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Serve God, Save the Planet

A Christian Call to Action

by J. Matthew Sleeth, MD

Foreword by Rev. Richard Cizik

Associated Articles

Some evangelical Christians preaching environmentalism

The News-Sentinel
By Linda B. Blackford
November 22, 2006

WILMORE, Ky. - J. Matthew Sleeth is a man of God and a man of science.

He is a physician who believes that the Bible is the literal word of God, that Jesus Christ walked on water, and that our addiction to oil and energy is killing our spiritual lives and violating a sacred pact with God.

As a "born-again" Christian preaching environmentalism, Sleeth is part of a growing phenomenon of evangelical Christians who think protecting the natural world should transcend politics. He spreads that message with his new book, "Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action," and through an incessant speaking schedule before groups and congregations across the country.

Sleeth's tale is a compelling one: A successful Maine doctor chucks his big house and big cars to get real with his spiritual life and his tangible footprint on nature. Because his story is so personal, he thinks he can open a door to other Christians who have been stranded on one side of a historically polarizing issue.

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God's in His Heaven, All's Right with the World

Huffington Post
By Carl Huffington
November 20, 2006

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe once again has demonstrated that his kind of rightwing ideologue really doesn't believe in learning from experience -- because that would mean acknowledging reality. Inhofe, of course, is the ranking Republican on the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee (although that may change soon). His latest proclamation on global warming is that we shouldn't worry; it can't be anything other than natural because "God's still up there." (Do listen to this link -- it's funny.) The theology behind Inhofe's position is a little murky -- it would be more consistent if Inhofe argued that global warming was happening because God wanted it to -- after all, in Genesis, God promised that the next time he destroyed the earth it would not be with a flood but with fire. (Some of Inhofe's supporters do take this view -- global warming is the end of the world, and it's about time too.)

Ironically, Inhofe's view is losing ground among the same evangelicals to whom he is trying to appeal. J. Matthew Sleeth, an evangelical preacher and the author of Serve God, Save the Planet spoke to the Sierra Club's Board of Directors last weekend, and he was a heartening (and very funny) contrast to the kind of know-nothing-ism preached by Inhofe. Sleeth urged Club leaders to realize that the way to engage Americans of all faiths in thinking about global warming is not to talk about parts per million of CO2. (After all, he points out, no one (including most scientists) can tell you how many parts per million of nitrogen there are in the atmosphere -- it's not how our minds work.) Instead, he told the story of appearing at a church in New Hampshire, where the congregation was initially not persuaded that global warming was real, until he asked them all how often they had used their snowmobiles that winter! And then it dawned on them there had been no snow to travel over.

And as the lame ducks get ready to fly wherever it is that discredited political ideas go for the winter, even they seemed to get the message. The outgoing Governor of Colorado, Bill Owens, in one of his final acts, announced that Colorado would request protection for 4.1 million acres of roadless areas, almost all of the state's remaining wild forests. Since the courts have restored the Clinton Wild Forest rule, Owens's act may turn out not to have been necessary. But it's a sure sign that politicians are finally hearing the public repudiation of the Bush Administration's environmental assaults more clearly.

Another straw in the wind: In its first post-election act, the lame-duck U.S. Senate voted to protect another wild area, New Mexico's Valle Vidal, when Republican Senator Pete Domenici finally endorsed protection "after months of intense political pressure from all over New Mexico. Hunters, anglers, Republicans, Democrats and environmentalists lobbied Domenici relentlessly to protect the national forest property, famous for its high mountain valleys, rambling forests and elk herds, from oil and gas development." It appeared that Domenici, who won't chair the Senate Energy Committee next year, didn't want his successor, New Mexico's other Senator, Jeff Bingaman, to get all the credit for protecting Valle Vidal. But Domenici also admitted that he held off on speaking up for the Valle because it might have gotten in the way of his efforts to open up the nation's coastline to oil and gas drilling -- his argument for sacrificing California, Florida, and the Carolinas would have been undercut if he wasn't willing to devastate New Mexico as well.

But now that the voters have spoken -- well, a certain amount of common sense does seem to be returning.

Christians gather for prayer against new coal-fired plants in Texas

Associated Baptist Press
By Hannah Elliottt
October 20, 2006

DALLAS (ABP) -- Texas Christians -- by reputation a determined, opinionated and politically powerful bunch -- recently held another statewide prayer day. This time, though, it wasn’t about abortion or gay marriage. It was about coal.

On Oct. 19, a group of environmentally minded Texans convened in front of the governor’s mansion in Austin to pray about some 17 coal-burning power plants proposed for the state. They were joined by comrades at other locations across the state.

Their concern: the environmental and health dangers posed by burning coal.

vSome participated for reasons of faith; others were more involved in the political scheme of things. For Matthew Sleeth, however, the common bond was “a concern for their neighbors.”

Sleeth provided much of the impetus for the prayer day, touring five Texas cities last September to raise awareness about the proposed coal plants. A former physician, he teaches and writes full time about earth stewardship. He wrote Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, which was published in June.

Sleeth's eight-day tour was arranged by Sustainable Dallas, Public Citizen and Interfaith Power and Light, all organizations aimed at sustainability and environmental protection. Founded by Ralph Nader, Public Citizen focuses primarily on consumer advocacy and governmental accountability.

Sleeth and his wife, Nancy, visited roughly 15 environmental groups, churches and colleges like Southern Methodist University, Baylor University and Texas Christian University. Both Sleeths said the tour was essential for raising awareness about health and environment issues, especially among Christians.

“In the final analysis, the decision on building the coal plants will not be a logical one. Rather, it will be a spiritual one,” Sleeth said in a written statement about the event. “We will have to answer [if] we have the heart to continue down this path. How many more mountains made of coal should we level in order to run our multiple televisions and refrigerators? Who better to ask than the Lord?”

