The Way Things Should Be

So, don't excommunicate me for turning green on you, but I actually started subscribing to treehugger's feed, and while a lot of their stuff is WAY too out there for me, I found this posting on Christian environmentalists to be pretty cool (Be sure to follow the link through to the Christianity Today article). Billy and I went to a marriage class recently, and the guy teaching it used his platform to insist that Christians should be leading the way with environmental protection.

Typically, environmentalists are painted by Christians to be nature-worshiping heathens. They care about the earth because they are scared of death and they grasp so tightly to this huge rock because it's all they think we have. Well, no, it's not all we have, but shouldn't we take care of it anyway? Perhaps we can't believe in both Revelation and the depletion of our resources, but does that mean that we should trash it with our obscene SUV emissions? Or worse yet, does that mean that we need to alienate ourselves from yet another segment of the population?

Think about this quote from the post and the Christianity Today article: "I grew up thinking: 'environment, liberal, bad.' "

First of all, is that really how Christians should view the earth? Shouldn't we be thinking, "Environment, Gift of God, Respect it"?

But worse, to me, are the implications of the relationship fracture that this quote points to. How many Christians think this way? And how many "bad environmental liberals" think something similar? Something like, "Christian, selfish, bad." Does God want us to look like the rest of the world driving SUVs and consuming, consuming, consuming; or does He want us to be a good example, being healthy stewards of both our money AND our resources?

So, anyway, I'm not saying that we have to fall in the spectrum of Sheryl Crow and other hypocrite liberals, but I do think that the real, everyday environmentalists, like this green blogger, are often doing a better job at being a peculiar people than we are.