Even though many evangelical Christians criticized the 1967 paper by Lynn White, Jr. (see previous blog entry), he was right in his conclusion that conservative Christianity has encouraged a brutal conquest of nature. One reason is that the Bible is not a book. It is a collection of books, written by many people over many centuries, and it does not have a single coherent message. Most of the biblical books are themselves the product of editorial redaction from different primordial traditions. The first chapter of Genesis, correctly interpreted by White, presents a different view of creation from the second chapter, which was originally written by a different person. Each part of the Bible potentially contradicts every other part. An adherent of Christianity may choose to accept a Biblical image of conquering the Earth, or a Biblical image of taking care of it. It all depends on which passage is chosen. Adherents of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam can, however, force these passages into harmony, and in this way they can use the second chapter of Genesis to ameliorate the first.
White was right for another reason. Christian theologians have forced all the Biblical passages into harmony, and the climax of this harmonized Bible is the book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is the only example of an entire style of literature, popular in the Mediterranean world about 100 C.E., which is familiar to most modern readers. In this book, the entire biosphere of the Earth is destroyed during cosmic battles between good and evil, and those who are saved live in Heaven. The Heavenly City there described is the antithesis of biodiversity, and contains virtually nothing of the original creation. There is a river and a single tree. Everything else is gold and jewels—an utterly artificial environment. If this is, as about half of Americans believe, the future of the universe, what is the point of saving species and ecosystems? (See earlier blog entries for more on this idea.) For this reason also, if Christians are to participate in the rescue of the environment, they must look beyond the Bible and perhaps, as White suggests, emulate St. Francis.
The extreme popularity of apocalyptic Christianity meant that Christians, as a whole, were a feeble source of support for environmental protection. Their main passion was to support the politically conservative George W. Bush Administration, which rejected the evidence of global warming and paid little attention to environmental protection. In fact, after the end of the Bush administration, the full extent of conservative neglect for even the most basic environmental protection became obvious. The Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior was supposed to license fossil fuel extraction on federal lands with due consideration of the impact that this extraction would have on natural habitats. Instead, they gave licenses to corporations in return for bribes and sexual favors. When President Bush left the 2007 economic summit, he said, “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” making environmental ethics into what he considered to be a joke.
Edward O. Wilson, perhaps the world’s leading defender of biodiversity, wrote a book that was addressed to an unnamed Baptist minister. Wilson said that a conservative Christian could find common ground with even a secular humanist like himself by defending the Earth, which Wilson called the Creation. Wilson, however, wrote this book only after originally considering the Christian environmental movement to be a hopeless cause.
With the end of the Bush Administration and the disgrace of several leading Christian anti-environmentalists, a tide of opinion has turned towards Christian environmentalism. Despite this, many conservative Christians still consider the Earth to be unworthy of serious attention. They focus their attention instead on fighting against evolutionary science. When Edward O. Wilson visited Oklahoma in March 2009, a group of creationists disputed him about whether Charles Darwin did or did not believe in a Creator, and in the process Wilson’s impassioned plea for saving the Earth’s biodiversity was largely obscured. The view of the Earth that many conservative Christians have can be summarized in this way: “It’s okay to spit on it, to drive a truck over it, to spill oil on it, to chop it down, or to shoot it, so long as you don’t believe that it evolved!”
This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.
No comments:
Post a Comment