The Birth of Baptist (Anti)Environmentalism: Reagan, the Religious Right and Government Regulation
By Aaron Weaver
Following World War II, the United States experienced fundamental social and economic changes. Historian Adam Rome has described this post-war period as a time of mass consumption, affluence, modernization, suburbanization and scientific discovery.1 Over time, Americans became aware of the environmental consequences of unrestricted growth and unregulated industrial expansion. Out of this new awareness, a popular concern for a clean and well-balanced environment emerged and began to form throughout the 1960s into a broad, inclusive grassroots reform movement. This environmental movement expressed concern for a wide range of quality-of-life issues from pollution to the use of pesticides to global population to ecological preservation. 2
The first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970, served as the coming out party for this new environmental movement, putting environmentalism front-and-center in American society in a very visible way. With over 20 million participants, Earth Day displayed the popularity of many environmental concerns from clear air to clean water. As the nation was caught in cultural turmoil over civil rights and the Vietnam war, environmentalism provided bipartisan issues to which both Democrats and Republicans could support to some extent. 3
During the late 1960s and immediately following Earth Day 1970, Christian denominations and ecumenical bodies began to address environmental issues. The American Lutheran Church adopted a statement in 1970 that chronicled the most urgent environmental problems and called on Christians to be responsible stewards of God’s creation. Other mainline Protestant denominations, including the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church and Disciples of Christ, passed resolutions affirming many of the goals of the environmental movement. Prominent ecumenical partnerships such as the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches approved resolutions urging ecological concern and action.4 Several denominations, such as the United Church of Christ, went a step further and developed environmental advocacy programs.5
During this period, an emerging Christian environmentalism began to take shape within the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Disasters such as the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 caught the attention of the nation as well as some Southern Baptists. National catastrophes, environmental protests and celebrations like Earth Day inspired Southern Baptists to confront the pollution crisis. Denominational publications began to highlight pollution as a problem of moral significance. Southern Baptists also adopted environmental statements at both the national and state levels, including a pollution resolution two months after the first Earth Day that called on churches to help “remedy…environ-mental mismanagement” and urged Christians to practice environmental stewardship and “work with government and businesses to solve the pollution problem.”6
Throughout the 1970s, the SBC’s ethics agency hosted environment-themed conferences and promoted education advocacy and activism through lectures, articles in denominational publications and the development and distribution of resource papers and pamphlets on environmental issues to thousands of pastors and laity. In Texas, Southern Baptists actively pursued pollution control legislation — becoming in 1967 one of the first Christian groups to do so. Although these Southern Baptists in the Lone Star State called on individual Christians and churches to change their lifestyle choices, they consistently emphasized that government played the most important role in solving the pollution crisis. Texas Baptists adopted a report that declared, “Only through government can much be done to regulate and control the principal polluters of our air and water.”7
Government regulation was central to the environmentalism of Southern Baptists during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s as the SBC dealt with the pollution crisis, population issues and grappled with several nationwide energy crises. The resolutions of other state conventions echoed that of Southern Baptists in Texas who insisted that only government could control pollution. 8
This defining conviction of early Southern Baptist environmentalism was also seen in the SBC’s 1977 resolution calling on government leaders to develop an equitable national evergy policy and again in 1979 when Southern Baptists turned to the federal government to ensure the development of “safe, clean and renewable energy forms.” 9 Even as government distrust was building in the nation, Southern Baptists continued to place an enormous amount of faith in the federal government and its ability to “fix” environmental problems under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
Far different from the 1970s, which was regarded as the “environmental decade,” the 1980s were characterized by open hostility toward environmentalism and the modern environmental movement. Newly-elected President Ronald Reagan was viewed as the driving force behind an emerging anti-environmentalism movement. On the campaign trail, Reagan vilified environmentalists as extremists and refused to meet the leaders of environmental groups.10 Upon taking office, Reagan immediately challenged the environmental movement through executive orders, speeches, press releases and cabinet appointments.11 Historian Mark Dowie has described Reagan as a “counterrevolutionary” who was “determined from the outset to turn Americans away from environ-mentalism.”12 In fact, one of Reagan’s first acts as president was to have the solar panels that President Jimmy Carter had installed removed from the roof of the White House.13
