Stewardship, Conservation, Environmentalism, Creation Care

As I read through Almost Amish (see yesterday's review), one of the notes from the Authoress on their non-profit organization was that they worked to promote "Creation Care".

I had to stop for a moment and compose myself.  If there is a word combination that will set me off, that is it.

Once upon a time - within my lifetime - we discussed caring for the world as "stewardship of the Earth".  The concept, which had somewhat improved itself from the old understanding of "have dominion over the earth" in the bad sense of "use it all up without thinking of any of the consequences" was more or less commonly understood as a Biblical concept as the concept of stewardship was pretty wide understood in Christian circles.

In secular circles, the word was "conservationist" - again, a word I remember being used within my early lifetime as the only word used to discuss the concept.  The conservationist was one that worked to conserve the environment for future generations, much like the concept of stewardship.

In time that term also fell by the wayside and what we were left with was "environmentalist".  Working hard to avoid any pejoratives, environmentalism encompassed the concept of environment first and only.  There was no sense - at least in the early days that I recall - of any allowance of the human race as a either a participant of value or as a manager.  Humans had done awful things to the environment (in fairness, they had in some but not all cases) and so, sotto voce, they were unworthy managers of the world they lived in. 

Unfortunately as the past 30 or so years has demonstrated, an unmanaged environment is an uncontrolled one.  Population imbalances which result in die offs or disease, invasive species which destroy entire ecosystems, unmanaged forests that become fire holocausts waiting to happen - there has to be a balance of preserving the environment as well as managing it with people in the world.

After the effective fall of stewardship and the rise of environmentalism, Christian theologians (apparently) went back to the drawing board. One of the elements of environmentalism which can come to the fore is an effective worship of the environment.  To the Christian, the world and the environment are a creation of God, but not the Creator.  Thus - perhaps - the term "Creation Care" was born.

"Creation Care" seems to encompass many of the concepts of the old stewardship:  managing things for future generations, preserving existing wilderness, making things better than what they were.  So in theory, it is an acceptable term, correct?

I hate it.

The term "Creation Care" represents, at least to me, just another example of the Western Church infantilizing a Christian concept - in this case stewardship or conservation.   Whenever I hear the term, I almost immediately expect a show with brightly covered shapes, happy music, and some sort of childlike figures named "The Tubbie Wubbies" to come out and cavort about.  It is the sort of term that may be appropriate to introduce as a concept to young children, but not as a serious discussion among adults on such weighty matters.

It reflects a trend, at least in my own mind, the trend of making Christianity "more accessible" to the masses not by than lifting people's education and intelligence up to meet the loftiness of God and Scripture but by making it simple and "modern".  We rightly decry the denial of Scriptures to individuals in their own languages which was a policy at one time and which was modified to allow people to lift up God in their own tongue and understand Him through their own tongue.  The Church now makes the same error, by taking difficult and weighty concepts and somehow managing to reduce them to an almost cartoon-like status.

What term do I prefer?  Environmental stewardship is a good one to me, as stewardship implies that we manage something for someone else (God in this case), not our selves.  Conservationist I find is equally good or better - again, the idea that we are conserving that which we have (oddly enough, we are encouraged in the modern world to conserve many other things - energy, fuel, food.  Why this one thing is different is beyond me).

But what do we call someone that follows creation care?  A "Creation Careist?"  Besides just being a made up term, it would seem to be an issue either for discussions or to represent the panel - imagine, if you will, a debate on a matter where we have "Professor X, Environmentalist" and "Bob Y, Creation Careist".  Sometimes we Christians set ourselves up for failure.

Besides - it underlies yet another weakness in modern Christianity (and indeed, modern society):  this need that we have to label and package everything in such a way that we can then point to how we are doing it - the hideous cancer of "virtue signaling".  Should Christians be 100% about caring for the environment and managing it both because God created it and it is a fantastic example of showing our love for our fellow man by helping to preserve and provide such a thing?  Absolutely.

But please, let us refrain from the need to have catchy concepts designed to inspire programs, conferences, and merchandise, or design entirely new terms and things to cover old, practical concepts because it is "hip".  Christ never said "Go and design Thou a program"; he said "Go and do".