#31: Where the Gospel Meets Environmentalism

#31: Where the Gospel Meets Environmentalism

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, Jesse. So, let me set the scene for you. It’s the month of October. 1993. Just outside Chicago. And there’s a group of evangelicals, and they’ve gotten together to draft a statement on a very important social issue. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: Any of this sound familiar?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Evangelicals love to write statements.

RACHEL SZABO: They do. 

JESSE EUBANKS: It makes me think of, like, The Nashville Statement or The Statement on Social Justice.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, very similar vibes. And so, among this group of evangelicals, there’s a former editor for World Christian Magazine, there’s a retired president of Asbury Theological Seminary, and there’s the presidents for both InterVarsity and World Vision. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh yeah. Those are some big names.

RACHEL SZABO: These are, like, very highly influential people. 

JESSE EUBANKS:  Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, and so, the statement that they drafted — do you want to know what it was?

JESSE EUBANKS:  So, when did you say this was?

RACHEL SZABO: 1993.

JESSE EUBANKS: 1993? Yeah, why are all these leaders getting together?

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so the statement was called An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation. So, almost thirty years ago, prominent evangelicals made a public statement declaring our role in caring for the environment.

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Every episode we hear stories of social action and Christian community.

JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode is where the gospel meets environmentalism.

RACHEL SZABO: And some folks might be a little wary of that term, so for the sake of clarity — the episode is called “environmentalism,” but really it’s about the earth and ecosystems that God has created and our role within them. And also since today any talk of the environment usually involves climate change, that will be a topic that we’ll bring up in this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right. But, what we’re really exploring is the larger context. What is our relationship to the planet? Should Christians care about things like deforestation and melting glaciers? Or is it all just political and a waste of our time in light of eternity? Welcome to our corner of the urban universe. 

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JESSE EUBANKS: Okay Rach, so tell me more about this evangelical statement on Creation Care. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay so, here let me read you the opening sentence from the statement. It says, quote, ‘As followers of Jesus Christ, committed to the full authority of the Scriptures, and aware of the ways we have degraded creation, we believe that biblical faith is essential to the solution of our ecological problems.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay. So these are Christians that are saying, ‘We have impacted the environment in negative ways, and we believe that the fullest response to that will come out of our Christian faith.’

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, exactly. Here’s the thing that was baffling to me. Y’know, most people know about other statements that evangelicals have made. Like you mentioned them — The Nashville Statement, the Danvers Statement. But no one seems to have heard about this statement on Creation Care. Like when I asked around the office if anyone knew what this was, everyone was like ‘What?’ Like they had never heard of this before. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well yeah, because evangelical Christians, you know, we have a reputation of not getting involved in environmentalism. Just this past June, Chiristianity Today ran an article called ‘Why Don’t Evangelicals Care About the Environment?’ And here’s what they write — ‘For most evangelicals, the environment is on a spectrum from a benign lack of interest to a rather more aggressive negative attitude toward the environment.’

RACHEL SZABO: Which is interesting to me because society at large is really concerned about the environment. You know, so there’s this organization called Y-Pulse and they do a survey every year in the United States asking each generation the open-ended question of ‘What is your biggest concern? As a generation, what is your biggest concern?’ And last year, both millennials and Gen Z had the same number one concern — the environment. More specifically, climate change. So, like environmentalism is something that all of our society is talking about, but Christians seem to not want to talk about it or they just don’t have anything to add to the conversation. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well hold on. I don’t think that’s entirely true. So the term environmentalism simply means “seeking to protect and conserve aspects of our ecosystem.” And that — it’s actually very biblical.

In the book of Genesis, we get our origin story. God is on his last day of creation when he makes us, humans. And then, God gives humanity specific instructions for their existence. In Genesis 1:28, he tells them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’

RACHEL SZABO: Right, this is where we get the biblical calling of stewardship. God has given us dominion over the created world. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, like we have a responsibility to care for this world that we live in. And when we talk about dominion, we’re getting to this idea that we are stewards, that we are people who are supposed to care for this planet and for what God has entrusted to us.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and not like dominion as in like ‘I’m going to rule you with an iron fist.’ We’re made in the image of God, and the way that God has dominion is like, it’s loving, it’s serving, it’s caring.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So I guess in this way, y’know, we see that environmental care is actually a part of our God-given identity. It’s literally a part of who we are at our core. To be made in the image of God means that we are people who steward and care for the creation around us. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah it’s interesting that you mentioned that because that’s exactly the identity that a girl named Keely Shulz wanted to live into.

