A DIFFERENT SHADE OF GREEN L o w ell “ R u sty ” Pritchard
The Danger of Derivatives When I was in college, our local Christian bookstore had a wall chart to help music buyers determine which Christian band would match their listening preferences. Such charts reflected the evangelical penchant for wholesale cultural copying — find out what the world is buying and create a derivative Christian version for the Christian market. Copying allowed Christians to have religious music that was almost as good as the music the secular world created. Copying is one in a typology of postures toward culture that Christians can adopt, according to Andy Crouch’s new book Culture Making (reviewed on page 36). Crouch outlines other possible postures: condemning, critiquing, consuming, cultivating, and creating. Each can be an appropriate gesture to particular aspects of culture, but Crouch warns of the shallowness of adopting one particular posture as an overall response to culture. Those four postures characterize much of evangelical reaction to environmentalism. Some of us merely condemn whatever arises from secular environmentalism. I hear those condemnations regularly, and I have been told that my own work is a “Satanic distraction from evangelism.” However, I’m not nearly so worried about the last throes of condemnation or about the inaction bred by critique as I am about the more dangerous postures of merely consuming or copying secular environmentalism. This past autumn I was at a large Christian conference (over 12,000 attendees), manning an exhibit booth promoting creation care ministry.What just a couple years earlier was only a trickle of interested visitors had turned into a flood. There is a rush to “green the church,” as
evangelical Christians begin to break into what is, for them, new territory, a landscape of new ideas, new opportunities, and new relevance to the world around them. And, just as occurred in the contemporary Christian music flood of yesteryear, there is a risk that what we create will be derivative, an environmentalism almost as good as what the secular world has created. After all, much of what has been created by the culture of environmentalists and conservationists is good and can be enjoyed on its own terms with salutary effect.We don’t need “Christian” versions, for example, of the National Wildlife Federation’s children’s magazines, the EPA’s Energy Star energy-saving tips, or the National Audubon Society’s field guides. Merely consuming or copying other parts of the culture of secular environmentalism is not so helpful, especially since Christians late to the conversation seem prone to adopt ideas from a previous generation of environmentalists. There is sometimes a latent misanthropy, though in my experience it is far less widespread or integral to the environmental movement than critics allege. The knee-jerk (and erroneous) identification of “overpopulation” as the fundamental environmental problem is sometimes picked up by Christians without sufficient theological (or empirical) reflection. And mouthing populist, anti-capitalist, antibusiness sensibilities can seem trendy, but that rhetoric remains ignorant of deeper Christian thinking on the role of the market. The real dangers are where secular environmentalism and evangelical Christian cultures reinforce each other’s most destructive aspects. Accusations of legalism, judgmentalism, hypocrisy, and being “too political” are leveled, with some justification, at both evangelicals and environmentalists. Pride can creep in when we try to justify ourselves by what we do or have done, and manipulative PRISM 2009
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cultures emerge when we appeal to guilt to persuade others to change. Both movements tend toward elitism when they isolate themselves and disparage outsiders. But the good news is that we evangelicals who wrestle with our own pharisaical attitudes can share the need for grace and humility with those outside the faith, and we can share from past experience the danger of putting politics above lifestyle. After all, that’s how cultural change actually occurs.“The only way to change culture is to make more of it,” writes Crouch. “We need to cultivate the good and true things, to create more of what is beautiful from the raw materials around us, both from the natural world and from previous cultural products.The beauty of God’s garden requires cultivation — not in the sense of bringing it under the plow, but of protecting and preserving it and helping society remember what it means to be truly human (walking and Sabbath-keeping, for example). And sustainable living requires creativity in the use of the natural world. So a rich Christian engagement with the culture of environmentalism will require us to cultivate the good we find there — a strong sense of place, a desire for community, a recognition of the sacred nature of creation, even when its author is not recognized—and will require us to create forms of stewardship and respect for nature that extend what we find. When churches open their grounds to create community gardens, when families help their kids grow closer to God by connecting to creation, when Christians fight to make sure that environmental policies don’t protect creation by inadvertently harming the poor, and when we practice lives of joyful and intentional simplicity, we are adding to, extending, and creating cultures of beauty and truth. And that’s just what the world needs. n A natural resource economist, Lowell “Rusty” Pritchard is editor of ESA’s Creation Care online community.