made their way into churches across the country, preaching the spiritual rewards of environmental stewardship.

MacAusland discovered environmentalism before he discovered the Church. After graduating from Williams College, he traveled up to Northern Canada where he worked as a community organizer to prevent the infiltration of Canada’s largest hydro project into Native American territory. He and his fellow activists failed to save the land from development, but MacAusland returned to Canada after the announcement that a similar hydro project was getting under way in a neighboring region. This time, activists brought the plans to a standstill. It was upon his victory in James Bay that MacAusland joined the Episcopalian Church, serving on its Committee for the Environment.

“The Episcopal Church, at that point, seemed the best avenue for me to continue my environmental justice work,” says MacAusland, now an Episcopalian minister. “The community of faith needs to get involved. There are churches all over the place. They’re a great place to get the word out.”

But churches are more than pragmatic locations for MacAusland’s mission. He believes that caring for the environment epitomizes the Christian value of caring for those in need. “Do we love our neighbors when our use of electricity seriously impacts the health of the poor who have no choice but to live in the shadow of coal burning power plants?” MacAusland asks his congregation. “Do we love our neighbors when our consumption of foreign oil contributes significantly to conflict around the world? And do we love our neighbors when our emission of greenhouse gases changes the very climate on this fragile earth, our island home?”

Like MacAusland, Reverend Fletcher Harper of Trenton, New Jersey, believes that protecting the earth is both a religious and civic duty. “Our souls are refreshed and strengthened by the natural world,” Harper says. “Being in the natural outdoors, I am reminded of the tremendously powerful healing process of the natural world.”

In 2000, Harper became the executive director of Partners for Environmental Quality (PEQ), an organization that spreads its mission of environmental protection throughout New Jersey. PEQ, says Harper, “was founded in 1992 in order to promote the stewardship of creation as well as continue the work that faith-based groups have done for our urban poor.”

It is the poor, says Harper, who suffer most from the effects of pollution. Some of the country’s largest oil refineries and coal plants are located in New Jersey’s poorest areas, such as Elizabeth and Newark, which have been the consequent focus of PEQ efforts. In Long Branch, a low-income neighborhood on the Jersey Shore, PEQ organized a march in opposition to a coal plant, abandoned by the local government, whose toxins continue to permeate the surrounding region. Public pressure against an oil refinery in Linden has mounted after PEQ organized community members; an Occupational Safety and Health Administration audit had found over fifteen violations of environmental health safety in the building.

Communion Along Sidewalks

One of environmentalism’s most common themes is how suburban sprawl wreaks havoc on the natural world. Affirming what environmentalists have asserted for years, a recent study by the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group showed that development in New Jersey’s fastest growing regions is polluting drinking water. “The study goes a long way to making the connection that there is a direct relationship between the amount of development and the degradation of water quality,” says Jennifer O’Reilly, associate executive director of Save Barnegat Bay. “We see it every day.”

The suburban development of New Jersey between 1986 and 1995 claimed 144,000 acres of farmland, forests, and wetlands. The story is the same in developing states across the nation. In an attempt to escape what are perceived as cities overwhelmed by pollution, flight to the “pristine suburbs” only heightens the region’s environmental destruction.

It’s not surprising then that environmentalist and New Urbanist movements can often work hand in hand. Eric Jacobsen, in Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith, argues that one achieves a true spiritual communion not by simply protecting the environment, but by protecting the environment through protecting cities. The City is holy, he says, and the Suburb, by causing the destruction of the City, is spiritually bankrupt.

In the first chapter of his book, Jacobsen retells a passage from the Book of Revelations in the New Testament. Exiled on the island of Patmos, John is presented with a picture of the redeemed state. He “does not see Eden restored in some kind of an agrarian utopia;” Jacobsen writes, “nor does he see the American ideal of a single-family detached house surrounded by a huge yard for every inhabitant of the kingdom.” John the Evangelist sees a city. “And I saw the holy city,” John states, “the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.” Emerging as the center for communion with God, the city of Jerusalem was safeguarded from the sins of suburbanization that plague modern-day cities, such as New York and Boston. Because Jerusalem served as a site of redemption, rural Jews enjoyed the culture that it offered and, in return, served as stewards of the surrounding environment. Jacobsen argues that those who reside in today’s suburbs fail to provide for cities in the same way that the rural Jews were able to produce food and other resources.

Jacobsen contends that the City, by the very values it enables, is the true site of communion with God; as the city of Jerusalem is redeemed, it becomes the center of those morals that all Christians should hold dear. The critical mass that urban dwellings create makes possible the Christian values of sharing, loving thy neighbor, being a Good Samaritan, and even walking in a way that the suburban life never could. Suburbanization (and the cars it has generated) does not engender the same sense of community that develops from walking and engaging with city neighbors. As Jacobsen writes, “the conditions of city life create opportunities for the fruits of the spirit to grow as if one is in fact being directed by the Holy Spirit.”

Sins of the City

Not all Christians accept the relationship between religion and environmentalism. When the WWJD movement surfaced last year, Reverend Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network said in a statement, “I think the concept of linking Jesus to an anti-SUV campaign borders on blasphemy, and I regard it as a joke.” Evangelical groups, whom Jacobsen labels “private Christians,” have resisted organizing efforts in the belief that secular environmental organizations use religious groups for their own political ends.

Some opponents of the movement suggest that the act of loving thy neighbor is actually hindered by what may be called an obsessive protection of the environment. In his book, The Virgin and the Dynamo: The Use and Abuse of Religion in Environmental Debates, Robert Royal, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in D.C., argues that environmentalists of faith make the mistake of scorning human progress as they idolize nature. “Without blaspheming,” Royal writes, “it can be said that today the hungry are fed, captives freed, the lame walk, the blind see because human beings have made systematic efforts to understand and utilize nature and to distribute goods through efficient economic arrangements.”