Sleeth’s concern about the coal plants -- which offer energy cheaper than oil and are perceived as more reliable than some renewable power sources -- has to do with their side effects. Texas already produces the most carbon dioxide of any U.S. state. Breathing the secondhand smog put out from burning coal can be just as harmful as smoking, according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Smog-related diseases include heart disease, lung disease, asthma and stroke.

The federal government does not regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Each year the new Texas plants would emit the same amount of carbon dioxide as 19 million cars, according to a recent National Public Radio report. The new coal plants will also pollute the air with nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury. There are no plans to shut down or replace existing plants.

Despite such effects, roughly 150 new coal-fired plants are planned across the nation, according to the National Energy Technology Laboratory. Illinois and Texas are the only states with more than 10 plants planned. Eleven of the plants in Texas belong to the state’s largest power company, TXU Corp. The company has announced a five-year, $10 billion plan to build the plants faster and cheaper than ever before.

TXU officials have set up a website, www.reliabletexaspower.com, to combat negative publicity about the coal plants. The site says the plants will add much-needed power to the growing state, lower annual wholesale power costs by $1.7 billion, and create thousands of jobs. The plants will also be much more efficient and clean than older coal plants.

Big names have joined the fight. In a recent op-ed article in the Dallas Morning News, Texas governor Rick Perry wrote that a delay in building the plants would damage the state's economy. He also dismissed the opposition's concerns over air quality, noting that TXU has announced plans to install $500 million-worth of anti-pollution devices on some of its older plants.

For Sleeth and others like him, the task at hand is to pray for the utility owners, activists and oil companies -- “everything that sustains us.”

Nancy Sleeth said she and Matthew believe they have a biblically based responsibility to care for God’s creation, including humans. Jesus commands people to love one another, she said, so Matthew preaches a message of love. They aim to “build bridges to help more people become good stewards of God's abundant blessings.”

In addition to teaching environmental stewardship, Sleeth educates people about the health risks of pollution. As a physician, he has seen breast cancer and asthma rates soar. At such a dramatic rate, he said, the nation can’t afford to spend time looking only for cures and not for prevention tactics.

“Both my head and my heart tell me that we should not build the dozens and dozens of coal plants that are being fast-tracked into production nationwide,” he said. “The drive behind this unprecedented push is not to meet current demand, nor is it to meet the needs of the next decade. This rush to build coal-fired plants is, in fact, motivated by the desire to grandfather in these plants before stricter emissions requirements go into effect.”

Half of the power generated in the United States comes from coal, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Analysts estimate that U.S. coal reserves could last for the next 200 to 250 years.

The new units will use coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, with 9,000 rail cars operating continuously to transport the coal. Construction could begin in 2007. Plants would be operational in 2009.

Eco-Activist Evangelical Preaches “Creation Care”

Seven Days: Vermont's Alternative Weekly
by Cathy Resmer
October 4, 2006

BURLINGTON — J. Matthew Sleeth is a rarity in this politically polarized country: He’s a born-again Christian and a committed environmentalist. The Kentucky-based author of Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action embraces an avocation social conservatives typically regard with derision — he’s an avowed “treehugger.”

“The Bible starts with the tree of life,” he explains. “The word tree is mentioned 500 times in the Bible. Christ worked with trees before he started his ministry. He died on a tree. And the last chapter of the Bible ends with the trees in heaven. So call me a treehugger.”

Sleeth is part of a growing “creation care” movement among evangelicals convinced that the Bible calls them to be better stewards of the Earth. And the born-agains aren’t the only religious communities taking action — Sleeth’s Vermont visit comes during a week in which 50 congregations across the state will be screening Al Gore’s global warming flick, An Inconvenient Truth. The events are coordinated by Vermont Interfaith Power and Light, which posts screening times on its website, www.vtipl.org.

Sleeth has already spoken at Rice High School, Middlebury College and St. Joseph’s College in Rutland, and he’ll preach during morning services at Burlington’s First United Methodist Church on Sunday. That evening, he’ll speak at an interfaith event at Ohavi Zedek Synagogue, following a 7 p.m. vegetarian potluck dinner. Both the dinner and Sleeth’s talk are open to the public.

Sleeth, 50, says he doesn’t have a PowerPoint presentation or a scripted speech. He just speaks from the heart about his love for Jesus Christ — and the planet.

He often starts by telling his own story. Five years ago, he was an emergency-room doctor in Maine when he began to feel as if he was “straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic,” he says.

“When I started medicine,” Sleeth recalls, “one in 19 women got breast cancer. And now it’s one in nine. And actually, I was giving this talk in Austin, and an oncologist walked up and said, ‘No, it’s one in seven.’” He points out that other illnesses such as asthma are also on the rise.

Sleeth suspected the trend was connected to the destruction of the natural environment. This troubled the doctor, not only because of the medical implications, but also because of his religious beliefs. He quit his job, and began working to reduce his family’s energy consumption and environmental impact. They sold their big house, and moved to a New Hampshire town across the Connecticut River from Vermont, where Sleeth’s two children attended St. Johnsbury Academy; Sleeth’s wife, Nancy, taught there for a time. The couple recently moved to Wilmore, Kentucky, where their son and daughter attend Asbury College. “We went from living a doctor-sized life to moving into a house that was the same footprint as our garage,” he observes. “We’re the poster family for downward mobility.”

This downsizing had a dramatic effect. “We cut our electric use to a tenth of what the national average was,” he says, “and our fossil fuel use to a third.”

Sleeth suggests that this kind of change on a larger scale could have a real impact. “If everybody in the United States could do that,” he says, “we would not need a single coal-fired plant. We could take all the nuke plants off line. We could just run off hydro and alternative. We wouldn’t have to import oil.”