KEELY SHULZ: I grew up — we had an acre and a half of yard so we would basically just spend our entire days outside playing and looking at the birds, looking at the bugs, and all those kinds of things.

RACHEL SZABO: So this is Keely. She grew up loving nature and the outdoors. And in fact, when she was in fifth grade, she got a lepidtarium for her birthday.

JESSE EUBANKS: Is that like a Labrador-leprechaun mix? What is that?

RACHEL SZABO: That’s exactly what that is. (laughs) No, a lepidtarium. It’s a cage for housing butterflies.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay.

KEELY SHULZ: And like it came with like these little painted-lady butterflies that you would like order and raise, and we raised them to adulthood and I thought it was super fun.

RACHEL SZABO: Keely takes care of these butterflies and lets them go into the wild, and like she loves it. And so she starts wanting to learn more about butterflies.

KEELY SHULZ: And so then I started noticing that we had milkweed in my backyard, and we had milkweed kind of lining the ditches in our streets.

RACHEL SZABO: So I don’t know if you know this, but milkweed actually attracts monarch butterflies and they use it for food but they also use it as a nesting site to lay their eggs.

JESSE EUBANKS: Ah, I did not know that.

RACHEL SZABO: Mm-hm. Now you know.

KEELY SHULZ: And that was where monarch butterflies would lay their eggs and the caterpillars would kind of live their lives, eat, and then grow into butterflies.

RACHEL SZABO: And so Keely’s finding this whole thing just fascinating. But, she also started to notice a problem. 

KEELY SHULZ: And I also started noticing that the milkweed in the ditches would get mowed. So the caterpillars would all just get like killed because the city would come and mow the ditches. 

RACHEL SZABO: So these butterflies were laying their eggs on the milkweed, but these eggs could never grow to maturity because they were repeatedly being wiped out by lawn mowers. And, you know, in Keely’s little fifth-grade mind, that was a gross injustice.

KEELY SHULZ: When I learned that they were getting mowed and that so many caterpillars were being killed, especially when that species wasn’t doing very well, like losing an entire generation of them in this local area — as a child, it was just this super, super tragic thing that I saw, and I was just so like passionate about, ‘We need to save these butterflies. I’m gonna try to call the city and tell them not to mow” — which I never ended up doing.

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s like so sweet and endearing to hear her describe herself at that age like fighting to save these butterflies.

RACHEL SZABO: I know. Here’s the thing, like somewhere deep in the depths of her being, y’know, without even realizing she was living into this God-given identity, Keely knew like, ‘I have to do something.’

KEELY SHULZ: So what I started doing was — I had my lepidtarium, and every summer I would just go, y’know, pick some of those milkweed stalks, bring in the monarch caterpillars, and raise them in my little lepidtarium at home so that they would have a chance at life, and then release them when they became butterflies.

RACHEL SZABO: She’s just like ten years old or something, and she’s totally like living into this God-given calling as a human to rule the created earth. And she actually even started bringing others along with her.

KEELY SHULZ: I would have friends come with me to find monarch caterpillars on a milkweed, or neighbor kids would bring me caterpillars that they had found in the ditches.

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, I’ve heard Christians talk before about how, like, different parts of creation praise God literally just by doing what they were created to do. Like a fish swimming around brings glory to God because it was made to swim. And like that’s the picture that I get here with Keely, that she’s just honoring God by simply doing what she was made to do, to care for the creation around her.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah well, hold on to that sweet sentiment for just a second because it’s not gonna last long.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, well that’s not encouraging.

RACHEL SZABO (laughs): Okay so, as Keely went on into middle school and high school, she continued to be fascinated by the world around her, but she started to experience a problem that actually many Christians who are interested in nature or science run into — and that is that science and faith never really seem to mix.

KEELY SHULZ: Church and Christian life was a little bit compartmentalized from my schooling and kind of the things I was learning in school.

RACHEL SZABO: So after she graduated, Keely decided she wanted to go to college and learn to integrate her faith with her love for the environment. She enrolled at the University of Northwestern in Minnesota as a science major.

JESSE EUBANKS: And that’s a Christian school?

RACHEL SZABO: Yes, Christian school.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay.

RACHEL SZABO: But she ran into a problem because, while her interest in the environment had totally been welcomed and encouraged at home, she soon discovered that was not the case on this Christian college campus.

