To Care for Creation

The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement

Ellingson Stephen

Controversial megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll proclaimed from a conference stage in 2013, "I know who made the environment and he's coming back and going to burn it all up. So yes, I drive an SUV". The comment, which Driscoll later explained away as a joke, highlights what has been a long history of religious anti-environmentalism. Given how firmly entrenched this sentiment has been, surprising inroads have been made by a new movement with few financial resources, which is deeply committed to promoting green religious traditions and creating a new environmental ethic".To Care for Creation" chronicles this movement and explains how it has emerged despite institutional and cultural barriers, as well as the hurdles posed by logic and practices that set religious environmental organizations apart from the secular movement. Ellingson takes a deep dive into the ways entrepreneurial activists tap into and improvise on a variety of theological, ethical, and symbolic traditions in order to issue a compelling call to arms that mobilizes religious audiences. Drawing on interviews with the leaders of more than sixty of these organizations, Ellingson deftly illustrates how activists borrow and rework resources from various traditions to create new meanings for religion, nature, and the religious person's duty to the natural world.

About the Author

Stephen Ellingson is associate professor of sociology at Hamilton College. He is the author of "The Megachurch and the Mainline", also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"This is a well-researched study with some spectacularly good interviews. It covers important terrain not only sociologically but also theologically. If American civil society – particularly the religious underpinnings of American political culture – cannot come to terms with climate change and the environmental insights necessary to act on it, then the struggle against some of the more dire future scenarios will be in vain. Ellingson's work represents an important sociological contribution needed to underpin long-term change" – Richard L. Wood, author of "A Shared Future and Faith in Action"

"The religious environmental movement that Ellingson documents is not simply the faith-based component of the wider green movement. He shows that it first and foremost targets religious people and institutions, trying to instill in them new traditions, identities, and ways of fulfilling their sacred duties vis a vis God's creation. In doing so, Ellingson offers a theoretically integrated approach to studying social movement emergence and development by showing how the creativity and agency of movement actors are culturally and religiously embedded" – Rhys H. Williams, director, McNamara Center for the Social Study of Religion, Loyola University Chicago

"Does it matter why people care, or only that they care? Keenly attuned to how activists make use of their own religious traditions and attentive to the constraints imposed by religious authority and audiences, Ellingson illuminates the culturally-embedded emergence of new forms of engagement and new understandings of responsibility for the natural world. Simultaneously eloquent and accessible, 'To Care for Creation' is a compelling model for movement scholarship that wrestles seriously with the content of belief" – Elisabeth S. Clemens, co-editor of Politics and Partnerships

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