He set out to convince others, especially his fellow Christians, to make similar changes. He wrote his book, out this year from left-leaning, White River Junction-based Chelsea Green Publishing. Zondervan, the Christian publisher that released Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, has purchased the paperback rights.

Now the former doc’s sole occupation is traveling the country promoting the book and its message. He speaks free of charge to anyone who will host him.

In his book and in his talks, Sleeth challenges evangelicals to take better care of the Earth by referencing Bible stories like the one of Joseph and the Egyptians; he advised them to store grain during years of plenty to prepare for future lean years. “Everybody who’s read the Bible knows exactly what I’m talking about,” he says. “It’s a story about stewardship.”

He believes his outreach is working. After one sermon he delivered to seven conservative Northeast Kingdom churches, he claims members went home and replaced every light bulb in their houses with energy-efficient bulbs. “To have everybody in seven churches go home and do that,” he notes, “it’s significant.”

Sleeth laments the fact that concern for the environment is such a low priority for many evangelicals, and says it’s probably because the issue has been linked to others that many born-agains do not support. He doesn’t give examples, but it’s safe to assume he means abortion and gay marriage. “It’s kind of like buying a car,” he posits. “If you want the power windows, you’ve gotta get the air conditioning, and there’s no separating them.”

But Sleeth believes that separation is vital to the survival of the planet. After all, he says, “The Bible says that the Lord makes the rain to fall on the wicked and the just. And unfortunately, acid rain does the same thing.”

Evangelizing for the Earth

Conservative Christians are getting involved in environmental causes.

Fort Worth Weekly
by Wendy Lyons Sunshine
September 27, 2006

Look around you, the physician told the group at the Texas Christian University student center. Half of the two dozen or so folks in the room, he said, probably will get some kind of cancer eventually.

“The answer is not to find the cure or sell pink ribbons or build more cancer treatment centers,” said Dr. Matthew Sleeth, an author, evangelical Christian, and former emergency room director. “The answer is to prevent it, to find the cause.” And that means, he said, that people of faith must take a more active role in caring for the Earth.

Over a buffet lunch of salad and lasagna at the TCU center earlier this month, Sleeth brought his message of evangelical environmentalism to a group of students, faculty, and administrators. He told them how, a few years ago, he had admitted three young women — all in their 30s and dying of breast cancer — to his rural New Hampshire hospital within the span of one week. Disturbed by the trend, he reflected on the dramatic increase in the incidence of this disease. When Sleeth began his medical career, one in 18 women got breast cancer; recent textbooks now give the figure as one in nine. Rising cancer rates, Sleeth believes, are directly linked to mankind’s dishonoring God’s creation.

Since then, Sleeth has become one of a small but growing number of evangelicals across the country who believe that taking better care of the environment is a biblical mandate as well as a public health issue — that cleaning up the air and the food supply is no less important than ministering to the sick. In a weeklong tour of Texas, he made his case to university groups and a handful of churches in Fort Worth, Dallas, and Denton.

A religious reawakening a few years back spurred Sleeth and his wife, Nancy, to take concrete action. They began seriously observing the Sabbath, moved to a smaller home, and gave up many material possessions. Because fossil fuels like coal and gasoline contribute heavily to pollution, the Sleeths downsized their car, started using more efficient lightbulbs, and gave up energy-guzzlers such as their dishwasher and clothes dryer. They cut electricity consumption dramatically, and now their monthly electrical bill is around $9. Sleeth documented their spiritual and environmental journey in his book, Serve God, Save The Planet: A Christian Call To Action.

A widely read man of science, Sleeth believes that the way things are going, the Earth will soon be on life support. He finds the situation so urgent that he gave up medicine to travel around the country, evangelizing about Earth care and the Bible. “I get to tell people about God’s love for the planet,” he said.

One TCU student asked about the stigma of being called a “tree-hugger.”

“The front of my life-study Bible has a tree on it,” said Sleeth. He ticked off instances of tree symbolism in the Bible, from the Abraham oak to references to the throne of God as being an unpolluted river of life with trees on either side, and more. “What did Christ do before he started his ministry? Worked with trees. ... It’s not by accident that Christ died on a tree,” he said. “The Bible mentions ‘tree’ 500 times.” Am I proud to be called a tree-hugger? You betcha. The Bible says God loves trees. We’re supposed to love what God loves.”

Until now, conservative Christian groups haven’t been known for their environmental activism, despite a snowballing body of evidence of climate change — such as NASA studies showing that Arctic sea ice is melting at an alarming rate. Some fundamentalists are comfortable with pollution and its effects, because they embrace the Earth’s destruction as an opportunity to rejoin their maker.

But in the last year or so, a growing number of evangelical and moderate Christian leaders across the country have begun to talk about the need for people to become more responsible caretakers of the world for future generations. Earlier this summer, Pat Robertson said in a national broadcast that he has reversed his position on global warming and now believes it to be an urgent threat that must be addressed.

“Everybody expects Unitarians and some Methodists and Disciples of Christ and more progressive congregations to be involved with the environment,” said Jim Schermbeck of Downwinders at Risk, a local environmental group. “What’s different this time out is we’re seeing involvement not only from those congregations but also from Baptists, independent Pentecostals, and so forth — people who have not been traditionally allied with this issue. It cuts across all political lines.” Schermbeck finds this an encouraging sign. “I hope that it accelerates the pace of change, because it needs accelerating.”

Many conservative Christian leaders, however, shun the word “environmentalism”

and instead use the term “creation care.” According to the Evangelical Environmental Network, hundreds of congregational leaders have signed their Declaration on the Care of Creation. EEN has also launched an educational campaign and web site (www.healthyfamiliesnow.org). Texas Interfaith Power & Light, a faith-based environmental organization here in Texas, is part of a nationwide network helping put together local awareness-raising events on this issue.