KEELY SHULZ: It was a lot of, you know, white, middle-class, upper-middle class Christians who were coming from homeschool backgrounds or private Christian school backgrounds. It felt like everybody was politically homogeneous. It felt like a lot of people didn’t really support the major or interests that I had. And I definitely felt a little bit out of place for the first couple years there.

RACHEL SZABO: So whereas before like Keely was bringing her friends and family along to help her rescue these monarch caterpillar eggs, now some of her new friends were actually questioning her interests, and in particular, climate change.

KEELY SHULZ: ‘You know, I can’t believe that you think climate change is real, like the science doesn’t support it. It’s just part of a natural cycle. God’s just gonna destroy the earth in the end, so why do you even care about this?’

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s almost like, oh, when you were a little kid and like you believed in Santa Claus, but then you grew up and were like hey, get with the real world, Santa doesn’t exist.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah totally, great analogy, because even some of the professors at the school would scoff at Keely too.

KEELY SHULZ: I had one professor for example who would say things along the lines of, ‘Oh, y’know, here we’re gonna do real science, not like global warming.’ Or it would like snow outside and he would be like, ‘Oh, we could use some global warming right now.’ That’s something people love to say in Minnesota when it snows, ‘Oh, we could use global warming right now.’

RACHEL SZABO: And, you know, all of this kind of threw Keely for a loop because she had never really been faced with this before.

KEELY SHULZ: There’s just some really, really deep-rooted resistance to this concept among a lot of Christians. Again, I grew up in a very supportive Christian environment and then I kind of transitioned into one where it was like, wow, you know, some of the things that were no-brainers to me growing up I’m actually like having challenged here.

JESSE EUBANKS: So I guess the question I’m thinking is — why? You know, if we have this identity from God to be caretakers of what he’s created, why are Christians so opposed to any talk of environmentalism?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, okay, that’s a great question. And, y’know, as I was researching for this episode, I kinda came across two big reasons why that might be the case. And here’s the first one.

DALE GENTRY: There are a lot of people that will say that science is gonna lead you away from faith.

RACHEL SZABO: Coming up — science and faith have a showdown. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets environmentalism.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so you’ve been telling me about Keely SHULZ. She’s passionate about taking care of the environment. She’s gone to college to be a science major. But instead of learning more about how her love of the environment and her faith intersect, she’s actually being met with opposition.

RACHEL SZABO: Right, and you were asking, you know like, why is that? And, um, I’ve got some answers for you.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, good. Okay. Hit me.

RACHEL SZABO: Alright, so we’re gonna look at two main reasons why Christians might oppose environmentalism. And the first is that sometimes we’re just skeptical about science. 

DALE GENTRY: Christians see science as an alternative way of knowing, basically science can answer our questions. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so this is Dale Gentry. He’s actually a biology professor at the University of Northwestern in Minnesota, which is where Keely goes to school.

DALE GENTRY: ‘It’s going to fill you with questions about the authority of Scripture. It’s going to just be a distraction.’

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, this resonates with me. I mean, for those of us that grew up in more conservative Christian circles, a lot of times science was seen like the boogeyman, like science was something that could easily harm our faith in some way or something that really couldn’t be trusted. You know, according to the National Association of Evangelicals, evangelicals are more than twice as likely as the general public — so that’s 29% of evangelicals versus 14% of the general public — to say that science and religion are in conflict. 

DALE GENTRY: Christians say ‘God is acting in my life to accomplish good things.’ If scientists are saying, well, you know, the sun, the energy from the sun is producing food that is feeding the world, then does God have a role in that? Right, if we can explain where the energy comes from in the sun and we can explain the photosynthesis that produces the plant growth and if we can explain how the fruit exists to perpetuate the seeds of the plant, God doesn’t have a role in that. Uh, and I think that’s really problematic because we’ve lost our sense for God as the sustainer. We’ve lost our sense of God having a role outside of miracles.

RACHEL SZABO: When in fact, God being in the everyday acts of nature and science is something that is repeatedly seen throughout Scripture.

DALE GENTRY: There are so many verses — I especially love Psalm 104, which gives us account of God playing an active role in feeding the animals and God playing an active role in the natural cycles of the climate and the sun rising and the sun setting and that we need to be able to find God in what we understand and can comprehend and know with the help of science. And if we’re able to accomplish that, then God is in our lives every day. Right? When we see the sun rise, then we experience God. And when we see the sunlight produce, you know, the apples growing in my backyard, then I get to experience God. So when we see God acting through the processes that God built into creation, then we’re no longer waiting for that miracle for evidence of God’s role in our life.