Jacobsen’s faith-based advocacy for the protection of cities comes under an even greater attack from the dissenters of the religious environmentalist movement. Representations of cities in the Bible are not always as hopeful as John’s imagined Jerusalem. When Cain built the city of Enoch, he committed the second sin against God. To some present-day Evangelical Christians, Cain’s relationship with the city is a manifestation of his broken relationship with the land and represents man’s relationship with all cities. This anti-urban bias is further rooted in the fact that cities in the Bible have been the site of conceit and political oppression. The tower of Babel is often believed to represent self-assertion rather than holiness, while the construction of the city of Ramses entailed the use of coercive power over the enslaved Israelites.

In his book Courage to Stand: Jeremiah’s Battle Plan for Pagan Times, Phillip Graham Ryken writes, “Most postmodern cities are like Babylon. They are Cities of Man ruled by Satan, and Satan is doing his best to turn them into suburbs of hell. One can see it in the abandoned buildings, the graffiti, the tired faces of prostitutes, the racial altercations, the slow shuffle of the poor, and the great buildings built for human pride. Satan has been very busy.” Ryken goes on to ask, “What should God’s people do when their zip codes place them in Satan’s precincts?” While he may call on people’s duty to redeem the city from its bed of sin, other evangelists are not so hopeful nor so ambitious.

“We have definitely had a harder time gaining access to evangelical communities,” Reverend Harper states, unwilling to disclose further details out of fear of further alienating such groups. Yet he can’t resist revealing one personal anecdote: “A private Christian once told me, ‘Well, you must be a pagan if you do this work.’”

Beyond Judeo-Christian Involvement

The growing movement of religious environmentalists has alienated not only the more evangelical members of the Christian faith, but other religious minorities who feel left out of the movement’s reach. Although the group is still in its infancy, it’s easy to question the extent to which Interfaith Power and Light has lived up to its name.

Religion aside, environmentalism has long been criticized for its tendency to be an upper middle-class white movement. “When I go into a black church,” says Fletcher Harper, “I know my job is going to be harder, and I know that the skepticism of the congregation is a result of the fact that some environmentalists have unfortunately spent too much time trying to save spotted owls and not enough time trying to deal with the causes of increased rates of childhood asthma among African-American children.”

Now, with the introduction of religion into the equation, the question may become: to what extent can green politics be seen as an upper middle-class, white, Jewish and Christian movement? The National Council of Churches—“an interdenominational/interfaith organization working to provide on-line environmental resources for faith-based communities”—has organized an Eco-Justice working group in which a number of Christian denominations are represented, including African Baptists, Greek Orthodox, and the Commission on Religion in Appalachia. Even though the Bible is not the only religious text with environmental undertones, however, the environmental movement has not attracted non-Christian and non-Jewish congregations. The Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions—rapidly gaining strength in numbers across the Northeast—also contain an inherent respect for one’s natural surroundings. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna to work “for the benefit of the earth and not at the cost of it.” Similarly, Buddha instructed his followers to be peace-loving creatures and not to harm any living beings.

Ahmed Afzaal, a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Drew University, is currently writing his thesis on environmentalist implications in the Quran. “The current trend of religious environmentalists and the flourishing Muslim population in this country have the potential to connect,” Afzaal says. As he recounts the points in the Quran at which man is entrusted with the duty of protecting the earth, Afzaal describes man’s role as a viceregent who is perceived as the trustee of the earth and should not corrupt the environment in any fashion. “In the Islam tradition, it is not life that entails great responsibilities,” Afzaal explains, “but more specifically, life on earth.”

Private Edens

Some critics have complained that the religious environmentalism movement is insufficiently inclusive. Other critics have argued that secular environmentalists have employed religious groups as an organizing tool and that the connection between faith and environmentalism is contrived and strategic.

Yet proponents of environmentalism’s creative basis in religion believe that it is not religious groups that have become increasingly secular; rather, secular environmentalists have always been inherently dependent on their faith. As Jacobsen writes, “our secular culture is moving in a spiritual direction… The New Urbanists are reminding us that human community requires a certain physical structure that has been provided in all times and all places of the world except in postwar America’s sprawling suburbs.”

Echoing Jacobsen, Harper describes how images of utopia are intrinsic to all environmental movements: “Secular environmentalists have long turned the natural world into paradise.” Perhaps the pristine photos of an untouched natural world in the calendars of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace suggest a subconscious longing for a return to a spiritual paradise. “There is a sense of eternity to all environmental movements,” Harper says, “a sense of eternity which includes this earth, but is greater than this earth.”

Harper’s comment brings us back to the fundamental divide of the religious environmentalist movement—between those who privilege the paradise of the natural environment and those who prize the holiness of the City. As congregations across the country garner their faith in an attempt to save this world, perhaps the longing to return to a pristine paradise is misguided. As Jacobsen asks in his book, “Does God care about beauty and quality on this earth and in our cities?… How can beings who are sinful and imperfect hope to approximate anything remotely related to that which God creates?” While the City may not provide the image of a pristine paradise that, according to Harper, we all inherently crave, there are those who claim that we must accept the City’s failings. Just as the city of New Jerusalem was a site of redemption, perhaps the modern day city is also a site at which human capabilities are tested. As Jacobsen concludes, “we cannot retreat to our own private gardens… We must at some level learn to take our cities seriously. We need to look to our cities if we hope to catch a glimpse of what God has in store for us.” And as Jeremiah tells the Jews sent to Babylon, “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”