Sleeth came to the TCU luncheon at the invitation of campus minister Angela Kaufman. “There’s a movement around religious stewardship of the Earth that’s rising up all around the country now,” she said. “Caring about the Earth is not just for hippies, not just for tree-huggers. Caring about others and our surroundings is something we’re all called to do.

“One of the dangers is for people to be overwhelmed with too much information and then feel paralyzed,” she said. “We’re not asking people to give up their life or career, we’re asking people to make small changes in how they live day to day.”

The Rev. Kaufman is coordinating a film festival on environmental topics in cooperation with University Christian Church. TCU will kick off the festival with snacks and a free viewing of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s film on global warming, on Oct. 17 at 6 p.m. in Moudy Hall. Later that week, UCC will present two more films: Kilowatt Ours and A Great Warming, a documentary in which Sleeth appears. All screenings are free and open to the public.

The film festival comes on the heels of a new Bill Moyers television special, “Is God Green?” which airs Oct. 11 on PBS.

“The visit from Dr. Sleeth was a catalyst for reaching out,” said Nelda Mills, a member of the “Caring for God’s Creation Committee” at University Christian Church. She passionately believes that her two grandchildren, 4 and 6 years old, deserve a world where they can go out and play during the summer, like children used to do, and not have to stay indoors because of air pollution. “For so long we have talked about profit, and it’s time to talk about consequences to people and to children,” she said.

A week after Sleeth wrapped up his Dallas area visits, Mills carried a message of creation care to Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth. For a small lunch gathering, she played a 10-minute DVD about “clearing Texas air, one congregation at a time.” Then she spoke about how Fort Worth’s air is among the dirtiest in America.

“The situation is critical in this area,” she said, linking local air pollution not just to cars and congestion, but to coal-fired power plants and Midlothian concrete kilns. “People of faith have a role in environmental issues, in caring for creation,” she said. “A coalition of faith groups could be heard when others might be seen as having an agenda. For us there is no agenda except caring.”

One Doc's Medicine: Serve God, save the planet

Austin Chronicle
by Daniel Mottola
September 22, 2006

An unusual doctor visited Austin last week – a former emergency-room director turned evangelical environmental crusader, who has taken to showing others how caring more for our planet while cutting back consumption can bring individual spiritual peace and help save our ailing planet. People in both environmental and religious communities believe Dr. J. Matthew Sleeth, once chief of staff at a prominent New England hospital, may also have the metaphysical medicine to heal the two groups' largely disjointed relationship.

Sleeth's treatment is a simple regimen of downsizing one's life – a procedure he and his family have undergone. In spreading the word about this therapeutic transformation (at times to less than receptive congregations), Sleeth focuses more on building relationships than changing minds. Though he fluidly cites Bible verses to reinforce his points, his tone in preaching sounds less like a hysterical auctioneer and more like the soft-spoken bedside manner of a trusted family physician. Sleeth was in town to speak at University Presbyterian Church about his new book, Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action.

A big part of Sleeth's message is how, upon realizing what an excessive and unsustainable lifestyle he and his family were leading, they slashed their energy use and consumption. He describes moving into a house the size of his former garage; dispensing with appliances such as the clothes dryer, dishwasher, extra TV, and refrigerator; and replacing fancy cars with a single, more efficient one. Sleeth said he thinks most people know things like global warming and oil addiction are problematic but "just don't think they can make the necessary changes" to stop them. He said "somewhere between Christ's life and a McMansion, two cars, and three TVs, we'll get closer to God." An easy solution to the proposed construction of 17 polluting coal plants in Texas, then, is to diminish the demand for electricity by using less. He references the popular Christian notions that spiritual wealth outweighs material wealth in the eyes of God as a remedy for materialism and that Earth is the Lord's holy place and that he reveals himself through his creation. For comic relief, Sleeth's wife, Nancy, says the goal of the family's green crusade is to put the conserve back in conservative and the fun back into fundamentalist.

Sleeth says he's been talking environmentalism with various Christian groups, large and small, since 2003 and receiving a generally positive response. That could be because he speaks as articulately and confidently about medical procedures as he does about Bible scripture and eco-jargon.

Following his talk at a suburban Houston church, local green activist Isabella Schmidt, a Catholic, described the difficulty she was having initiating environmental dialogue with other area Christian congregations, who quickly dismissed the Earth talk as an unacceptably political topic. Sleeth, stressing the importance of human interaction, suggested that she ask to discuss the matters with church leaders over a shared meal and emphasize the specific and personal implications of ecological degradation as they apply to the congregation, rather than throwing out stark, generic statistics. "You become a person on the church's agenda, not vice versa," he said.

Bee Moorhead, executive director of Texas Impact, the Austin-based interfaith group that brought Sleeth here, is someone whose daily work is partially devoted to bridging the church/environmental chasm. She cautioned environmental groups against looking at someone like Sleeth opportunistically. "As long as secular environmentalists see this as a one-way street, as 'we need some of those evangelicals,' it won't work out. It's necessary for them to think about what being in a relationship with a church really means." On the other hand, in many churches, Moorhead said, differentiating charity and justice is a problem. "Charity operates in the status quo, while justice challenges the status quo," she said. "Sleeth is good at starting out on the charity side and pointing a congregation toward the justice side."

The Gospel of Green

Will Evangelicals Help Save The Earth?

On Earth
by Bill McKibben
Fall 2006

First came the mighty winds, blowing across the Gulf with unprecedented fury, leveling cities and towns, washing away the houses built on sand. Toss in record flooding across the Northeast, and one of the warmest winters humans have known on this continent, and a prolonged and deepening drought in the desert West. For Americans, this has been the year the earth turned biblical. Pharaoh may have faced plagues and frogs and darkness; we got Katrina and Rita and Wilma.