JESSE EUBANKS: We learn so much about God’s character from nature. I mean that’s why Jesus says, ‘Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the birds of the air.’ Like Jesus is saying, ‘Look at the harmony of nature and the way that God cares for nature, and you are so much more valuable than they.’ Yeah, nature tells us a lot about God.

DALE GENTRY: So what I invite people to do is to take those verses and spend some time thinking about them and meditating on them. If you can better understand the circumstances of light or water or a mustard seed or yeast — I think if you can better understand how those things function, which science gives us access to — I think you’ll actually encounter God through that process and you can get a clearer understanding of God.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah and so, you know, Dale would argue that actually science and faith aren’t these two competing worlds but that they actually fit very well together.

DALE GENTRY: So if we have just science, we get part of the story. We get to understand how the world works, but we don’t understand why it’s here. If we have theology, you get to understand why we’re here and we understand our purpose — but we also know if we go back in time three or four hundred years and we have theology alone and the absence of science, we didn’t know how to cure diseases and we didn’t know how to produce clean water and we didn’t know how the world works. So science produces knowledge, and yet science cannot understand Jesus. Science can’t make sense out of love. Science can’t provide an explanation for the virgin birth or the resurrection of Jesus.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so he’s saying that science can tell us how, but it can never tell us why.

RACHEL SZABO: Right.

JESSE EUBANKS: I feel like so often those of us that are Christians, our tendency is that when we see something that has a potential threat to our faith — that instead of us keeping it in its proper perspective, we have a tendency to overcorrect and just to throw it out altogether.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, instead of putting science in its proper place of like — this is not answering why, this is answering how — and leading us in the wonder of the why. And I would love to just camp out here this whole episode and I think that would be amazing, but…

JESSE EUBANKS: We gotta keep going.

RACHEL SZABO: We gotta keep rolling, yeah. 

Okay, so back to Keely. One reason she might be feeling this tension on her campus related to her interest in the environment is skepticism to science, but there’s another reason too that is sadly probably more pervasive and more hostile. And this reason is actually explained really well by scientist and evangelical Christian, Katharine Hayhoe. So Dr. Hayhoe was unfortunately unavailable to speak with me in person, but she did give me permission to use this story from a TedTalk that she gave back in 2018.

KATHARINE HAYHOE (TEDTALK CLIP): It was my first year as an atmospheric science professor at Texas Tech University. We had just moved to Lubbock, Texas, which had recently been named the second most conservative city in the entire United States. A colleague asked me to guest-teach his undergraduate theology class. I said sure.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so Dr. Hayhoe is new to Texas, she’s new to this school, and she’s filling in for a class. And she’s teaching on the geological carbon cycle.

KATHARINE HAYHOE (TEDTALK CLIP): As I tracked the history of the carbon cycle through geologic time to present day, most of the students were slumped over dozing or looking at their phones.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, so shockingly no one’s really on the edge of their seat to learn more about the carbon cycle. (laughs)

KATHARINE HAYHOE (TEDTALK CLIP): I ended my talk with a hopeful request for any questions, and one hand shot up right away. I looked encouraging, he stood up, and in a loud voice he said, ‘You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?’ (audience laughter) ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m Canadian.’ (audience laughter) That was my baptism by fire into what has now become a sad fact of life here in the United States and increasingly across Canada as well. The fact that the number one predictor of whether we agree that climate is changing, humans are responsible, and the impacts are increasingly serious and even dangerous has nothing to do with how much we know about science or even how smart we are, but simply where we fall on the political spectrum.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay so, Jesse, what sector of Christianity is super well-known for being highly conservative politically?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, in 2020, evangelicals.

RACHEL SZABO: Right. More specifically, white evangelicals.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right.

RACHEL SZABO: Now, that same group — white evangelicals — is also the only religious group where the majority says that there is not enough solid evidence to support climate change. Every other Christian group says climate change is happening and is due to human activity, but not white evangelicals. So here’s Dr. Hayhoe again. This time — this is from a clip in an episode from her online video series called Global Weirding.