Pursuing a domestic agenda based on tax reforms and deep budget cuts, Reagan launched what has been referred to as a “conservative assault on government regulations.” This assault especially targeted environmental regulations.14 Central to Regan’s political philosophy was the view of government as the problem rather than a solution to the nation’s challenges. And, consequently, he attributed the nation’s economic struggles to excessive government reg-ulations.15 An important component of Reagan’s anti-regulation campaign was the selection of industry leaders hostile to popular environmentalism to high positions in his administration, such as property rights advocate James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. These appointments assisted the emergence of an anti-environmental movement, a movement which, according to historian Katrina Lacher, enjoyed “remarkable cohesion” during Reagan’s presidency. Lacher noted that “The conjoined rise of Ronald Reagan and the antienvironmental movement are attributable to the resurgence of [social and religious] conservatism in the United States in the late 20th century.”16
This resurgence of religious conservatism, as seen in the rise of the Religious Right and, more specifically, the mobilization of the Jerry Falwell-led Moral Majority, was instrumental in securing Reagan’s defeat of President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. In recent years, several scholars have noted that this politically-organized resurgence of Christian conservatives was motivated by opposition to government regulation. Historian Randall Balmer has argued that the Religious Right was not founded as a response to Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling on abortion rights. Rather, what most motivated Falwell and other key Religious Right leaders were the efforts of the federal government in the mid-1970s to regulate private Christian schools that had racially discriminatory policies. Paul Weyrich, who is regarded as one of the founders of the Religious Right and the person credited for luring influential pastors such as Jerry Falwell into the political arena, has stated that what launched the Religious Right was “Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools.” 17
The origins of the Religious Right then are appropriately traced back to serious concern over the expanding role of government. In his book American Evangelicals, historian Barry Hankins noted that many evangelicals and fundamentalists viewed the government’s attempt to regulate church-related schools as “an attack on their ability to live their lives in accordance with their own private religious views.”18 Intrusive government regulation was deemed the problem. It should then come as no surprise that conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who supported the Religious Right also embraced the anti-regulation campaign of Ronald Reagan.
Southern Baptist conservatives were key leaders in the Religious Right. Charles Stanley, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Atlanta, was one of the founders of the Moral Majority alongside Falwell. Other notable Southern Baptist conservative leaders including Bailey Smith, Jimmy Draper, Adrian Rogers, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler served on the boards of other Religious Right organizations.19
While Southern Baptist conservatives were becoming politically active as part of the Religious Right and Reagan Revolution, they launched a movement to take control of the institutions and agencies of their denomination.20 Controversy consumed the Southern Baptist Convention throughout the 1980s as conservative leaders pursued their strategy. While the SBC confronted numerous environmental issues from 1967-1979, little attention was given to any environmental issue during the 1980s. As a denomination, the SBC mentioned the environment just once during this decade of in-fighting. Coming in the form of a resolution, this singular example of environmental concern revealed the political divide within the SBC, including drastically different views regarding the appropriate role of government in American society.
At the 1983 annual meeting of the SBC in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, messenger William Wallace Finlator introduced a resolution titled “On the Care of Our Environment.” Finlator was a prominent Southern Baptist pastor and longtime progressive social activist from North Carolina, who was well-known for his participation in worker’s rights and civil rights marches.21
Finlator’s resolution began in typical fashion for an environmental statement, affirming “God is Creator… and has placed us here as responsible stewards” and that abuse of the Earth “through reckless greed is a sin against our Creator.” The resolution called on Southern Baptists to commit their lives to a “deeper reverence for the earth and to a more sparing use of its limiting resources.” The resolution urged industry and commerce leaders to “impose upon themselves rigorous and verifiable standards of protection and preservation of land, air and water.” Government officials were asked to “faithfully and fearfully enforce all legislation enacted, or to be enacted, for the protection of the natural environment.” The proposed resolution concluded with a request that the United States join “the family of nations in solemn compact to protect, preserve and share the resources of the oceans and seas.”22
This seemingly harmless resolution proved to be quite controversial. J. Thurmond George, a conservative pastor from California, moved that the word “reverence” be replaced with “regard.” George’s successful amendment signaled that conservatives felt that “reverence” for the Earth implied nature worship. This would become more apparent in the late 1980s when Southern Baptist conservatives began to express fears about the influence of the “New Age Movement” and warn against worshipping nature.
Albert Lee Smith, a prominent leader in the SBC’s conservative movement, also moved to make changes to Finlator’s resolution. Smith had represented the 6th district of Alabama in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1981 to 1983. He was elected to Congress as a Moral Majority candidate. In the 1980 Republican primary, Jerry Falwell’s organization helped Smith to defeat longtime Congressman John Buchanan Jr., who was a moderate Southern Baptist pastor.
