Christians Warned Not to Jump on Global Warming Bandwagon
by Jim Brown
August 7, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A conservative columnist says an attempt to align the evangelical movement with the environmental movement on the issue of global warming is "nothing new under the sun." He believes Evangelicals should have better sense than to support what he sees as just another cultural fad. In February, 85 Evangelicals endorsed an "Evangelical Climate Initiative," stating their belief in the need to fight human-caused global warming, the increase in temperature in the world's climate that they believe to be almost entirely due to human activity. In their statement, they assert that the consequences of global warming will be disastrous, particularly for the poor, if the warming effect is not reversed.
However, Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy recently argued against these claims in a column for the American Spectator magazine. He contends it is foolish to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few decades trying to reorder industry and reduce economic growth to stave off global warming.
"Would it not be better," Tooley asks, "to spend that vast amount of wealth on actually helping the poor around the world?" Would that not be of greater benefit, he says, to "those hundreds of millions of people in the Third World, especially, who -- for example -- do not have access to any electricity whatsoever, do not have refrigeration, do not have heat, do not have air conditioning?"
In the past, the IRD spokesman notes, "some evangelicals invited ridicule by foretelling imminent doom if listeners did not repent." The Evangelical Climate Initiative, he says, "seems to fall into that same dubious tradition." In his article in the American Spectator, the conservative writer describes the Evangelical Climate Initiative as merely a passing craze.
"It's a vanity of people in every generation to think that their own problems are unique and completely divorced from what previous generations have experienced," Tooley says, "but in fact, we know that is not the case. I think that the apocalyptic talk about global warming is in some cases a fad that has been with us for several years."
That fad will certainly last for several more years, the Christian columnist asserts. However, he says he suspects currently popular global warming theories "will not be with us in the coming decades," as they will eventually subside, "just as the talk about the new ice age in the 1970s ultimately faded away."
Tooley says he would hope Evangelicals would have a better sense of history and be less anxious to embrace fads or jump on the "bandwagon involving apocalyptic claims," whether these have to do with global warming or other potential disaster scenarios.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
