Stop Making the Moral Case for Climate Action

The Sierra Club tries their hand at exegesis, while self-professed "Bible-believers" prefer the New Chris Wright to the Old one.

by Lowell Bliss, Director of Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership

 “Damn it, we just lost Laudato Si,” which was an unfortunate thing for me to say, since the encyclical that Pope Francis had just issued seemed like our most powerful tool yet for promoting climate action. It was June 2015 and I was due to help host the Canadian and American Lausanne WEA Consultation on Creation Care and the Gospel. To prepare my soul, I had decided to take a retreat at Genesee Abbey, a Trappist monastery in upstate New York, and for reading material, I printed out a copy of Laudato Si. It was a beautiful setting in which to read a beautiful document. Yet when I left Genesee, one of the first things I saw in my newsfeed was a headline from the Baltimore Sun’s reporting on Laudato Si: “Pope calls climate change a moral issue.”

“Damn it,” I said, “we just lost Laudato Si,” because of course climate change is a moral issue. But so was the Vietnam War and so was nuclear non-proliferation. And Pope Francis said so much more about climate change: yes, it’s a moral issue, but it is also a justice issue, and a worship issue, and a love issue, and a mercy issue and a Jesus issue. The fact of the matter is the world does not need the Church to make the moral case for climate change. Besides, they’ve pretty much stopped listening to moralists anyway.

Consequently, you can imagine that I was not primed to welcome this week’s headline in my newsfeed from the Chicago Sun-Times: “Fixing climate crisis is the ‘moral’ thing to do, and Bible says so.” Oh boy, here we go again. Most surprising of all however was the author of the Op-Ed: Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club isn’t known for its religious pronouncements, though Jealous has used social media to identify himself as a Christian. And as for Jealous and morality, this past summer, his apparent union-busting at the Sierra Club badly hurt a dear friend of mine. Nonetheless, I had to chuckle, because I also had a memory of when I was on the steering committee of Kansas Interfaith Power and Light and our young director was trying to help us conceptualize what role our new organization could play. “We don’t want to be ‘The Sierra Club but With Prayer,’” she told us.

So what does the actual Sierra Club but With Biblical Exegesis sound like? Jealous buries his lede. Is he choosing this moment to write up “reflections on God” because it is the Christmas and Hanukkah season, or because “whether you believe in the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, or are an atheist, we can all agree there is a moral imperative to address the climate crisis”? (BTW—he just affirmed what I said earlier: the world doesn’t need the Church for a moral case on climate; an atheist could do it.) What triggered Jealous to write on the Bible is not just that Donald Trump recently nominated oil executive Chris Wright for Energy Secretary, but that Wright is coming to office with his own moral message on climate action, one that, according to Jealous, “turns the concept of morality on its head and distorts reality.”

Last week, the New York Times ran an article with the headline “Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels are Virtuous.” It begins: “Chris Wright, the fracking magnate and likely next U.S. energy secretary, makes a moral case for fossil fuels. His position, laid out in speeches and podcasts, is that the world’s poorest people need oil, gas and coal to realize the benefits of modern life that Americans and others in rich nations take for granted.”

In the context of making a moral case, I have the same cognitive dissonance hearing the name “Chris Wright” as I do in hearing the name The Sierra Club. Back in 2015, the name Chris Wright meant the writer and architect of The Lausanne Movement’s The Cape Town Commitment, which we might call, in effect, the evangelical Protestant counterpart to Laudato Si. That Chris Wright is an Anglican theologian and a disciple of the late John Stott. That Chris Wright used the Cape Town Commitment to build one of the first globally-disseminated moral cases for climate change. Of course, That Chris Wright was betrayed by this New Chris Wright, or at least by the president-elect who appointed the New Chris Wright, and by the American evangelicals who paved the way for the New Chris Wright. Arguably, the Old Chris Wright was also betrayed by the latest iteration of the Lausanne Movement and the Seoul Statement they published this fall that has only two innocuous references to caring for creation and nothing at all about climate change.

Alas for that Old Chris Wright, and alas that it is Ben Jealous who takes up the biblical cause against the New Chris Wright. However much I might prefer the moral reasoning of Jealous over against the New Chris Wright, he really isn’t very good with a Bible in his hands. Jealous writes,

But let us look to Scripture. It is as good a place as any to start, since the Bible and its lessons help guide so many people’s ideas of morality. In it, God gave us a formula that certainly seems to be coming into focus today. In the Book of Genesis, God charged people with being stewards of the Garden of Eden. He told Adam and Eve to cultivate and care for it. This early commandment recognizes nature — also known as God’s creation — as something to be grateful for and respected.