KATHARINE HAYHOE (AUDIO CLIP): It’s crystal clear from both the social science and from the Bible that our objections to the science of climate change have nothing to do with being religiously evangelical. They have everything to do with being politically evangelical.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so she splits apart the idea of being religiously evangelical from being politically evangelical.

RACHEL SZABO: Right. 

JESSE EUBANKS: When she says religiously evangelical, what she means is a set of faith beliefs, theological faith beliefs. For example, like, evangelicals take the Bible seriously, they define it as the Word of God, they typically believe that the Word is infallible. These folks are typically going to have very traditional, orthodox Christian beliefs. On the other side, she’s talking about those that are politically evangelical. These are folks that tend to vote very conservative, so they tend to be Republican. They also tend to vote around the issues of abortion and same-sex issues. Along with that, those that are politically evangelical, they also tend to be skeptical of science. And so what we’re seeing is we’re seeing that she’s smacking up against folks that are politically evangelical, not necessarily religiously evangelical. 

RACHEL SZABO: And those two things can overlap sometimes.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yes, yes.

RACHEL SZABO: But that doesn’t mean they always do.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and so I was curious, y’know, why has this issue of environment and climate change become so political? So — you ready for a history lesson?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, please. 

RACHEL SZABO: So, did you know that it was actually all the way back in the late 1800’s when scientists first discovered this phenomenon that burning fossil fuels releases heat and that heat gets trapped in our atmosphere?

JESSE EUBANKS: No. That’s a long time ago.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. And this is what we call today, y’know, greenhouse gases, where the atmosphere acts like a greenhouse. What do greenhouses do? They keep it warm.

JESSE EUBANKS: So it’s not even like new science. This is kinda old science.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah we’ve known this for a long time, but media coverage and wider spread knowledge of this science didn’t happen until the 1980’s. An article about climate change made the front page of the New York Times, and so that’s when people really started paying attention to it and really started talking about it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Because it was suddenly thrust into, like, more public awareness.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, absolutely. And it sort of became this huge component of presidential elections. In 1988, the Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush actually spoke really boldly about the need to reevaluate some of our practices as it relates to the environment and he talked about how this was a bi-partisan issue that demanded attention.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which in and of itself is sort of amazing. Very few things are bi-partisan these days.

RACHEL SZABO: Right, but we all know, like, it’s not a bi-partisan issue today. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, wy do you think that is? Like what changed? Why is it no longer like that?

RACHEL SZABO: Well what happened was, in the 1990’s, big companies like Exxon Oil — they realized that they were going to be drastically affected by implementing more environmentally-friendly practices. And so what they did was they ran entire marketing campaigns calling into question the legitimacy of this climate science. And so now all of a sudden there was this new idea that all of this data, this science, this research — that it could be up for debate, that maybe it wasn’t true. And, y’know, for the Republican party at the time, it was in their financial interests to keep all these big companies afloat because they were funneling money into the Republican party. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So what you’re saying is that these large companies lobbied the Republican party for their own financial benefit, but that the campaigns were essentially around the idea that maybe this science isn’t reliable and maybe we shouldn’t trust it. And eventually that skepticism around the science — it trickled its way down into the general public and it really just found a way to meet up with evangelicals who were already skeptical about science anyway because of the debate between science and faith. So evangelical skepticism over science, it was an easy marriage with the Republican party’s new skepticism with science.

RACHEL SZABO: Yes. Here’s what I think we need to do. Since we come from a camp that is known for being skeptical about science, is known for being politically evangelical, I think we need to start off with a clean slate and we just need to take an honest, factual look at the state of our environment. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that makes sense.

RACHEL SZABO: And to do that, we’re gonna talk to this guy.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: It’s not a pretty picture…

RACHEL SZABO: This is Dr. Steve Bouma-Prediger. 

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: My name is Steve Bouma-Prediger, and I teach in the religion department and run the environmental studies program at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

RACHEL SZABO: As part of his class, he has his students take this quiz.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: I have what I call a ‘groaning of creation’ quiz, using the metaphor from St. Paul in the book of Romans chapter 8.

RACHEL SZABO: So this quiz — it covers 10 different ecological issues, but for the sake of time we’re just gonna look at three of these questions. So, it’s quiz time. You ready?

JESSE EUBANKS: I did not do well on quizzes in school.

RACHEL SZABO: Alright.

JESSE EUBANKS: I feel very anxious all of a sudden.

RACHEL SZABO: Well there’s no penalty if you get it wrong, so. (laughs) Okay, here’s the first question — How often do you think a species goes extinct? Every year, every week, or every hour?

