Why aren't Christians leading on climate change?

Donald Trump is now President of the most economically powerful nation on the planet and – the President-elect is self-avowedly no friend of God’s creation.

He has signed an order to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change and has pledged to roll back Biden’s clean energy law, the Inflation Reduction Act. And he’s doubling down on oil and gas: ‘Drill, baby, drill’.

All this is deeply troubling – to put it mildly! – to the vast majority of us concerned about the impact of climate breakdown on human prospering and creation’s flourishing. Maybe he’ll follow through on his pledges. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe there’s enough momentum towards a cleaner future even without the world’s biggest polluter on board. Or maybe there isn’t. Time will tell.

The role of US evangelicals in shaping climate policy

But there’s something even more troubling: the role US evangelicalism has in shaping Republican policy on climate and ecological breakdown. To put it as Sir John Houghton, brilliant British climate scientist and evangelical Christian, put it nearly 20 years ago: Republicans won’t act on climate breakdown until evangelical Christians are on board. Global action on perhaps the most far-reaching temporal crisis of our times is held hostage to the beliefs of US evangelicals, at least that part who make up what pollsters call ‘right-wing evangelicals’. That’s troubling indeed.

We might wish to distance ourselves from US evangelicalism. Or not. But either way, it’s not a problem confined to the US. Here in the UK, July’s report by think tank Theos (‘Where do the religious stand on climate change?’) found that Christians were less likely than the general population to prioritise the environment over the economy. And less likely to think the government should do more to protect it.

John Stott, 25 years ago, wrote that Christians should be ‘in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility’. So, what on earth is going on? How is it that we are laggards, where we should be leaders?

Let me tell you a story about a man I know. He became a Christian when he was 18, and was quickly active in the Christian Union at university and afterwards in a large evangelical church in south London. He loved the natural world around him. But he was attentive to the teaching and preaching he heard Sunday by Sunday, and so never gave money, time or effort to caring for it. God was after all, in the end, going to destroy it. There was only one thing that mattered: evangelism, getting others saved so that they could avoid being destroyed with it. Or worse. ‘The world’ might want to give money to Greenpeace, he thought, but that was a nice-to-have at best. And perhaps a dangerous distraction. It’s not a surprise to me that that young man – despite his natural instincts – would do little to care for God’s good earth.

Rediscovering the 'bigger gospel'

But what I didn’t know – for indeed it was I! – was that there was a great sea change beginning, even in those days, in evangelical Christianity. A renewal, a rediscovery of what some today are calling ‘the bigger gospel’, a more thoroughly Biblical understanding of the work of God in Christ on the cross and in resurrection, was already underway. It’s a change that would integrate individual salvation, an eternal perspective, the sanctifying work of the Spirit, the flourishing of God’s earth and pursuit of the common good.

Though becoming mainstream in training colleges, and inspiring new movements among evangelical Generation Z and Generation Alpha, it’s still working through to our congregations and to our everyday lives.

In my next few articles for en, we’ll be looking at key features of this integrated gospel. We’ll see how it helps us not just to be leaders in pursuing the flourishing of the earth and the common good. But also to declare afresh to our nation, and particularly the younger generations for which these issues are writ large, the gospel of Jesus Christ.