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The very first issue discussed in Red Letter Christians is the environment. As a long-time environmental advocate, I was a bit shocked to see a topic that is usually considered a secondary concern – especially among Christians, who follow the mantra “love God, love people...then love everything else” - in such a place of prominence. My second reaction was to be thrilled: everything I have seen of poverty in the U.S. and abroad indicates that the fate of the poor is closely tied to that of the earth, a fact the author recognizes and illustrates compellingly. My third reaction, upon finishing the chapter on the environment, was disappointment. While the author's observations of environmental degradation and political commentary were valid and correct, I found the biblical justifications for creation care to be relatively weak. As a student of environmental theology, I know there is more and better scriptural evidence to be had, and in a book about the specific words of the gospel, I expected more.
The topic of creation care is especially relevant in American cities today. Last year, I lived across the Delaware River from Philadelphia in the much-smaller city of Camden, New Jersey, which has a population of just over 80,000 people spread over 9 square miles (City-Data.com). In the first half of the twentieth century, Camden was a bustling industrial center. The home of Campbell's Soup, RCA Entertainment, and the New York Shipbuilding Company, the city was a hotbed of commerce between Philadelphia and New York, and it employed hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers. With the deindustrialization that began in the years following World War II, all three of these corporations shut down their Camden operations, and over a third of the city's jobs were lost. Today, the city is a skeleton of its former self, with poverty and crime rates some of the highest per capita in the country (City-Data.com). What few people are aware of, however, is the extent to which Camden is also an ecological nightmare.
In this small city alone, there are 2 federal Superfund sites, 114 known contaminated areas, 350 polluting facilities, 400 ships at port per year emitting toxic fumes, and 328,500 diesel trucks passing through town annually (South Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance). There is a sewage plant in Camden's Waterfront South district that leaves the heavily-populated neighborhood in a year-round foul stench. The health effects of these toxins are innumerable: respiratory diseases, birth defects, heart conditions, and cancer. Hospital discharge statistics for the state of New Jersey from 1994 to 2002 indicate that blacks are four times more likely and Hispanics are three times more likely than whites to be hospitalized for asthma (SJEJA). High levels of lead in the soil and drinking water mean that 5% of children six months to two years have tested positive for poisoning, which can cause delayed growth, learning disabilities, brain damage, and behavioral problems (SJEJA). How many of the tough behavior cases in Camden schools might be traceable to exposure to lead? Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and hexavalent chromium are also common to industrial sites, and as the movie Erin Brockovich brought to public attention, their presence in the air and ground water can have devastating health effects, most of which take years to manifest themselves. Compared to cities of a similar size, Camden has elevated levels of cancers of the lung, esophagus, stomach, liver, kidney, and pancreas (SJEJA). Though they only scratch the surface, these statistics are alarming.
Camden, like the example from Senegal in Red Letter Christians, is a prime illustration of what is known as an environmental justice issue. For Christians who have trouble putting the wellbeing of a forest, mountain or reef on the same plane as lives lost to abortion, undernourishment or war, environmental justice proves that the two are intimately tied. In addition to industrial wastelands, heavily polluted areas, zones of habitat destruction, and toxic dump sites, global climate change is a major example of this phenomenon. As quoted in the book, a spokesperson for the U.N. Climate Change Impact Report said, “It is the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit” (Campolo). Overseas, this may refer to the farmers in Senegal who are forced to abandon their farms and move to the city due to desertification, the coastal dwellers in Bangladesh whose towns will be underwater with the slightest rise of sea level, or the fishermen in Indonesia whose source of livelihood is vanishing with the bleaching of the coral reefs. It wasn't until Hurricane Katrina, though, that the present effects of climate change really hit home. Many are still skeptical that a single weather event can be traced to a very large scale, slow moving global trend, but causes aside, Katrina was an environmental injustice. The breach of the substandard levees left many in the lower ninth ward homeless or dead, while the wealthier parishes, built on higher ground, were relatively untouched. Whole papers could be written – and have been – on this topic, but suffice it to say that our treatment of the environment and our treatment of the poor are essentially the same, and are equally important to God.
