I often hear the claim that environmentalism is a kind of new religion, usually from folks who are trying to disparage the movement.

I think it’s partly right. The human bent toward legalism, finger-pointing, self-righteousness and meddling finds its expression in various forms of fundamentalism, whether in churches, mosques, or environmental circles. Part of our sin nature is a desire to find some weapon to wield over others whom we deem less worthy than ourselves.

If you don’t believe there are environmental fundamentalists, try throwing way an aluminum can at a Sierra Club event. Or talking about the joys of Southern barbecue, or the happiness that comes with having three kids (or two, or more than none) in certain environmental circles. There can be a little venom in those green fangs. It can feel like a religion, with all its rules and finger-pointing.

But if our “critique” of environmentalism stops with its own finger-pointing and doesn’t provide a springboard for salty encounters with the world, we are missing a huge opportunity. It’s not enough to claim that environmentalism seems like a religion. We have to provide some answers for what to do about that.

After all, Jesus didn’t come to offer a new religion, or a new set of standards, or a new ethic. He came to offer himself–to us, and for us. Through his death on the cross, he offers us a restored relationship, first with our Creator, but also with our fellow man, and with the rest of Creation.

Thoughtful environmentalists are often racked by guilt, but so are non-environmentalists, who realize that in almost every dimension of life they don’t live up to their own standards, much less the standards of a holy and righteous God. Christians should be bold in proclaiming that the answers to today’s crises, whether political, social, moral, or environmental, are not found in Law but in Grace.

It’s no surprise that folks outside the church who perceive a crisis would want to find religious answers to it. The shame is that most Christians don’t even have a vocabulary for talking about the environment in Christian terms. Letting a Biblical worldview infuse our consciousness would allow us to cultivate conversations about how God’s grace operates in every sphere of life.

(1) God’s common grace operates to reveal his awesome power and divine nature through the created order (Romans 1:20; Psalm 19). Why do we fail to use this gracious revelation in our communications with environmentalists? I think part of the reason is that we Christans have failed to allow ourselves to encounter the incredible witness of Creation–we’re committed indoorsmen. Environmentalists may know more of the awesome nature of God than Christians do in this regard. If we aren’t humble enough to admit this, we won’t be very good at pointing people to Jesus.

(2) God’s common grace provides for our needs through the operation of the earth’s ecosystems. We may mouth the words about the rain falling on the just and the unjust, and the sun rising on the evil and the good (Matthew 5:45), but we too often leave rigorous learning about the operation and management of the planet to secular scientists and secular environmentalists. Because so few churches teach about this, we find ourselves unable to provide answers to secularists who understand something of how the world works, and want to offer thanks to someone or some thing. This is a travesty.

(3) God’s common grace restrains evil in the world, often through the hand of civil governments (Romans 13). Yet it is environmentalists who often have a better diagnosis of evil in the world, of how misuse and mistreatment of creation affects innocent people through pollution or wasteful resource use. They don’t usually find support in the church, especially in the evangelical church. Rather, they too often find Christians denying the very possibility of environmental problems through unsound prooftexting. And they find an anti-government, anti-regulatory streak that verges on rejecting the role of civil governments in the restraint of evil.

(4) Finally, and most to the point, God’s common grace operates through the human conscience, convicting the world of sin. Paul writes, “they [the Gentiles] show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them” (Romans 2:14-15; NASB). Isn’t this guilty conscience what Asma and Mohler are writing about?

It’s one thing for a Buddhist to complain about the operation of the conscience, but it is quite another for one of America’s best living theologians to seem to lament the operation of the conscience in non-Christians.

If people are convicted about their waste, their poor stewardship, their ignorance of the side-effects of their actions, shouldn’t we praise God for his grace by which this occurs, and point people to the answer offered by Jesus’ life and death on the cross? Awareness of sin is something we can share with the rest of the world; the disorder wreaked on the world by human ignorance is perceptible even to those outside the faith, and we can use this as common ground to communicate the gospel and to work for the common good.

God’s special grace, redeeming, sanctifying, and glorifying those who put their trust in Jesus, is the ultimate answer to today’s environmental crises. But we do a disservice to God, and to those he died to save, if we don’t use people’s awareness of creation and the disorder they find in it and in their own lives, to communicate the whole gospel story.

What’s the best book for Christians who want to learn about climate change? It isn’t the book written by the Nobel-prize winning author who appeared in the Academy-Award winning movie a few years back. After all, that author, though smart, was not a climate scientist, and because he was a polarizing political figure, he didn’t appeal to most Christians who don’t share his political views.

It also isn’t the massive tome, Global Warming: The Complete Briefing , by evangelical scientist and world-renowned climate expert Sir John Houghton. It’s very good, VERY complete, very thoughtful–it really lives up to its name. But it is quite an investment, not just of time but of money. If you’re looking for Climate Science 101, this isn’t it. (I think of how my kids sometimes ask my wife questions about environmental science. She’ll answer them, and then ask “but why didn’t you ask your father that question?” To which they reply, “Well, Mom, we didn’t want to know that much about it.”)

No, the book you should read this Christmas, and buy for your skeptical friends and family, is written by an evangelical husband-wife team–climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe and pastor/teacher Andrew Farley. A Climate for Change–Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions is a great resource for connecting with conservatives (like me) who are skeptical about the science (as I was for the first ten years of environmental teaching and research). It’s readable, understandable, scientifically accurate and theologically sound.

