Whatever Happened to Creation Care? | by Jeff Miller

Far-right evangelicals killed creation care as secular poison. Is the rise in paganism an unintended consequence?

The term creation care first emerged in the early 1990s, thanks to an open letter to religious leaders signed by the late astronomer Carl Sagan and 33 other scientists. In short, the letter urged religious communities to be like Adam, whom God told to “serve the garden,” by protecting and nurturing nature as designated stewards of the Earth.

For awhile, it seemed that this new moral call to environmental advocacy just might work. Creation care, after all, bridged the gap between creation and creator — a frequent criticism of environmentalism by religious leaders — and avoided the confrontational baggage associated with phrases like global warming and climate change.

When an interdenominational group, known as the National Religious Partnership for the Environment formed in 1993, the media took notice. There were articles about the Evangelical Environmental Network and the spate of sermons from the American heartland sprinkled with practical examples of how pollution harms the unborn, how conservation aids farmers, how being pro-life means being pro-Earth too.

Indeed, the hope was that a new brand of environmental warriors would soon turn the tide of skepticism about human-induced global warming into a religious crusade for saving the planet.

Some religious communities welcomed this opportunity. But others, particularly those led by far-right evangelical leaders, attacked creation care as left-wing progressivism with a phony Biblical veneer. They asserted that creation care was an affront to God’s sovereignty over the Earth, and — because it put the onus of natural destruction on human activity — anti-human. Moreover, as Hayden Ludwig, the Director of Policy Research at Restoration of America, wrote in a series of vituperative online essays, creation care’s “secret war” funded by “fear-mongering secularists” threatened to “drive a wedge between them and the Republican Party, which relies on conservative Christians as a major constituency.”