To what extent can evangelical Christianity be redirected toward valuing or promoting environmental sustainability? On one hand, it has so thoroughly accommodated capitalism that religiosity in the United States has become a fairly reliable negative correlate with environmental values. This is particularly true of the more conservative sects that Johnston primarily focuses upon, which are most prevalent in United States regions with the lowest levels of popular support for environmental protection or affiliation with the environmental movement. On the other hand, as he aptly documents, an increasingly vocal minority of evangelicals has at least begun to embrace “creation care” imperatives as consistent with their religious convictions. While still a distinct minority within a community that remains suspicious of the culture and scientific bases of much of mainstream environmentalism, one might wonder whether and to what extent such dissenting voices might contribute to the “greening” of organized religion, and thus to the attitudes and beliefs of many thus far intransigent opponents of environmental protection policy and practices.
Johnston's engaging book is organized into three parts, with the first charged with defining religion and sustainability in such a way that the latter is infused with the former, the second with an historical and contemporary analysis of creation care movements that seek to bring the two together, and the third considering the thought processes of elites and receptiveness of followers in such efforts. Defining religion to include a broad array of affective and metaphorical language or narratives, he offers an historical and conceptual account of sustainability as a religious concept that is “not merely subsisting within ecological limits” but which uses “large-scale stories” to posit “an ideal state” rooted in “core (and often religious) values” (25). The creation care movements and leaders that he documents embody this understanding, working within faith communities and theological constraints to promote conservation and stewardship in domains that have traditionally been hostile toward them.
Johnston's exhaustive case study, based on a series of interviews with creation care leaders and a decade of participant observation in the movement, subtly but relentlessly argues for evangelical creation care efforts to be viewed as essential contributors to wider sustainability movements and for its strategies to be adopted by secular environmental advocates. He claims that “there is a strong religious dimension to nearly all sustainability advocacy,” even on the part of those not themselves religious or intentionally invoking religious themes, such that “sustainability acts as a political religion” in “connecting affective states with political issues” related to environmental quality (201, 211). On this point, Johnston's insistence upon reducing all environmental values to religious ones is occasionally overstated, as in his tendentious claim that the 1972 Stockholm Declaration's reference to humans as “both creature and moulder of his environment” implicitly invokes creation and thus a (divine) Creator, given the etymology of “creature” (56). When more modestly stated, as in his claim that religion is “an overlooked dimension of sustainability,” his work presents an important corrective to histories that ignore evangelical movements altogether or marginalize their contributions (18).
Given Johnston's pursuit of a version of Bryan Norton's “convergence hypothesis” in which he seeks unity among secular and religious environmentalists at the level of action if not justification, along with his evident approval of interfaith and other coalition-building efforts, one might expect him to endorse Norton's pragmatic value pluralism. Instead, he directs some of his sharpest criticism against Norton, rejecting his prescribed limits on the use of “religious or spiritual language” in public deliberation. Johnston recites now-familiar objections to Rawlsian public reason constraints in reply: that this marginalizes religious people, undermines potential sources of motivation, and forecloses opportunities for consensus built around explicitly or implicitly religious convictions. Indeed, he claims that we cannot “produce viable, sustainable public policy” without “reflection and public debate on religious values,” upping the ante on his general claim that affective language can be constructive in forging social consensus (101).
Despite acknowledging that “religion may also prevent consensus and action at times,” Johnston remains adamant that “religious discourse” can be the “tie that binds” together disparate actors and value systems on behalf of stronger environmental protection. Based on the data presented from what he terms a “pilot study” into the attitudes and beliefs of creation care elites and followers, however, his empirical findings present a less encouraging prospect for his version of the convergence hypothesis (105). While demonstrating that elites and academics have been open to a “greening” of Christian theology in response to Lynn White's indictment of it as complicit in environmental degradation, the evangelical rank and file display considerably more resistance to such efforts. Indeed, his documentation of resistance on the part of evangelical leaders to collaboration with secular greens due to differences in “the values underlying practical actions” bode ill, as does elite and popular resistance (shared by Johnston) to development of an ecumenical “global ethic” like that found in the Earth Charter (117). Finally, the “thoroughgoing human exceptionalism” of evangelical creation care cosmologies may prevent anything deeper than a superficial strategic alliance with “dark green” activists that take the rejection of anthropocentrism as a non-negotiable axiom, despite Johnston's earlier identification of “nature-as-sacred” religious cosmologies as themselves “dark green” (130, 132).
Overall, and perhaps in accord with his object of study, Johnston cycles between reaching out to worldviews different than his own and pulling back from them, bracketing his own beliefs in the interest of cooperation on some occasions but unduly constrained by them in his reading and assessment of other positions on others. Nonetheless, if the efforts at reorienting evangelical doctrine and practice that Johnson carefully documents exhibit even a fraction of the success that he expects from them, current tensions between religiosity and environmental values may give way to a religious conservatism that is oriented more toward conservation than degradation. Even if Johnston's analysis rests more on his aspiration for the movement making inroads into popular attitudes and practices than a realistic assessment of it, one could forgive his revisionist environmental history and overstated case if this came to pass.
