ENVIRONMENTALISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Environmentalism and Christianity

Environmentalism and Christianity

Introduction

There are over 2.5 billion practicing Christians on earth, approximately 1 billion of whom are Roman Catholic. Orthodox and Coptic Christianity have roots as ancient as those of Roman Catholicism, and Protestant churches originated in the break with Rome in Europe during the Reformation in the sixteenth century or have developed through further schisms since that time. The 20th century saw the proliferation of a range of new denominations. The largest of these is the Pentecostals, whose numbers are estimated at 600 million. The rise in the public influence of religion is significant for concerns to the environment, since it may indicate that in these regions, environmental beliefs and practices will need to find a central place in religious beliefs, ethics, and practices. This paper discusses what specific actions Christians should take regarding the environment and its preservation or restoration.

Discussion

Christianity obliges its followers to protect Gods creation and sustain the environment for our future generations. Historically, there has also been stronger environmental concern associated with Christianity than with other religious beliefs. Countries with the strongest array of environmental laws and regulations and the largest number of environmental nongovernmental organizations include the USA, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, the UK, and Switzerland. (Berry, 1993)

Christian churches must begin to address growing environmental and social challenges. They should also respond to a pressing call for involvement on the part of less radical environmentalists who sought to gain the support of moral institutional authorities in view of grounding environmental issues in ethics.

Christian Religious groups have also contributed to the drafting of the Earth Charter, they should review it now. This new alliance of world religions and environmental conservation is likely to result in culture-specific religious concepts of ecology and nature being increasingly mainstreamed in national and international environmental policies, in particular in the field of biodiversity conservation. Christian leaders and laypersons must also speak out on the media for protection of the environment. (Gottlieb, 2009)

In a historical sense, contemporary green campaign is a child of religious Protestantism inasmuch as Protestantism gave rise to the culture of multiparty democracy of contemporary nation-states. Christianity being the biggest religion has more obligation to solve the modern environmental concerns. And with the turn of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians toward environmental awareness, the ecological alienation that was manifest in both Protestant and catholic teachings about creation after the Reformation may at last be being healed. For in ethics, practice, and theology, there is increasing emphasis on the ecological effects of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the creative Word, in healing human-earth relations, as well as the human body and soul.

Although environmental concern first arose in these Protestant countries in the 1960s, when formal churchgoing was in decline, elements of Protestant Christian culture are friendly toward green campaign and democratically expressed pressure for restraints on capitalism and industrialism. Catholic and Orthodox Christian countries, by contrast, have seen much less environmental mobilization, and these countries have much laxer environmental ...