JESSE EUBANKS: Hmm. I think every week.

RACHEL SZABO: Here’s Dr. Steve with the answer.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: It’s every hour. 10,000 species per year, about 27 species per day go extinct. 

JESSE EUBANKS: That’s so much more than I thought it would be.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. Isn’t that crazy? And so, y’know, the natural question is, why is it so many?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: The biggest factor is habitat loss. It’s not people going out and shooting birds or other, y’know, animals. That’s one piece of it, one factor, but the biggest factor is simply we’re rendering many creatures homeless.

JESSE EUBANKS: So the big reason that these animals are going extinct is because of us.

RACHEL SZABO: Yes.

JESSE EUBANKS: Wow.

RACHEL SZABO: And he also says that that’s a big problem.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: Now why is that important? Because biodiversity is absolutely crucial to the flourishing of virtually every creature, including humans.

RACHEL SZABO: That’s just one area. So, okay, we’re gonna go on to the next question. You ready?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I’m ready.

RACHEL SZABO: How much garbage and solid waste do you think the United States produces every year? Just the United States. And we’re gonna put these numbers in terms of how many garbage trucks it would fill up.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: And here are your options on this little quiz — Convoy of garbage trucks that would go from Chicago to New York. B, Chicago to Calcutta. Or C, it would encircle the earth five times.

JESSE EUBANKS: That is a big leap from two to three. This is a huge leap. There’s no way it’s three. That’s huge. So it’s two. It’s B. It’s the second one.

RACHEL SZABO: Chicago to Calcutta?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, here’s Steve with the answer.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: Encircle the earth five times at the equator. That’s one country in one year.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. That’s so much trash.

RACHEL SZABO: In one year, just the United States produces enough solid waste to encircle the earth five times. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh, I’m gonna start consolidating my Amazon orders. Wow.

RACHEL SZABO: And that’s the thing, is like it’s going somewhere. Where are we putting it? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Out of sight, where I don’t think about it.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, this is the last question. The hottest 14 years on record have occurred when? In the past millennium, in the past century, or in the past two decades?

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, considering we’ve talked a little about global warming and considering that I’ve gotten the other two questions wrong, I’m going to go worst-case scenario and say that we are living it. So the last two decades. 

RACHEL SZABO: That is correct. Hottest 14 years on record have occurred within the last two decades.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: The last five years have been the hottest five ever. And January 2020 was the hottest January ever in the 140 years of record-keeping, and this is from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis website.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, but I guess Rachel, I’m imagining some of our listeners are probably thinking, ‘Hey, I’ve read where that’s just part of the natural cycle, y’know, that sometimes the earth just heats up as it gets a little closer to the sun and then eventually that’ll stop and we’ll go back to a more standardized set of fluctuations.’ I mean, is that wrong?

RACHEL SZABO: Yes and no. There is a natural cycle depending on, y’know, where the earth is positioned away from the sun as it’s going around. Like, yes, the earth will cool for some years and then get warmer for some years, like that happens. The problem is that we are way off course for what that should be. When scientists look at the models and try to predict, y’know, okay, where would we be in this cycle of being warmer or cooler — we’re supposed to be getting colder right now. But yet we’ve had the hottest years on record.

JESSE EUBANKS: So something is fundamentally changing about our planet.

RACHEL SZABO: Exactly. So that’s the end of our ‘groaning of creation’ quiz. So the question is — how are we doing?

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: And the bottom line is that creation is groaning. It’s not all doom and gloom, but it’s also not sweetness and light. And the overall assessment, not just by me but many other scientifically-trained earth watchers, is that we have some very serious environmental, ecological problems.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so what he’s saying sounds bad. You know, but what about the reality that we do live in a broken world? You know, of course the earth is groaning and it isn’t functioning as it should. We aren’t either because sin is real and it affects everything. And so we can just wait for God to make everything right again, right?

RACHEL SZABO: Well Dr. Steve actually says no and that that’s actually kind of just a cop-out answer.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: Taking the easy way out, and the point is we’re not supposed to just let the status quo be. We are called, as Christians, we are called to bear witness to God’s good future.

RACHEL SZABO: So what it all comes down to is this — is that based on the answers of this quiz we are not doing a good job of being caretakers of this planet. And so regardless of what you think about global warming, about saving the polar bears, we all need to reclaim our God-given identity as earth-keepers, as those responsible for the ruling and dominion of this created planet. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so how do we do that?