But this was also the year the environmental movement turned biblical -- the year when people of faith began in large numbers to join the first rank of those trying to protect creation. The key symbolic moment came in February, when 86 of the country's leading evangelical scholars and pastors signed on to the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a document that may turn out to be as important in the fight against global warming as any stack of studies and computer models. It made clear, among other things, that even in the evangelical community, "right wing" and "Christian" are not synonyms, and in so doing it may have opened the door to a deeper and more interesting politics than we've experienced in the last decade of fierce ideological divide.

That document seemed, to many newspaper readers, to come out of nowhere. But, of course, it was the result of long and patient groundwork from a small corps of people. Understanding that history helps illuminate what the future might hold for this effort. And given that 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian, and that we manage to emit 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide -- well, the future of Christian environmentalism may have something significant to do with the future of the planet.

In the beginning (say, The Reagan Era), all was darkness. To liberal American Christians, the environment was largely a luxury item, well down on the list below war and poverty. "I remember one Catholic bishop asking me, 'How come there aren't any people on those Sierra Club calendars?'" says one of the few religious conservationists of that era. To conservative Christians, environmentalism was a dirty word -- it stank of paganism, of interference with the free market, of the sixties. Meanwhile, many environmentalists were more secular than the American norm, and often infected with the notion spread by the historian Lynn White in his famous 1967 essay, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," that Christianity lay at the root of ecological devastation. Everyone, in short, was scared of everyone else.

But there were a few lights starting to shine in that gloom. Calvin DeWitt carried one lantern. A mild-mannered midwesterner with a Ph.D. in zoology, he helped in 1979 to found the Au Sable Institute in northern Michigan. The institute devotes itself to organizing field courses and conferences that teach ecology, always stressing the Christian notion of stewardship, the idea that, as it says in Genesis, we are to "dress and keep" the fertile earth. To understand what a religious environmental worldview might look like, consider this from one of DeWitt's early statements: "Creation itself is a complex functioning whole of people, plants, animals, natural systems, physical processes, social structures, and more, all of which are sustained by God's love and ordered by God's wisdom. Thus, Au Sable brings together the full range of disciplines -- from chemistry to economics to marine biology to theology -- that we need if we are to be good stewards of God's household." That doesn't sound too frightening, right?

In DeWitt's Reformed Church tradition, God has left us two books to read. First, the book of creation, "in which each creature is as a letter of text leading us to know God's divinity and everlasting power." And second, the Bible. It's easy to see how environmentalism connects with the first of these, but it's taken longer to understand its relevance to the second.

"When we started, for the first two or three or four years almost everything we were dealing with was an Old Testament text, from the Hebrew Bible," says DeWitt. That makes sense. Since the Old Testament starts at the beginning, it almost has to deal with questions about the relationship between people and land. There's Noah, the first radical green, saving a breeding pair of everything; there are the Jewish laws mandating a Sabbath for the land every seventh year; there's the soliloquy at the end of the book of Job, which is both God's longest speech in the whole Bible and the first and best piece of nature writing in the Western tradition.

But the sparer, more compressed text of the Gospels and Epistles had never been read with an eye to its ecological meaning -- in large part because it wasn't necessary. Medieval Christians, say, weren't living in a time of planetary peril. But now that we were, people started finding passages like this from Colossians: Jesus "is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth...all things were created before him and through him." It may not sound exactly like an Audubon Society mailer, but the insistence on this world as well as the next was important in helping many pastors open up to environmental thinking. Or this, from Revelation, describing the final judgment, when the time would come for rewarding the servants and prophets and "for destroying the destroyers of the earth." (That's a little scarier to secular ears, but if you've ever sung Handel's Messiah, the "trumpet shall sound" stuff echoes the same passage.) The point is, once people started looking, the Scriptures started speaking.

Something else happened too: the emergence of climate change as the key question for the environmental movement. On the one hand, confronting global warming made everything harder -- environmental groups suddenly found themselves contending with the main engine of our economy. But for many religious environmentalists, heightening the stakes may have made progress easier -- this was a cosmological question, one about the ultimate fate of our species, our planet, God's creation. Unlike, say, clean drinking water, where simple, practical wisdom was enough to offer you an answer, global warming almost demanded a theological response. In that sense, it was like the dawn of the nuclear age. "The magnitude, the comprehensiveness, the totality of the challenge it represents to God's creation on earth, the profoundly intergenerational nature of the damage that was being done-it became the central axis," says Paul Gorman.

Gorman is a story in himself. A former speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy, in 1993 he cofounded the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, which, with generous amounts of foundation money, set out to build environmental support among American Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants (like Methodists and Lutherans), and evangelical Christians. Crucially, it was willing to go slowly enough to build a solid foundation. "It's not going to be the environmental movement at prayer," says Gorman, "not about providing more shock troops for the embattled American greens. We have to see the inescapable, thrilling, renewing religious dimension of this challenge." A thousand Sunday school curriculums and special liturgies and summer camps later, Gorman's effort is bearing real fruit. In 2001, for instance, America's Catholic bishops issued a pastoral statement on the environment, one that fits the question into their long-standing theology of "prudence" and relates it to their centuries of work against hunger and poverty around the world. "If you measure [the change] against the speed with which religious life integrates fundamental new perspectives, then historically it's been kind of brisk," says Gorman.