Smith requested that the messengers remove the resolution’s final two paragraphs referencing the role of the government in protecting the environment. After debate on the convention floor, Smith’s motion to amend passed. The final adopted resolution, however, now concluded with a charge to businesses and corporations to “impose upon themselves” standards to protect the environment.23
This amendment clearly displayed the anti-regulation ideology of conservative leaders. Whereas Southern Baptists had—in their first 15 years of environmental engagement—urged the federal government to take action, the new conservative leadership took a drastically different approach. A strong role for the government in ensuring environmental protection was replaced with no role for the government.
Seven years passed before Southern Baptists returned to the subject of the environment. During the summer of 1990, the now conservative-controlled convention adopted a resolution titled “On Environmental Stewardship,” just two months after the 20th anniversary celebration of the first Earth Day. The 1990 resolution called on Southern Baptists to be “better stewards” and warned that Christians are forbidden from worshipping creation.” Like the 1983 resolution, this one did not urge any type of government action or regulation and only asked individuals and churches to make “an environmentally responsible ethic” part of their lifestyle and evangelistic witness.24
Less than a year after adopting this resolution, the SBC’s ethics agency hosted a conference on environmental issues with the theme “Finding a Biblical Balance Between Idolatry and Irresponsibility.” At the conference, SBC ethics chief Richard Land stressed that Southern Baptists had a responsibility to teach biblical stewardship to their children in order to “inoculate our young people against the false, anti-biblical teaching which so heavily suffuses so much of the modern, secular environmentalist movement.”25 Like the 1983 and 1990 resolutions, there were no calls for government action at the conference. Environmental legislation was not a subject of discussion.26
Scholars have noted that while the 1990s marked the flowering of evangelical environmentalism, the decade also marked the emergence of a new distinct environmentalism, best described as Christian anti-environmentalism. Proponents of Christian anti-environmentalism like the conservative-led SBC were fundamentally opposed to the environmental movement’s goals. The single defining characteristic of these anti-environmentalists was their loud and consistent opposition to almost all environmental regulations in the post-World War II era.
According to historian Kenneth Larsen, what had previously been “relatively infrequent and unorganized criticisms of environmentalism within conservative evangelicalism coalesced into a concerted, organized effort to counter the evangelical environmental movement.”27 Scholar Richard Wright has argued that this Christian anti-environmentalism developed into a movement with a distinct political agenda to “restrict the regulatory powers of government.”28
Wright noted that Christian anti-environmentalists pursued this agenda through attacking the credibility of the claims of prominent scientists and depicting environmentalists as New Age earth-worshippers. According to Wright, these two strategies were “red-herrings” which masqued the political anti-regulation motivations of these Christian anti-environmentalists.29
During the mid-to-late 1990s, free market economist Calvin Beisner established himself as the most prominent and influential Christian anti-environmentalist.30 In many of his writings, Beisner has stressed the instrumentality of nature and its value only in serving the needs of humanity. Arguing against environmental regulations, Beisner has stated that “Humility applied to environmental stewardship should lead us, in light of the vast complexity of human society and the earth’s ecosystems, to hesitate considerably at the notion that we know enough about them to manage them.”31
In April 2000, just a few days before the 30th Earth Day anniversary, Beisner and a group of Religious Right leaders including D. James Kennedy released a statement called the Cornwall Declaration championing a free-market philosophy of environmental deregulation and formed an organization to counter the message and advocacy of Christian environmental groups such as the Evangelical Environmental Network and the Eco-Justice Working Group of the National Council of Churches.32 The SBC’s Richard Land signed the Cornwall Declaration and participated in the Washington D.C. news conference. This event and declaration marked the beginning of the SBC’s relationship with Calvin Beisner.