RACHEL SZABO: Well, to find out, we’re actually going to go back to Keely at college because there’s three things we can do to reclaim this identity, and Keely is about to learn them. So stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome back to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Today — where the gospel meets environmentalism.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so, we’ve looked at objections. We’ve taken the pulse of our planet. And we’ve seen that God calls us to care for this world — all of it, people, animals, atmosphere. So Rachel, where is it that we go from here? How do we reclaim our identity as stewards, as caretakers of the earth?

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so we’re gonna look at three ways that we can reclaim this God-given identity as caretakers of creation, and like a good Baptist I’ve made them very easy to remember.

JESSE EUBANKS: Nice.

RACHEL SZABO: They are affect, awareness, and awe. So going back to Keely at college, she actually learned the first one, affect, in her biology class. So at the end of class one day, her professor started shifting gears and talked about climate change. 

KEELY SHULZ: And he put these pictures up on the screen of people’s houses and people’s fields who had been kind of flooded — I believe it was in Sri Lanka — and he started to talk about the connection between like natural disasters, climate change, and kind of how inequitable the effects of climate change are.

RACHEL SZABO: So an example of this is Hurricane Catarina. Have you heard of Hurricane Catarina?

JESSE EUBANKS: No, I don’t think so.

RACHEL SZABO: Not Katrina, Catarina.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: So this is a hurricane that happened off the — I think it was the southern portion of Brazil. And what’s really interesting is that Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, and typically hurricanes don’t happen on that side of the earth because the water’s not warm enough. The water has to be warm for a hurricane to happen. And so for the longest time, there were no hurricanes in the southern hemisphere. And scientists started predicting, like, there’s going to be a hurricane, y’know, off the coast of Brazil, there’s gonna be a hurricane. And everyone was like, ‘No, there’s not. Like that’s an impossibility.’ But because we’ve seen the temperature rising consistently across our planet, the water in the southern hemisphere is now warm enough that it supports hurricanes.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, that’s fascinating. Terribly fascinating.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and so there’s a lot of connection between natural disasters and the state that our planet is in.

JESSE EUBANKS: Wow.

KEELY SHULZ: And I just remember that being like a super transformative moment where I was like, ‘Wow, like this isn’t just ecosystems and animals being affected by this. This is people too.’ And it’s just more of a matter of trying to show people that there’s not a disconnect between human suffering and environmental issues. I’m actually really grateful that people did raise objections initially because I would say that when I first started to care about this issue, my desire for climate action kind of mostly rested on a scientific basis, which is fine and good — but as people raised some objections, I was forced to also think about it on a theological level and a faith level. This is actually something that’s now really important to me on a spiritual level, as well as just like a practical, scientific level.

RACHEL SZABO: So the first thing we can do to reclaim our identity as earth-keepers is to see the effect that environmental issues have on our neighbors. You know, what are the two great commandments that God gave us? — Love God, love your neighbor. So when we become better stewards of creation, we aren’t just loving nature — we’re loving our neighbors, especially those who are poor or vulnerable and won’t be able to bounce back from certain calamities.

JESSE EUBANKS: Recently I was reading Tim Keller, and he was quoting somebody else who gave a synopsis of the book of Proverbs. And he said basically the book of Proverbs can be boiled down to this — ‘The righteous disadvantage themselves to advantage the community. The wicked disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.’ And I feel like so much of that applies to this topic of the environment.

RACHEL SZABO: So the first way is affect. The second way is through awareness. So it’s not realistic for us to care about every single place on the earth. We don’t have the capacity to do that. So start where you are. And Dr. Steve actually suggests two easy things to do this — know where your water comes from and know where your trash goes.

STEVE BOUMA-PREDIGER: Most people, most students, at least that I talk to, they don’t know where their water comes from, with the possible exception of folks who live on a farm and have their own well or live in a more rural area where they have well water. But most people don’t know. I ask them where their local ‘away’ is wherever they’re from in the world. Do you know where ‘away’ is? We say we throw things ‘away.’ Basic principle of environmental science is that there is no such thing as ‘away.’ It’s simply a euphemism for some place.

JESSE EUBANKS: So wait, why is it so important to know where our water comes from? Like why is he emphasizing that?