On occasion, the religious environmental movement flared into public view. At the turn of the century, for instance, while spending a year as a fellow at Harvard Divinity School, I helped organize a series of demonstrations outside SUV dealerships in Boston. Before one demonstration with a bunch of mainline clerics, Dan Smith, then the associate pastor of the Hancock United Church of Christ in Lexington, Massachusetts, where I'd grown up, and I painted a banner that said "WWJD: What Would Jesus Drive?" The initials were borrowed from evangelical circles, where they stood for What Would Jesus Do and usually referred to questions of sex or drugs. But we liked the emphasis on personal responsibility -- and we guessed that the newspapers might like it too. Guessed correctly, as it turned out, for the sign was splashed across the front pages and websites the next day. Within a matter of months, it wound up back in more conservative circles, where the Evangelical Environmental Network, of which DeWitt was a founder, used the slogan as part of a multistate advertising campaign.

Most of the time, though, the progress has been slower, steadier, and less visible. The Evangelical Climate Initiative document, for instance, grew out of a very private retreat for select leaders at a Christian conference center on the Maryland shore, a gathering that included many of the evangelical movement's luminaries, most of whom had not been deeply involved in environmental issues. The opening remarks came from Sir John Houghton, an English physicist and climate expert who had served as chairman of the scientific assessment team for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group that definitively broke the news that humans were indeed heating the planet. Sir John was also a lifelong British evangelical (on a continent where Christians are less politically polarized) and a friend of John Stott, another Brit and a beloved elder statesman in evangelical circles. Sir John also could point to his collaborations with business leaders in Europe, like John Brown, chairman of British Petroleum, who were far more open to acknowledging global warming than were their American counterparts at companies like Exxon.

"When John Houghton speaks, he speaks with both biblical authority and scientific authority," says DeWitt. "The critic, the detractor, the naysayer has to deal with a person who is both the scientist and the evangelical scholar in one and the same person. As an evangelical, Bible-believing, God-fearing Christian as well as a scientist, he'd made sure that the IPCC reports were absolutely the best and most truthfully stated documents ever produced in science." And, he adds, "it helps that he's got a British accent."

By the conference's close, the participants had made a covenant to address the issue, and then spent months gathering signatures. When it was eventually released, some leaders of the Christian right, like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson, demanded that it be retracted. Climate science was unsettled, they said. Speaking anonymously, one conservative Christian lobbyist scoffed to a reporter, "Is God really going to let the earth burn up?" The National Association of Evangelicals, the umbrella group for the entire movement, feared a split and stayed officially neutral. But the bulk of the 86 signers (who included seminary presidents, charity directors, and prominent pastors like Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life) held strong, some of them quietly relishing the chance to say that their movement was larger than high-profile televangelists and not necessarily a steady date of the GOP. "The grace of it!" says Gorman. "I think you could say this is one of the first significant events of the post-Bush era."

It's had legs, too. This spring the New Republic reported that in Pennsylvania the incumbent Republican senator Rick Santorum has come under religious fire for his stand on climate change. At a panel on the subject, a biology professor at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, "tore into the senator, accusing him of selling out the environment to business interests." In the words of Richard Cizik, the chief lobbyist for evangelical causes in Washington, "there's going to be a lot of political reconsideration on this in the coming year. The old fault lines are no more."

Other evangelicals are less political, but at least as subversive. A former emergency room doctor named Matthew Sleeth, for instance, quit his job to preach the green gospel and says the reaction has been far greater than he could have guessed. His book Serve God, Save the Planet was published last spring, and he has been traveling to churches ever since. Everywhere his message is the same: God asks us to surrender some of our earth-wrecking wealth. "Bible-believing Christians have confused the kingdom of heaven with capitalism and consumerism," Sleeth says. He's not attracted to electoral politics. Instead he's been downsizing his life -- putting up the clothesline, selling his stuff, buying a Prius. (He writes his books on a lifetime supply of old computer paper he rescued from a Dumpster.) The ecological battles ahead of us compare to the greatest battles in American history, he says, and his models include people like the abolitionist John Brown, who practiced exactly what he preached, sharing his farm with freed slaves. "There's a longing for a spiritual life in this country," he says, over and over. "A great hunger for something more than capitalism."

It's far from clear, however, that faith communities will take this fight as far as it needs to go. Simply breaking ranks with the Bush administration on this issue took enormous courage for evangelical leaders. So if some legislator offers any kind of deal to "fix" the problem of global warming, it may win all-too-easy endorsement. Some kind of Kyoto-lite measure, like the one proposed by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, might pass the Congress in the next few years. If it does, the bar has been set so low that environmentalists of all stripes, but especially those out on a limb like the evangelicals, might well sign on, even though the steadily worsening scientific findings make it very clear that bold and rapid action is required. Here's John Houghton, speaking hard words to Americans: "You've got to cut your own greenhouse gas emissions, on the fastest time scale you can possibly do. You've got to help China and India develop in ways that are environmentally friendly and don't emit too much, but allow them to develop at the same time." Those are precisely the fights -- over scale, speed, and international equity -- that will bedevil whatever steps we take to fight global warming, and it's not clear that the faithful are really girded for the fight. "Will this groundswell have the real moral edge to keep the pressure on over the long haul?" asks Gorman, and he doesn't answer his own question.

If the answer is going to be yes, a couple of things may need to happen. One, the mainline Protestant denominations will have to step up to the plate. They long ago passed all the proper resolutions decrying the destruction of creation, and certain congregations have launched interesting initiatives. (An upstart group called Episcopal Power and Light, for instance, pioneered the practice of supplying congregations with green power.) But not many mainline Protestants have stepped far outside their comfort zones -- in part because the denominations themselves are dwindling in number and beset by internal divisions over questions like the ordination of gay clergy. Still, there are increasing hints of future activism: Planning for possible widespread nonviolent civil disobedience to draw attention to global warming, for instance, was widely discussed at a recent National Council of Churches meeting in storm-wrecked New Orleans. Protests at Ford headquarters? Blocking the entrance to the EPA? Sitting on the tracks of coal trains? Whatever the strategy, it will play better on TV if there are some clerical collars near the front.