What Jealous doesn’t seem to understand is that the New Chris Wright, as a fossil fuel moralist, could have written the exact same sentences using the exact same language. They think they are being stewards of God’s good resources, which they cultivate and care for, for which they are grateful. (Did you see their quarterly earnings report?! Trust me, they are very grateful for God’s creation.)

“Going back all the way to the beginning,” Jealous explains, “God gave us the means to our own salvation or our demise. He gave us free will — along with his many commandments was the free will to choose whether or not to follow them. The other thing God gave us was fire. Ultimately fire became electrical power.” This line of theologizing just becomes silly before it becomes unbiblical. He writes, “In the Bible, when humans finally understood the message and acted in ways God wanted, floodwaters receded; fires stopped.” What floodwaters is he referring to? What fires stopped because humans finally understood and obeyed? It would be a hard enough statement to justify if Jealous limited himself to the Old Testament, but is this how God-in-Christ-Jesus operates?

Jealous concludes his Op-Ed by saying, “So if saving lives, improving health outcomes and expanding economic opportunity through more and better jobs are not enough of a moral calling to prioritize the clean energy transition, look to the Bible and listen to God. His message seems to be pretty clear.” But that is precisely the problem. The message is so clear as to have been rendered invisible. Or if it is clear, it is clear like water which notoriously takes the shape of whatever container we pour it into. To say “look to the Bible,” has become little different than saying “look at the Bible” as if the message of Scripture is just a Draw Four card in UNO that you place on your opponent’s Draw Four card who places another Draw Four card on yours. And if part of your “moral” argument is that climate action will result in “expanding economic opportunity through more and better jobs” then I question whether you are doing anything more than just playing a game. The climate crisis deserves better.

And perhaps the climate crisis deserves a recognition on our part that the admonition “look to the Bible” has not been synonymous with “listen to God” for a long while in Christian circles, Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant. According to last year’s PRRI report, The Faith Factor in Climate Change: How Religion Impacts American Attitudes on Climate and Environmental Policy, the one group that has been most attentive to the crisis of climate change are those who identify as “religiously unaffiliated,” often called “nones” or “spiritual-but-not-religious.” Meanwhile, White evangelical Protestants—who imagine themselves to be the most “Bible-believing” of the bunch--have regressed since 2014 down into single digit percentages of “those who say climate change is a crisis.”

In the end, I’m not telling the Sierra Club to stay in their lane. I’m telling all of us: let’s re-evaluate our drive to re-create the (adequately clear already) moral case for climate action, and let’s stop assuming that “looking to the Bible” is going to win us the argument. My dear colleagues at the Global Creation Care Forum, which met right after the Lausanne Congress, recently produced a new statement in Good News for All the Earth: The Korean Invitation to Respond to the Gospel which surely does much to honour the Old Chris Wright, over against the New Chris Wright and, in my opinion, the Seoul Statement. But the fact that they quote so much from the Cape Town Commitment (2010) and from some of my own writing in the Jamaica Call to Action (2012), suggests that it really is ambiguous what they are “inviting” us to that is new, or that could gain a new hearing, or spark a renewed movement.

Let me issue my own invitation instead, an invitation to “Be curious, not judgmental.” (You may recall this admonition from something that TV football coach Ted Lasso said, even though he misattributes it to Walt Whitman.) Let’s not be judgmental of Ben Jealous’s exegetical skill (though I have been), let’s be curious why the Sierra Club thought they needed to tactically try their hand at bible exposition in the first place. Admittedly, I am judgemental about evangelicals spurning the Old Chris Wright for the New one, and yet, I appreciate my colleague John Elwood’s insistence that we will find more profit in being curious: what is it in evangelical theology and hermeneutics that seems to actually contribute to anti-democratic reactionary movements and to the climate crisis? Let’s be curious why asking people to read their bibles, or read their bibles better, isn’t resulting in any change in belief or behaviour. And finally, let’s not be judgmental about those who identify as “spiritual-but-not-religious,” particularly since so many of them used to be evangelicals. What do they know that we don’t? What spiritual space (still tethered in faith) could open up for us if we weren’t so tied to what we think is religion’s turf or so (damned) confident in religion’s ultimate persuasiveness?

In January, I am going to be teaching my first ever course at William Carey International University: DS 653 Foundations of Creation Care. Lesson Two will be “The Old Testament Basis for Creation Care” and Lesson Three, the New Testament one. The main textbook will be the book I wrote in 2013. Nonetheless, I hope to enter the course through one of the best decisions I made in publishing that manuscript, however off handed that decision was back then. I chose for my epigraph a quotation from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up people to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long
for the endless immensity of the sea.