In February 2006, an alliance of evangelical leaders calling themselves the Evangelical Climate Initiative released a declaration calling for Christian concern and government action around the problem of climate change.33 Responding to the declaration, Southern Baptists adopted a resolution titled “On Environmentalism and Evangelicals.” This was the SBC’s first environmental resolution in 16 years. The resolution warned that environmentalism was “threatening to become a wedge issue to divide the evangelical community and further distract its members from the priority of the Great Commission” and made the news-grabbing assertion that “the scientific community is divided on the effects of humankind’s impact on the environment.”34
Calvin Beisner also responded to the Evangelical Climate Initiative with a 12,000-word point-by-point rebuttal that was endorsed by more than 100 conservative evangelical leaders including numerous Southern Baptist academics. Beisner’s statement refuted the most basic claims of the environmental movement with regard to climate change. It concluded that global warming would have “moderate and mixed — not only harmful but also helpful” consequences in the foreseeable future. Human emissions of greenhouses gases were, according to the statement, only “a minor and insignificant” contributor to global warming. The Southern Baptist-backed statement argued forcefully that government regulation of these emissions would “cause greater harm than good to humanity” — hurting the poor in developed and especially developing nations.35
From this statement, Beisner’s organization formed a task force to propose public policy recommendations and selected SBC policy expert Barrett Duke to serve as co-chair.36 In June
2007, just a month after the SBC’s ethics agency helped launch this environmental policy task force, Southern Baptist messengers meeting in San Antonio, Texas adopted a resolution on global warming. The resolution rejected and depicted as “dangerous” government regulations mandating limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.37
Nine months after the SBC adopted its global warming resolution, Jonathan Merritt, a 25-year-old seminary student and son of a former SBC president, spearheaded the release of a declaration on climate change. This statement, which received the signatures of several dozen well-known Southern Baptists, echoed much of the Evangelical Climate Initiative and chided the SBC’s previous environmental engagement as being “too timid” and faulted this past engagement for “failing to produce a unified moral voice.” Unlike the Evangelical Climate Initiative, this declaration made no specific public policy recommendations. However, it did commend government action — a position that stood in stark contrast to the SBC’s previous positions since 1983.38
The declaration received widespread media coverage. This media attention infuriated denominational leaders, especially the SBC’s ethics agency. Almost immediately, Baptist Press, the denomination’s public relations entity, published an article titled, “Seminary student’s climate change project is not SBC’s.” Richard Land offered his rationale for not signing the declaration, emphasizing that it would be “misleading and unethical of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission to promote a position at variance with the convention’s expressly stated position.” Over the following week, Baptist Press published an additional 13 stories that criticized the declaration. In response to this reaction, Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary where Merritt was a student, stated, “Some Christians have a problem separating conservative theology from conservative politics. The two are not always the same.”39
Shortly after the declaration made headlines, the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission along with the Cornwall Alliance and several Religious Right groups unveiled an environmental campaign. This campaign sought the signatures of one-million Christians who endorsed a “biblical” view of the environment that dismissed concerns about climate change. The SBC’s ethics agency also joined up with Beisner’s Cornwall Alliance to release a 22-page document with a detailed set of public policy recommendations aimed at rolling back existing environmental regulations. This “Stewardship Agenda” stressed: “Environmental policies should harness human creative potential by expanding political and economic freedom, instead of imposing draconian restructions or seeking to reduce the ‘human burden’ on the natural world.” The agenda characterized government-imposed environmental regulations as “antithetical to the principles of stewardship and counterproductive to the environment.”40 The SBC promptly acted on this agenda a few weeks later when its ethics agency sent out an “action alert” to Southern Baptists urging readers to contact their senators to oppose the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2007, a bipartisan bill which sought to combat climate change through the regulation of corporate emissions.41 This campaign and “stewardship agenda” focused on opposition to regulation model what Southern Baptist anti-environmentalism has continued to look like in recent years.
As this paper has detailed, in the late 1960s Southern Baptist leaders began to align themselves with the modern environmental movement and embrace an environmentalism that urged government regulation and preached a stewardship ethic focused on sacrificial living and the divine responsibility to care for God’s creation through conservation and preservation practices. This environmentalism was abandoned with the conservative takeover within the denomination — a “conservative resurgence” that coincided with similar transformations in American culture and politics, specifically the rise of the Religious Right and the Reagan Revolution.
The pace of change within the SBC throughout the 1990s was incredibly rapid as the new leadership demanded that the denomination affirm a particular conservative political and theological orthodoxy. This rapid change of pace is clearly reflected in the SBC’s embrace of a distinctly different environmentalism, more properly described and understood as anti-environmentalism as it was opposed to the aims of the main-stream environmental movement. In partnership with well-known Christian anti-environmentalist Calvin Beisner, the SBC continued to utilize the language of stewardship but redefined stewardship to be extremely anthropocentric and focused on economic development. Echoing former President Ronald Reagan, the SBC has deemed government regulations as dangerous and has contended that an economy largely free of environmental regulations is a prerequisite to “sound ecological stewardship.”
The anti-regulation ideology that drove the Reagan Revolution and inspired the formation of the Religious Right also fueled the anti-environmentalism of the new Southern Baptist leadership. Perhaps this story of the birthing of Baptist (Anti)Environmentalism should lead to a new understanding of the Southern Baptist “takeover” or “conservative resurgence.” In my view, this case study of Baptist (Anti)envi-ronmentalism necessitates that this denominational controversy be viewed as being much more than a theological battle or as a battle over a particular moral issue or combination of issues including women’s rights, abortion, school prayer and race. Instead, the famed “Battle for the Bible” should be interpreted as a theological and political battle deeply rooted in drastically different convictions about the appropriate role of government in a nation experiencing profound social and economic changes.
