Christians & Conservation
Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community
by Wendell Berry
New York: Pantheon Books, 1993
(177 pages; $11.00, paper)
Creation at Risk? Religion, Science, and Environmentalism
edited by Michael Cromartie
Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans; Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center,
1995
(166 pages; $15.00, paper)
Redeeming Creation: The Biblical Basis for Environmental Stewardship
by Fred Van Dyke et al.
Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996
(213 pages; $15.99, paper)
Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental
Debate
by E. Calvin Beisner
Grand Rapids, Mich.: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty;
Eerdmans, 1997
(208 pages; $18.00, paper)
reviewed by Preston Jones
Imagine two Americans, reasonable facsimiles of whom live somewhere near you. One strives to keep damaging insects from his tomato patch by non-lethal means—snail-repelling copper strips and such; the other smashes, swats, and sprays every living thing unfortunate enough to get within sight of his rosebushes. The former goes out of his way to buy food, dairy, and meat goods from producers who care for creation in addition to profits; the other says that if God made it, man can eat it. The one recycles all the household refuse he can; the other throws aluminum cans, bottles, and newspapers away, despite the fact that his municipality has provided him with free recycling bins and service. Both of these Americans are relatively active church members and, if given the chance, both would claim that they are exercising dominion over the portions of the earth they touch.
Another thing these Americans have in common is an unavoidable ignorance of the extent to which even the seemingly trivial decisions they make each day affect this planet.
Enter Wendell Berry, who in the essays that make up Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community wants to make readers aware that the way they conduct their everyday lives matters. While the essays gathered here are concerned with subjects as different as tobacco farming, the Gulf War, GATT, and television addiction, linking them all is the passion that has been at the heart of Berry’s work since at least the 1960s: the preservation of small, and especially farm-based, communities.
Just about everything Berry has published has been filtered through this prism. Thus, in the 1980s he wondered how it was that a nation could spend so much time, money, and energy on nuclear bombs and other massive weaponry when—since less than one percent of the population feeds all the rest—a handful of well-placed bullets from third-rate rifles could bring the United States to the brink of starvation. Thus, in the essay from whence this book takes its title, Berry inveighs against corporate advertisers and others who relentlessly “pimp” for the sexual revolution, thereby denigrating sexual love within marriage, which Berry believes is at the heart of functional community. And thus in a talk he gave in 1992 at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, titled “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Berry went after his own Christian kin—he was raised Southern Baptist—for mistaking economic fashion and the pursuit of leisure for biblical principle. “Despite its protests to the contrary,” Berry said, “modern Christianity . . . has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households.” And alluding in one place to the chemicals and poisons Americans pour on their gardens and down sundry drains on a daily basis, Berry notes that “It is understandably difficult for [American Christians] to think of their dwellings and workplaces as holy, because most of these are . . . places of desecration, deeply involved in the ruin of Creation.”
In sum, the view expressed in this essay and elsewhere in Berry’s work is that Christians would do well to look less at creation as something from which simply to extract wealth and comfort and more as God’s handiwork bequeathed to men to be honored and carefully employed. The earth was not made strictly for man’s enjoyment. Indeed, “By denying spirit and truth to the nonhuman Creation, modern proponents of religion have legitimized a form of blasphemy without which the nature- and culture-destroying machinery of the industrial economy could not have been built—that is, they have legitimized bad work.” “Good human work honors God’s work,” Berry says. “Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin.”
While Berry cites numerous Scripture passages in this essay, he does not support his environmental allegations with footnotes to scientific research but with the force of his own experience as one who gave up a comfortable life in the upper echelons of the American academy for a family farm in Kentucky, and as one—simultaneously conservative and radical—who in many ways has his finger on this nation’s uncertain pulse. He is angry, he is cool, he is a man of obvious integrity, and his prose is nothing less than graceful. I cannot recommend this book, and everything else Berry has published, highly enough.
Preston Jones teaches history at John Brown University.
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