Editor’s Note: The following is a brief excerpt from the author’s in-depth essay, “Using the Cultural Mandate of Genesis 1:28 and the Ten Commandments as the Foundation for a Christian Ethic of Earth Stewardship,” originally published by the Cornwall Alliance on November 7, 2023. Shared here with permission.
Introduction
As recently as the 2018 Gallup poll, climate change ranked near the bottom of Americans’ environmental concerns. But that has changed. A Google search on the question “What are the largest problems facing the 21st century?” on May 15, 2023, generated a substantial number of links, including to various lists, with environmental issues, including climate change, near the top. Climate change has become a hot-button issue. It moved out of the realm of meteorology and into politics, and then religion (Gushee, 2006), long ago. As a result, opinion is now fractured largely into two camps: those who don’t think a slightly warmer Earth is an existential threat and those who believe we’re headed into a climate apocalypse in the next decade if we don’t take radical steps to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. The science is not settled on this issue—neither by the data nor by the definition of the word science itself. But one thing has been settled since the dawn of creation: What God thinks about the environment and what is man’s responsibility as Earth’s caretaker.
This is an important issue for the church, and this paper will examine the ethics of Christian Earth stewardship beginning from the creation narrative in Genesis when man was placed in a garden and given the mandate to rule over and subdue the Earth (Gen. 1:28). We will utilize several of the Ten Commandments as normative, broadly and narrowly, negatively and positively, including the first commandment’s prohibition to worship false gods such as “Mother Nature” or Gaia, the fourth commandment’s implied warning against secular environmentalism and its wrongheaded approach to land use, the fifth commandment’s call for servant leadership to the earth, the sixth commandment’s logical extension to protect and preserve the environment for the sake of God’s creation, most importantly, for the health and well-being of the people who live on the Earth, and the eighth commandment’s concept of stewardship. This will necessarily include a discussion of the poor and the impact of radical environmental policies in the Developing World. Lastly, we will develop a Christian triperspectival ethic utilizing existential, deontological, and teleological concepts: Christians should be the voice of reason when it comes to environmental issues. It is our duty to take care of God’s creation and in so doing, it will benefit everyone while giving glory to God.
The Church Should Be Skeptical of the Claims Made by Climate Alarmists
On any given day, my Twitter feed is filled with links to articles, graphs, and videos about climate change. The phrase alone is instructional. It wasn’t too long ago that the term used was global warming and before that, fears were of an impending ice age (Rasool and Schneider, 1971) along with mass starvation and overpopulation on a global scale (Mann, 2018). None of these disasters has ever transpired, yet the so-called experts behind these predictions still get face time in the media. Here in the U.S., the historical data for weather-related events such as hurricane frequency and intensity, tornado frequency, and the incidences of wildfires in western states are at multi-decadal lows despite a steady increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (Spencer, 2018; CO2.earth, n.d.) since the Industrial Revolution. And while the Earth’s temperature has increased during the last century, the increase has been half of what the climate
models simulated. Meanwhile, the Earth has responded with an extraordinary greening as the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide drives photosynthesis resulting in record grain production worldwide (Idso, 2013). But you’d hardly know any of these facts unless you intentionally went looking for them.
No one should deny climate change per se. Climate change is a defining characteristic of planet Earth. Historical accounts and scientific measurements such as tree rings and ice core data show that the Earth has experienced epochs that were both colder and warmer over the past 2,000 years. The Roman Warm Period (1 AD–500 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (950 AD–1250 AD) were both warmer than the Current Warm Period (Idso, 2018; Magaritelli et al., 2020). The Little Ice Age (1300 AD–1850 AD) was considerably colder. Along with a warmer Earth come rising sea levels. Yet the rate of sea-level rise has essentially remained constant for the last 140 years (Lindsey, 2022). And in South Florida, where I live, there is evidence, in the form of marine shells found far inland from the ocean, of an extraordinary millennial variability in the eastern coastline of the of the United States (Rummo, 2019).
The postmodern deconstruction of language has been successfully applied to climate change through the use of drama-laden vocabulary to characterize meteorological phenomena. Winter storms are now named similarly to hurricanes, and the large ones are no longer called blizzards but bomb cyclones. Cold air masses during the winter months in the northern tier of the U.S. are now the result of the Polar vortex. And climate change skeptics like me have been branded as climate change deniers. Al Gore, the producer of An Inconvenient Truth, a 2006 documentary that predicted numerous global climate catastrophes by 2016, none of which have materialized (Behr, 2022), recently went on an unhinged rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, warning about “atmospheric rivers,” “rain bombs,” “boiling oceans” and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide trapping as much heat in the Earth’s troposphere as “600,000 Hiroshima class bombs every day” (Hays, 2023). And ramping up the hysteria is 24-7 on-location, live reporting of every weather-related disaster by meteorologists and storm chasers, often risking their lives so they can bring horrific images of weather fury and devastation into our living rooms in full color on our large-screen flat-panel displays, a phenomenon unknown in previous generations.
Pundits like Al Gore, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye, “the Science Guy,” then further exaggerate what is reported. Next, public school teachers repeat all of the misinformation to their students, relying on textbooks written by poorly informed authors, many with only a superficial knowledge of science. Alarmist theories are presented as fact. Is it any wonder our young people grow up believing humans are destroying the Earth? (Spencer, 2018)
Roger Scruton sums up this strategy of apocalyptic fear-mongering succinctly: “The curbing of human activity is the goal. We are the problem, and it is our intrusion into Eden that spelled disaster for the world” (Scruton, 2012).
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