Yale Divinity Library photo
Long before the creation of Earth Day, back in 1970, the earth belonged to, well, the Lord.
And Christian missionary organizations were not only in the business of prosyletizing, medical, and education programs; in their early efforts to combat erosion and improve agriculture in far flung parts of the world, they also were precursors of the post-1970 secular environmental movement.
That’s the quiet argument of “Religion and the Environment,” a small but informative exhibition now on display at the Yale Divinity School library, where it runs through May 30.
“Firmament,” journal of the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology, founded in 1986.
In the first of three modest display cases that Yale Divinity School Librarian Martha Smalley has assembled, you see some of the collections of the library’s holdings that document these early efforts.
They include a photograph of a University of Nanking forestry program (top of the story) from around 1912, which is an example of early Protestant missionary work to improve environmental conditions in China.
Nepali language handbook on how to raise goats, published by the United Mission to Nepal, a Christian NGO, active since 1954.
The missionaries “were doing things to effect the environment, but they weren’t talking about it,” Smalley said during a brief tour of the exhibition in the library’s rotunda off the 409 Prospect Street quadrangle.
The exhibition is also not scholarly in that it doesn’t trace how these church efforts might have contributed to the United Nations’ 1969 declaration for the environment, followed by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson‘s efforts to have Congress create an American Earth Day.
The documents suggest that church-based activists may have emerged more or less at the same time as the environmental movement picked up steam, in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the second display case the materials suggest that early church-based environmental activists also encountered considerable resistance. Here’s a selection from a 1989 report of the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology (NACCE). reported in their Firmament magazine (pictured):
In its own life the church must put into practice the Gospel, the good news that life is good; that redemption is for all creation. However, although there is increasing awareness of the environmental crisis, churches are still dominated by materialism. Economic anxiety is a major obstacle to making an ethical response to the ecological crisis. In addition local churches are frequently separated from the real life of the planet. They are alienated from the biblical mandate to care for the earth.
Cartoon from “Motive,” Methodist student movement journal, spring, 1970.
That’s why in the years after 1970, it was primarily theologically minded students, like those who created Motive, the journal of the Methodist student movement (pictured) — and not the grayer institutions of the church — who paved the activist way, said Smalley.
Yet by the 1980s and certainly in the 1990s, the churches, especially in interdenominational and cross-faith partnerships, were convening conferences, doing studies, and trying to weigh in on environmental issues with the moral force of religion.
Click here, here, and here for more information on activities bringing together these two realms, including Yale University’s pioneering masters degree program jointly offered by the schools of forestry and divinity.