The critique from all quarters will need to get sharper too. Calvin DeWitt pulls no punches: "We've spiritualized the devil," he says. "But when Exxon is funding think tanks to basically confuse the lessons that we're getting from this great book of creation, that's devilish work. We find ourselves praying to God to protect us from the wiles of the devil, but we can't see him when he's staring us in the face."

Much of the uncertainty about the future of such efforts stems from this: Christianity in America has grown very comfortable with the hyperindividualism of our consumer lives. In one recent poll, three-quarters of Christians said they thought the phrase "God helps those who help themselves" came from the Bible, when in fact it derives from Aesop via Ben Franklin and expresses almost the exact opposite of the Gospel injunction to "love your neighbor as yourself." Says DeWitt, "By accommodating to a new philosophy about how society works, we've flipped Matthew 6:33 on its head. Instead of 'Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all the rest shall be added unto you,' we're looking out for number one." Which makes it a lot harder for politicians to start talking about carbon taxes or other measures that might actually start to bring our emissions under control.

Still, there are continuing signs of progress -- what Christians might call evidence of the Holy Spirit at work. In August, after the hottest early summer on record in the United States, even Pat Robertson announced his conversion -- people were heating the planet, he said, and something needed to be done. In the end, it's clear that this battle is not only for the preservation of creation. In certain ways, it offers the chance for American Christianity to rescue itself from the smothering embrace of a culture fixated on economic growth, on individual abundance. A new chance to emerge as the countercultural force that the Gospels clearly envisioned. And also a chance to heal at least a few of the splits in American Christianity. Fighting over creation versus evolution, for instance, seems a little less crucial in an era when de-creation has become the real challenge.

Evangelical Christian and environmentalist says change has to begin "in your backyard"

Waco Herald-Tribune
by J.B. Smith
September 16, 2006

Dr. Matthew Sleeth felt the need to apologize for the red Jeep Liberty he and his wife, Nancy, were driving around Waco on Thursday. They usually drive a Honda hybrid — and that as little as possible.

“This thing can’t get more than 20 or 25 miles per gallon,” Sleeth said after an interview near Baylor University, where he was to speak on Christianity and the environment. “It was the last car the rental place had.”

The Sleeths are on tour to promote his new book, Serve God, Save the Planet, published by Chelsea Green and soon to be published in paperback by the Christian publishing giant Zondervan. During the tour, they have struggled with suspending their simple lifestyle for one of planes, rental cars, hotels and cell phones. But the payoff is finding an audience for their message: God cares about his world.

The Sleeths are devoted evangelical Christians and environmentalists, but they defy stereotypes associated with either label. Matthew Sleeth speaks at big universities and churches ranging from Pentecostal to Unitarian on topics from personal faith in Jesus to the dangers of global warming and overpopulation.

At Baylor University on Thursday, he was introduced by the environmental groups Public Citizen and SEED, then proceeded to talk to his audience of about 70 in equal measure about saving souls and saving the planet, offering free Bibles along with his books.

Sleeth’s book, written for a popular audience, is part manual for living an eco-friendly lifestyle, part testament to his family’s experiment in living it out. More information is available at www.servegodsavetheplanet.org.

A few years ago, newly converted to Christianity, Matthew Sleeth quit his job as an emergency room doctor and chief of staff at a large East Coast hospital to spend time writing and preaching about “creation care.”

After doing an audit of how much they consumed, the Sleeths decided to sell their spacious house for a modest house the size of their old (admittedly large) garage.

They committed to reducing their electrical use to one-tenth of the national average.

More recently, the two moved from New Hampshire to Kentucky so they could be closer to their children at Asbury College without having to fly or drive to visit.

Nancy Sleeth has accepted a part-time college teaching position that pays a fraction of her old teaching job in New Hampshire.

In an interview with the Tribune-Herald at Common Grounds coffeehouse Thursday, Matthew said he had no regrets about becoming “downwardly mobile.”

Q: At what point did you go from being someone who accepted the standard American lifestyle to beginning to question it?

A: When I came to know God. After the religious conversion of being born again, all the wisdom in the Bible began to be real, something to take seriously — like a Sabbath day of rest, seeking first the kingdom of heaven instead of trying to get ahead here on earth.

Q: So it came about pretty quickly that your faith had practical consequences.

A: In Christianity, when you have Christ as the example of the perfect person, it gives you an example of how to live our lives. When you look at Christ’s lifestyle, he had only one coat, he has no home, he gives everything he has away, he doesn’t charge anyone for cures or miracles. On the other hand, there was my American lifestyle. In the gap between the two is really the joy of life.

Q: Hasn’t there been a feeling over the years among evangelicals that the spiritual aspect is what’s important, that the world is going to pass away anyway?

A: That’s a question I get constantly. Christ says, “I come quickly.” For each of us, we don’t know when our own personal end time is. The whole point is to do the work and will of the Lord now. We’re told not to be caught sleeping when the end time comes.

Q: Do you think Christians have made mistakes in their thinking about the environment?

A: Absolutely. I was asked on the air by a radio person, “Isn’t it true that God gave the earth to man?” It doesn’t say that anywhere in the Bible. Psalms says, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” It repeats over and over: This is God’s planet, God takes an interest in it down to lilies of the field and the sparrows. We’ve been dead wrong. There was more an understanding in past because there was a closer relationship (to nature), the idea that God was a sustainer, back in the preindustrial age.

Q: Do you think people in a preindustrial age really understood the extent to which human beings could impact the planet?