In order to make political waves on the issue of the environment – to convince U.S. leadership to sign onto G8 proposals and Kyoto treaties, to shift from oil to alternative energies, to preserve wilderness areas and promote local and organic food, to cut down on the American demand for beef – people will need to be convicted deeply and spiritually about the gravity of the ecological situation. For Christians – and especially Red Letter Christians – this conviction is most likely to come from their faith and from the words of the scriptures they espouse. The book names Genesis 1:26-28 as the “most commonly cited passage” for making the case of creation care, and claims that it is in these verses that God “gives us the obligation to be stewards” (Campolo). Fundamentally defined, it is true that this is the biblical moment when God appoints Adam and Eve (and implicitly, their descendants) to be the caretakers of the earth in his temporary physical absence. The word “stewardship” is not explicitly biblical, though, and I would argue that this verse is in fact more often cited as evidence against the Judeo-Christian case for creation care. In his famous 1967 essay, Lynn White used that passage to blame the Christian religion for the ethic behind the ecological crisis, and his sentiment is picked up by novelist Wallace Stegner, who writes, “Our sanction to be a weed species living at the expense of every other species and of the Earth itself can be found in the injunction God gave to the newly created Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it'” (Bouma-Prediger).
I think it is important to acknowledge that like the Medieval crusades or American slavery, the environmental crisis is a clear case of Christian complicity and misuse of scripture to justify hateful and damaging actions. Before using their faith to diagnose solutions, Red Letter Christians must confess and apologize for their long history of taking “rule over” and “subdue” to mean “exploit by any means necessary.” That said, I am convinced that in the broader picture of the biblical narrative, loving, caring, stewardship was indeed what God intended for humanity's relationship with the earth. In Genesis 1, God proclaimed “It was good” at every stage of creation – seven times in all. In Genesis 2:15, the Lord placed Adam and Eve in the garden to work it (abad) and take care of it (shamar). Adam's name even comes from the word for soil, adamah, just as “human” and “humus” have the same derivative. Later the apostle Paul declares, “From him and through him and to him are all things” (Romans 11:36). In other words, the birds, trees, slugs and sloths are as important to the gospel story as Abraham, Moses, you or me.
Humans, in their infinite wisdom, didn't waste any time in perverting both the gift of creation and their instructions for its care. In the story of the Fall in Genesis 3, the Lord curses the ground because of the poor choice made by Adam and Eve. At their hands, creation too will suffer – it will “wait in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (Romans 8:19). King Solomon is just one example of a powerful politician who is a terrible steward: his exorbitant number of horses and wives and ridiculous volume of riches and food are all forcibly taken at the expense of the common people and the the land itself (1 Kings 4:22-28, 10:14-11:6). The destruction of the forests of Lebanon for his cedar palace is the subject of the prophets' mourning again and again. Just as creation is cursed by the Fall, however, it is blessed by Christ's redeeming sacrifice. Jesus reverses the economy of empire and proclaims the year of the Lord's favor – the Jubilee. Jubilee brings with it the promise from Moses' law of rest for the land and redistribution of resources equally among all (Leviticus 25). The New Testament also speaks of creation's liberation from bondage (Romans 8: 21) and reconciliation, through Christ's blood, between all things in heaven and on earth (Colossians 1:19-20).
In conclusion, the discussion of the environment in Red Letter Christians is for the most part very valuable. As brevity was likely an issue, the author did an excellent job of using statistics and anecdotes to draw the reader into the main elements of the ecological debate. The realm in which I was left hungry for more, however, was that of scripture, of the “red letters” themselves. As it is so often argued that the environment is sparsely mentioned in the Bible and is thus a small concern for God and for Christians, I believe that anyone wishing to argue otherwise must present a healthy dose of creation care passages, exegeted in context. As the case study of Camden illustrates, a disregard for creation is a disregard for the children of God; it deeply wounds a Lord from whom, through whom, and to whom all things are made.
Works Cited
Bouma-Prediger, Steven. For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1998.
Campolo, Tony. Red Letter Christians: A Citizen's Guide to Faith and Politics. Ventura, CA: Regal, 2008.
City-Data.com. Camden, NJ database. Advameg, Inc.: 2003-2007.
Holy Bible. New International Version. International Bible Society, 1984.
“SJEJA Toxic Tour Factsheet.” South Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, 2006.