It’s also a good refresher course on the science and impacts of climate change, replete with great illustrations and ideas for communicating what we know and what we don’t know. It is obvious that the authors have spent many, many hours patiently and winsomely explaining these concepts to interested but skeptical audiences.

Things that I noted immediately–the science and theology behind creation care, as they presented it, do not require a commitment to an old earth or to theistic evolution. They tackle that issue head on. Moreover, they build a strong case for why creation care should be a priority even for those who believe (like many of us) that the Earth will one day pass away, to be replaced by a New Heaven and New Earth.

Together, Hayhoe and Farley walk through the basics of what any citizen should know about God’s creation and the climate system. They don’t drift into politics; they instead concentrate on informing us about what we need to know BEFORE we get into policy considerations.

You can order it now on Amazon: A Climate for Change–Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions by Katharine Hayhoe and Andrew Farley. I’m a curmudgeon who doesn’t like most climate books, but this one I recommend to everyone I meet.

Other resources:
To those who want a more in-depth “guidebook” to global warming science, I recommend the Rough Guide to Climate Change. Be sure to get the second edition, since it contains information from the last IPCC assessment in 2007.

Of course, climate science has continued to unfold since the last IPCC summary of the science nearly three years ago, and many of the predictions have proven to be outpaced by the rate of change on the ground. For a summary of recent science, look at the Copenhagen Diagnosis, written by leading climate researchers, which also corrects some of the enduring misconceptions about climate change science.

The website for the book A Climate for Change is pretty cool too. You can follow Katharine Hayhoe on Twitter and get great up-to-date analysis of breaking climate news.

Rusty Pritchard thinks climate change is happening and that people are causing part of it, but his views are his own and not those of his parent organization, Flourish. Flourish believes every Christian should be caring for creation, no matter where they come down on the climate issue.

The world of creation, and our responsibility to the earth God entrusted to us, which God has reconciled to himself through the Cross (Col. 1:20). If the planet was created by Christ, sustained by Christ, and belongs to Christ as his inheritance, the least we can do is to look after it properly. Biblical responsibility for stewardship of the earth should have been an evangelical theme long before the threat of climate change turned it into a matter of self-preservation.

Read the whole article. It’s good stuff.

Yet by the end of the twentieth century, another fundamental Christian doctrine could be regarded as empirically verified. The placement of the human race in "dominion" over the planet has shown up in study after study of global change–in articles on soil erosion, species extinction, biological invasions, nutrient pollution of water bodies, mercury pollution of global fish stocks, alterations of the global nitrogen cycle, and interference with the climate system.

With the 2007 release of the IPCC climate reports, we saw the first weighty summaries of science where the balance of evidence shifted from more or less plausible models of what the future portends to verifiable actual current impacts of climate change unfolding in real time.

Here’s a fundamental irony: At about the time that the first empirical evidence is accumulating to support the Christian doctrine of dominion–that God has granted to the human race a delegated but effective authority over the planet, as evidenced by our impact on not just local but global environments–you see Christians shrinking back from the doctrine. Several conservative Christians even testified before Congress that they didn’t believe God would create a planet humans could impair–they hypothesized that a wise Creator God would make a world comfortably resilient to human action. They cited Genesis 8 to say that we should doubt any predictions that global warming will exacerbate floods or droughts. They even used the scriptures that God would never again destroy the entire earth by flood to say we shouldn’t worry about the coastal flooding that may accompany global warming!

Not only is such a view at odds with Scripture about dominion, it is at odds with our experience of other parts of the material world. God didn’t create our bodies immune to self-abuse, or to injustice, or to accident. Our bodies, like the planet, are resilient, but within limits. God didn’t give us a child-proofed world. God didn’t make the world a giant bouncy castle, with all sharp objects removed and all hard corners covered in rubber. We have a real dominion, and we can really harm ourselves, one another, and the environmental systems we depend on.

Pope Benedict has even suggested that understanding these environmental limits may be the bridge the Church needs to explain natural law to a secular world: that there are also limits to our freedom in sexual and biological matters that we cross at our peril–in the areas of abortion, divorce, euthanasia, fetal stem-cell research.

That said, I’m not a catastrophe theorist like some environmentalists are. I don’t think the human race is going to destroy the entire planet. From my reading of scripture, I think God has reserved for himself the task of concluding this chapter of creation and opening the next one.

Though our dominion over the planet is inevitably corrupted by sin and ignorance, God is his common grace has already restrained our hand. Look at what he’s done in the recent past: he didn’t allow Americans to accidentally destroy their rivers and lakes or to render their air as foul as it could be. His hand of restraint was on us, and by his grace we passed laws and took actions which for a long time actually improved water quality and air quality for most Americans. We did it together, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, when we passed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Those were regional and national problems and required national cooperation.

I believe that by his grace he’ll allow us to solve global warming. We can together choose to exercise dominion in a way that restores and protects the poor, God’s other creatures, and the planet itself. Practical Christians understand this and believe that duty, cooperation, compassion, courage, and self-sacrifice are important elements in a creation story that counters the narrative of ignorance and self-interest. We won’t advance the kingdom of God with the erroneous theology that the world is really just an elaborate playroom that God designed and that we can’t influence. For good or for ill, dominion means dominion.

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from Psalm 95