A: I don’t think so at all. The scary thing is, scientists agree with the most fundamental religious groups on this. There isn’t a scientist I can find that says if we continue what we’re doing that everything won’t collapse in the next 30 years. They think it’s an apocalypse. A forest the size of Washington disappears every year. Species are going extinct in my lifetime. There are no elms on Elm Street, no chestnuts on Chestnut Street, no caribou in Caribou, Maine, no blue pike. These are aren’t minor players in makeup of life in this country. They’re all gone. We hear about the vast sections of ocean becoming essentially dead. Scientists say we can’t go on like this. There’s going to be a collapse.

Q: We have a president who’s a born-again Christian. By all accounts, he is personally interested in conservation, yet he’s not seen as being an environmentally strong president. He didn’t sign the Kyoto treaty, and his administration has been skeptical of global warming.

A: He’s not known for being green. The reason I don’t get into get into politics is because of this. Since the Arab oil embargo, about the same time of the first environmental revolution in this country, the Republicans have controlled the White House two-thirds of those years, and Democrats have controlled Congress two-thirds of those years. I don’t think either side has the right to brag or point fingers at the other side. ... Real democracy begins in your backyard when you decide to hang up your clothes on the line instead of using five pounds of coal to dry one load.

Q: So you think change has to come outside the political process.

A: I think when that five or so percent of the population that sociologists say tip the balance of behavior dry their clothes on the line, and their neighbors start doing it, you’ll see a presidential candidate flapping out the sheets when he comes to New Hampshire to campaign.

Q: Generally it seems politicians say OK, we’ve got to win the evangelical vote, so we’ve got to talk this way about abortion, gay rights. Does any politician say we’ve got to win the evangelical swing vote, so we need to green up on the environment?

A: It’s going to happen. When you get the Pat Robertsons, when you get the Rick Warrens on board, when you get people quitting their jobs as chief of staff at a hospital — you get enough people doing that, you’re going to get competition on who’s greener. It’s going to be “an organic chicken in every pot and a hybrid in every garage.”

Evangelical and environmental: Why is he news?

Waco Tribune
by John Young
September 10, 2006

It’s so odd for J. Matthew Sleeth to be traveling the country telling people what they already know.

Bible-believing people. God-fearing people. He tells them what’s in the book they read with fervor. Then he moves on down the road.

Circuit-riding preachers have done the same across the history of our nation.

The difference is they haven’t confined their messages to the Golden Rule to which Sleeth dedicates himself: Do unto your planet as you would yourself.

Sleeth will come through our town next week with a message that shouldn’t ever raise an eyebrow.

No more so than Psalms 24: “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”

You tell me why his crusade has become newsworthy, and crowds gather. Imagine: A guy who believes in God is beseeching fellow believers to care about “that which the Lord has made.” That would be our blessed mother Earth.

Certainly, Sleeth is newsworthy unto himself. He’s not a minister. He was a physician until two years ago, when he quit to write a book: Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action.

Air pollution and global warming, he says, represent “the biggest public health threat that the planet’s ever faced.”

His epiphany, if you can call it that, came bitterly. He watched three patients die of lung ailments.

He now says crusading for the environment is what God commands of him.

Is he being naive? Can we expect pristine skies, and cars and air conditioners? Of course not. But we can acknowledge that excess can have serious consequences.

The most serious, he says, is global warming.

But global warming — or the debate about man’s role in it — also serves as a distraction. Within that debate we have dueling scientists, one large group propounding evidence about man’s role, another smaller group casting doubt. The end result is a political standoff about air pollution.

It shouldn’t be. Whether or not air pollution causes global warming, we know it causes serious problems — asthma attacks, acid rain.

Industry cannot debunk that. With its influence and its proxies in government, however, it can filibuster the global warming debate.

This is reminiscent of the extremely devious P.R. offensive waged by tobacco companies on the issue of second-hand smoke and cancer. No proof, no proof, said the smoke-blowers on the asserted cancer link.

But no one needed any proof about what secondhand smoke does to people with asthma and allergies.

In many ways, that’s the global warming debate in a nutshell. We don’t need any additional evidence to know soiled skies aren’t good for us. We need no added reason to act on a public health problem. Is carbon dioxide a pollutant? Maybe not if emitted by our membranes. But emitted by smokestacks, it has other partners in grime — like mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide and soot.

So, where is the church on this?

“The church has been too wrapped up in materialism,” Sleeth said.

But he said, if it is sufficiently inspired, “I see the church as a potential leader in solving this problem.

“People have been going at this with science for too long. It’s not working. The church is one of those institutions where they tell people not to do things — to feel some guilt, some shame in what we’re doing to God’s creation.”

Sleeth amends a line from Matthew to drive home the point. “The Bible says that the rain falls on the righteous and on the unrighteous. Acid rain does the same thing.”

Climate change and the church

Evangelicals among those who see stewardship of Earth as God’s mandate

DesMoines Register
Shirley Ragsdale
July 16, 2006

The U.S. government does not officially accept that global warming is scientifically proven, but people of faith — both in conservative and liberal denominations across the country — increasingly are working to address it.

This new faith-based environmental movement does not break down along ideological or denominational lines, according to Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership on the Environment.

“This is not about red and blue religion,” Gorman said. “It’s happening across the full spectrum of religious life. It is just as strong and as real among conservative Christians as it is among religious progressives.” Caring for the Earth is not a new Christian tenet, but many people of faith are feeling an urgent need for religious communities to act.

“In the last 10 years, our society and religious traditions have gone from a state of widespread ignorance about global warming to widespread awareness,” said the Rev. Benjamine Webb, priest for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Cedar Falls. “Today, virtually everyone gets it.”

The 85 evangelical leaders’ call to action on climate change earlier this year signaled a shift in the conservative Christian community, he said. “The growing evangelical response to global warming, especially given their influence in the Republican Party, is very significant,” Webb said. “It’s also a healthy sign to see them acting not merely as a handmaiden for the party line, but serving as a cultural critic at this point.”

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