RACHEL SZABO: Let me give you this quote. This is actually from Dr. Steve’s book, For the Beauty of the Earth. He says, ‘We care only for what we love. We love only what we know. We truly know only what we experience. If we do not know our place, know it in more than a passing cursory way, then we’re destined to use it and abuse it.” 

Okay, so the first way was affect. The second was awareness. And the last one is through awe, through marveling at the wonder of the created world, and by extension the God who created it. So getting back to Keely, even though she was learning about all these effects and becoming aware of her environment, she was still running into people who just weren’t interested in what she had to say.

KEELY SHULZ: And I would talk to people about the things I would learn and I would be really excited and passionate about, um, the church’s ability to take action, and then some of those conversations would go super poorly.

RACHEL SZABO: So what Keely did was she thought back to when she was in fifth grade bringing her friends along to help save the caterpillars and the monarch butterflies, and so Keely started to think that maybe she could do something similar in this context.

KEELY SHULZ: So the plan that I came up with was to start a hiking club at school because I knew that one of the biggest ways that I came to care about environmental issues was just falling in love with creation. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, she started getting out in nature with her classmates, taking time to appreciate and wonder at what was around them.

KEELY SHULZ: When I’ve been in times of, you know, consideration of like my place in the world, God’s plan for me, those kinds of things, a lot of Psalms have been really helpful for me, um, just thinking about like the different nature imagery that’s used and kind of how I see a lot of Psalms as an affirmation of like God communicating with humanity through nature.

RACHEL SZABO: So, can I ask you a question?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: What is a moment or time when you’ve been in nature and you were just awestruck at the wonder or the beauty that was around you? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Mm. So one time I went camping with some friends. We were in California. We’re driving through California and we’re passing Sacramento. It’s fairly like the lowlands. But then we begin to slowly climb through the mountains. We go around these winding roads and we climb and we climb, and there’s evergreens everywhere and mountain chains starting to surround us. And eventually we come to this cabin. There’s a little lake at this cabin, and it was like the most perfect blue water, like you could see all the way down through this lake. And, uh, we would go like jump off the dock and go for a swim first thing in the morning. 

We’re so far from electricity at this point. Shortly after we had put the fire out, I’m laying out in my sleeping bag and I’m staring up at the night sky and there’s just stars, I mean just thousands of stars, and over and over again we could just see shooting stars passing by. And it was just this moment where you began to realize the universe is so big. I roll over and I begin to look at these evergreen trees and this lake and I can literally just hear the sounds of insects, y’know, all around me like an orchestra. And it just made me begin to realize how vast this planet is. And one of the things that really struck me was — how is it that this God of this universe — how is it that he knows me and sees me, and how is it that he loves me? Because unlike this planet and unlike these stars, I’ve rebelled against him. And yet somehow, in the mystery of God’s love, I’m not disposable to him. He’s redeeming me, he’s changing me, he’s making me new. That’s definitely also true for the world that he’s created. God loves all that he has created and he is making it new and he is telling us that we are caretakers of this good world that he’s made. He’s given us dominion, he’s called us to love it. So when we don’t care for this created world that we live in, y’know, it makes me think of this Wendell Berry quote where he says, ‘Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship or stupid economics or a betrayal of family responsibility. It is the most horrid blasphemy.’ Y’know, we’re not just being negligent — we’re lying to people about who God is because we’re telling people that God doesn’t care about what he’s created, and that’s not true. When we care for God’s created world, we’re telling people that God is someone who cares about all that he creates — including you and the world around you.

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JESSE EUBANKS: For even more resources on this topic or to hear past episodes of this podcast, visit our website at lovethyneighborhood.org/ltnpodcast. 

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode — Keely Shulz, Dale Gentry, and Dr. Steve Bouma-Prediger. If you wanna learn more about how science and faith interact, go check out Dale Gentry at his website, Disciple Science. He’s got videos, podcasts, and other great resources at disciplescience.com. Special thanks also to Dr. Katharine Hayhoe and to our friend Dr. William Nunnery, one of the most brilliant men that we know, who gave us a wonderful science lesson on climate change and Christianity.

RACHEL SZABO: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Rachel Szabo, who’s our media director, producer, and woman who cannot match two socks to save her life.

RACHEL SZABO: Our media assistant and audio engineer is Anna Tran. Additional editing by Annelise Collins and additional reporting by Alex de Freitas.

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX. 

RACHEL SZABO: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Come serve with us for a summer or a year, and grow in both your faith and your life skills. Again, lovethyneighborhood.org.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’