06.03
A Conservative Christian Ecological Conscience?
A friend shot me a link to a recent post by Russel D. Moore today. He’s a pastor, the Dean of the Theological school at The Southern Baptist Seminary and a contributing editor for Touchstone magazine, which, as you know, is a long-time favorite magazine of mine. In light of the B.P. oil spill, he makes a few points in his post about conservatism’s shunning of ecological concerns and how this is a liability for humanity in general and Christians specifically. He says at the end:
The protection of the creation isn’t just about seagulls and turtles and dolphins. That would be enough to prompt us to action, since God’s glory is in seagulls and turtles and dolphins (Gen. 6-9; Isa. 65).
Pollution kills people. Pollution dislocates families. Pollution defiles the icon of God’s Trinitarian joy, the creation of his theater (Ps. 19; Rom. 1).
Will people believe us when we speak about the One who brings life and that abundantly, when they see that we don’t care about that which kills and destroys? Will they hear us when we quote John 3:16 to them when, in the face of the loss of their lives, we shrug our shoulders and say, “Who is my neighbor?”
His point here is a decent one, but I think he’s on the cusp of over-spiritualizing the issue though. It might be right, in principle, for a Christian to be more in touch with the land and environment around him or her. In fact, I’m in the process of doing that very thing with my family at the moment. We are trying to buy some rural land where we can have livestock and larger agriculture on our homestead. But, tying the reputation of the Christian message to the ecological conscience of those who proclaim it is suspect. Augustine has been quoted as saying “never judge a philosophy by it’s abuse.” It’s the job of the hearer to rightly discern the truth of a particular message, independent of the messenger. If a fellow throws his #2 combo wrapper out of his car window and then turns to the passenger to tell him about Christ, so what? This Christian fellow is simply misinformed about the liability of his littering. He doesn’t understand properly how his actions harm others around him. That’s a separate argument from the legitimacy of the gospel. Confusing the two is strange.
I understand why he is linking the oil spill to Christian environmental attitude though. It’s an easy connection to make if you only read headlines and don’t look behind the curtain of government/media propaganda. He’s almost right when he says:
Too often, however, we’ve been willing not simply to vote for candidates who will protect unborn human life (as we ought to), but to also in the process adopt their worldviews on every other issue.
I would put it another way. We’ve been grossly naive to think that politicians who espouse pro-life rhetoric have any intention of actually doing anything about abortion on demand. Bush ran on pro-life this, pro-life that. What did he do in eight years in office? He signed a meaningless executive order to repeal the Mexico City policy. What a joke. Likewise, liberals are finding out the hard way that Obama has no intention of actually carrying through on all of his green rhetoric. I’ve posted here recently on how in bed with the oil industry he is and how the grass roots left are totally confused at how silent he has been on the oil spill issue. The religious right expected the conservative majorities of the 90′s and early 2000′s to gain some serious traction on the abortion issue. They didn’t. And, likewise, the liberal left expects the liberal majorities of today to do the same thing on the environmental issue. They won’t. The problem is not just that we have adopted the worldview of our political blowhards, it’s that we’ve actually believed that they took the issues seriously.
And this leads me to my real beef with his argument. There is an underlying assumption that state power is absolutely necessary, and that social power is only effectual when it is used as a tool to aim state power at a certain issue. He isn’t entertaining the notion that there is any effectiveness in social power itself to solve problems directly. He says:
Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats.
He didn’t think that statement out clearly before he wrote it. This is a question of ownership. If I own something, and it makes money for me, I will protect it and care for it. Why wouldn’t I? Allowing my property(an oil field in this case) to be ruined profits me nothing. It’s totally contrary to any logical expectation of human behaviour. You better believe that BP has every incentive in the world to get that leaked fixed and cleaned up rapidly. They are losing millions per week over this. That’s a far more powerful incentive than some government regulatory threat that has no teeth because the people making it are bought and paid for by BP lobbyists. This is the real world, not a naive 12th grade civics class.
He continues:
But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he “believes in young people.”
The Scripture gives us a vision of human sin that means there ought to be limits to every claim to sovereignty, whether from church, state, business or labor. A commitment to the free market doesn’t mean unfettered license any more than a commitment to free speech means hardcore pornography ought to be broadcast in prime-time by your local network television affiliate.
Caesar’s sword is there, by God’s authority, to restrain those who would harm others (Rom. 13). When government fails or refuses to protect its own people, whether from nuclear attack or from toxic waste spewing into our life-giving waters, the government has failed.
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Moreover, we’ve seen some of the theological and ideological fringes in the environmentalist movement, fringes that enabled us to see them as not “with us,” and, frankly, to enable us to make fun of the entire question as a silly enterprise. But perhaps the void is being filled by leftists and liberals and wannabe liberal evangelicals simply because those who ought to know better are off doing something else. Working with our secular progressive neighbors on, for instance, saving the Gulf no more compromises the evangelical witness than our working with feminists to combat pornography or with Latter-day Saints to protect marriage.
If I’m reading him correctly here, he starts off by saying that having government set business regulations is like having the fox guarding the hen house. I would whole-heartedly agree with that. But then he diverts into the typical mistake of using bad analogies to demonstrate how the free market is just like any other organization or group that would be dangerous if given “unfettered license.” The fact is, the free market is not just a different version of a government or corporation. It’s not an entity at all. It’s not a “system.” The free market is a loose set of concepts that identify human behaviour and economic law. It says “when X happens, Y will be the natural economic or praxeological result.” Giving an analogy of pornography as a result of unregulated free speech isn’t a legitimate criticism of the free market. That’s like saying, if you pay someone a salary, they might buy drugs with the money. Therefore, we should heavily regulate wages.
The problem with the BP oil spill is that someone made a mistake and lots of oil is now flowing into the gulf and needs to be cleaned up. That’s it. Period. BP screwed up and needs to clean up their mess. The thing that needs to be remembered is that the oil industry is NOT a free market. They haven’t been a free market in over a hundred years. They enjoy all types of regulatory protection from competition in exchange for lobbying dollars to Congress. Therefore, making arguments about the failure of the free market as it relates to this oil spill is illegitimate. And, likewise, arguing that the government should stay out of BP’s way and let the free market work is also illegitimate, because BP’s market isn’t free. The true solution is to have the government get out of the way altogether so that the economic and praxeological principles of free market exchange can work correctly, unencumbered by artificial influence from the outside.
Conservatives Christians aren’t to blame for turning a blind eye toward ecological concerns. We all operate in a rigged system, where the real answer to the problem is prohibited. But, things are changing. The local, organic food movement is a tide that has been rising for quite a few years now. Farmer’s markets and CSA’s are appealing to people of all political persuasions – conservatives and liberals. These things represent real alternatives to the artifical food marketplace that has been created by misleading government regulation of agriculture. In short, a real market is being born to compete with the fake one. And, people are flocking to it. Just drive around. You’ll see hundreds of people planting gardens for the first time this year. Many of these people are conservative Christians.
My criticism of Russell Moore’s argument is that he isn’t seeing these issues clearly. You can’t say that conservative christians have neglected ecological concerns when the game has been rigged the whole time. When the only options they are given are two different types of new government regulations then what are they supposed to do? If they choose to remain silent in the face of that rigged proposal, that isn’t the same as being unconcerned. It just means they’d rather not choose between two decisions that both serve corporate interests through increases in state power.
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