Environmental evangelicals?
Christian conservatives might be an untapped asset.
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| Katie Coleman, a master's student in the School of Journalism at Michigan State University, is editor of EJ. |
More than a few friendly debates have ended too quickly by the phrase, “Well, Katie, that’s because you’re an environmentalist.”
The label makes me wonder - What is an environmentalist?
The word seems to have become my generation’s version of the word “feminist,” which for so long — and to a certain extent still today — connoted the stereotype of a woman who shaved her head more than her armpits. But the Occam’s Razor definition is much more fitting: if you think men and women are or ought to be equal, then you are a feminist.
I see many parallels with the word “environmentalist” today.
In its simplest form, an environmentalist is someone who thinks the natural environment is worth giving a darn about. But just as feminists come in many shapes, sizes, genders, creeds, political ideologies and sexual orientations, “environmentalists” run the gamut.
I’m not just talking about the merits and shortcomings of a Sierra Club that’s more apt to work with government and industry versus Earth First!, an organization that may prefer to bomb an animal testing facility. I’m not even talking about Greenpeace’s hands-on approach as opposed to the Public Interest Research Group’s back-door system. Despite their methodological differences, these groups agree on the most basic principle of “environmentalism” in its mainstream form: the belief that we need to reverse the current catastrophic trends of global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss and overpopulation, among other problems.
No, I’m talking about a group not traditionally welcomed under the “environmentalist” label at all: evangelical Republicans.
It was brought to my attention at the recent Society of Environmental Journalists conference — not for the first time, but for the most meaningful time — that this group is an un-tapped asset of the environmental movement.
In a keynote address, broadcast journalist Bill Moyers said that conservative Christians in this country “have built up their own separate universe of media — silos of print and radio and television to which they go for the only news they get about the world that we all share.”
Too few environmental messages penetrate this world of Christian media, Moyers said, causing evangelical voters — who gave President Bush 15 million votes in 2000 and perhaps another 20 million in 2004 — to vote their conscience on social issues rather than environmental ones.
But these social and environmental issues do not necessarily have to be at odds, Moyers suggested.
“I think all of us environmental journalists, without sacrificing or compromising the ethics and tools of our craft, can help to get [the evangelical Christians] to look more closely at their moral choices … If you believe uncompromisingly in the right of every baby conceived to be born safely into this world, you cannot at the same time abandon the future of that child, allowing its health and safety to be compromised by a president who gives big corporations license to poison our bodies and destroy our climate,” Moyers said.
I am unsure how environmental journalists will or can make practical Moyers’ suggestions. But I take his comments to mean, in part, that it’s time to re-shape our concept of the word “environmentalist.”
Though the label has always encompassed a diverse group of people — both because of the interdisciplinary nature of its study and the wide variety of political tactics used in its practice — we ought to broaden the definition even further to include a spiritual group that is begging to be seen as something more than a “political religion, a weapon in political combat.”
That kind of Christian conservative does exist, according to Moyers, but so too do millions of others, who “believe they are here on Earth to serve a higher moral purpose, not a partisan agenda.”
Perhaps in large part because of the last election, many of us with liberal ties have an uncomfortable relationship with conservative Christians. But there are issues on which we all agree.
As the National Association of Evangelicals puts it, “Our uses of the Earth must be designed to conserve and renew the Earth rather than to deplete and destroy it.”
Welcome, evangelicals. You are one of us.
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