Did you know that Darwinism, the sexual revolution, and the Green movement, all working together, threaten the sanctity of human life; the dignity of human sexuality, marriage, and the family; and the God-given mandate for human beings to exercise godly dominion over the Earth?

They do, and they’re all parts of a spiritual world war in which Satan, who hates God but cannot attack Him directly, attacks His image/representative—humanity.

A little historical background, tied to an analysis of two great creation themes in Genesis 1:27 and 28, will help you see the situation we’re in, the challenges it presents, and how, working together, we can turn those challenges into opportunities.

Genesis 1:27 reveals the essence of man:

• “God created man
• in his own image,
• in the image of God he created him;
• male and female he created them.”

Man is

• the image of God; and
• male and female.

From these truths flow all truths about man’s relationships with and duties toward God and other men, and particularly about sexuality, marriage, and procreation.

Verse 28 expands on the mission of man:

• “God blessed them.
• And God said to them,
  • ‘Be fruitful
  • and multiply
  • and fill the earth
  • and subdue it
  • and have dominion
    • over the fish of the sea
    • and over the birds of the heavens
    • and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

God’s mission for man, male and female, is twofold:

• to multiply and fill the Earth; and, filling it,
• to subdue and rule it

—not abuse it, but rule it as God does, enhancing its fruitfulness, beauty, and safety, to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors.

• Human multiplication, and
• human rule over the Earth—

—these are the heart of this verse.

But these two ideas—multiplication and dominion—are also the nemeses of environmentalism.

• Believing that we have overpopulated the Earth and so our multiplication has become a curse, not a blessing, environmentalists attack the first part—“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”
• Following the lead of eco-historian Lynn White Jr., who argued in his 1967 Science magazine article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” that Judaism and Christianity justified ecological abuse by appeal to this verse, they attack its second part: “subdue it and have dominion over” it.

Sad to say, even some Christians have come to view having more than one or two children as irresponsible, despite Psalm 127’s teaching that children—lots of them—are a blessing from the Lord. Unaware that the Church has not interpreted Genesis 1:28 as justifying abusing the Earth, they have forced a false interpretation on it, transforming man’s role from ruler to slave of the Earth.

As a result, even many Christian environmentalists, advocates of what they call “creation care,” now undermine the message of Genesis 1:28. They have borrowed, without discernment, from a broader worldview, not recognizing it as part of a spiritual world war focused on undermining faith in Genesis 1:27 and 28. They misinterpret Genesis 2:15, which records God’s mandate to Adam (before Eve’s creation) respecting the Garden of Eden: “God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work [that is, cultivate] it and keep [that is, guard] it,” by making two mistakes.

First, mistranslating the command from “work and keep” to “serve and keep,” they insist that Genesis 2:15 says man should “serve” (not cultivate) and “keep” not just the Garden but the whole Earth. Suddenly the idea from Genesis 2:15 becomes almost identical to the preservationist idea of environmentalism: nature is best untouched by human hands.

Second, they insist that “serve and keep” in Genesis 2:15 restates and determines the meaning of “subdue and have dominion” in Genesis 1:28—despite the fact that subdue and have dominion over do not mean “cultivate” and “guard.”

Their mistaken understandings arise partly because they have borrowed, without discernment, from a broader worldview heavily shaped by the environmental and population control movements. And I’m convinced that those two movements are aspects of a spiritual world war that focuses on undermining faith in Genesis 1:27 and 28.

Let me quickly review some of the history of that spiritual world war for you. Three exceptionally fine recent books—Robert Zubrin’s Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (2012), Matthew Connelly’s Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2010), and Mary Eberstadt’s Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution (2012)— together reveal the historical and ideological ties in this war. In brief, it looks like this:

• 1798: Anglican minister Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principle of Population, arguing that population grows exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16, 32 …), while resource supplies only increase arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 …), making great population collapses through famine inevitable unless prevented by war or disease. The book incites fear of overpopulation and depletion of resources, undermines belief in man as producer, and portrays him only as consumer.
• 1859: Charles Darwin, building on Malthus’s thought, publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, undermining belief in the sanctity and uniqueness of human life as bearing the image of God and feeding belief in better (“Favoured”) and worse races pitted against each other in competition for survival of the “fittest.”
• 1883, Francis Galton, building on both Malthus and Darwin, publishes Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, launching the eugenics movement as a means for higher races (the “fit”) to weed out lower ones (the “unfit”) in order to reduce the strain on resources without the two preventives Malthus envisioned—war and famine. This spawns the population control movement, imposed by colonial powers on their colonies, the peoples of whom are Black, Yellow, Brown, and Red (the supposedly “lower,” “unfit” races), not White Europeans (the allegedly “highest,” “fittest” race).
• 1890s–1930s, Progressives like Margaret Sanger (founder of what became Planned Parenthood), embracing Malthusianism, Darwinism, and eugenics, launch the sexual revolution of the 1910s–1920s (“roaring 20s”), advocating contraception and abortion to limit population growth among the “unfit”—who turn out to be non-White-Europeans. Their efforts lead to government “family planning” programs in the colonial world, including incentivized or coerced sterilization and abortion and the intentional promotion of, or refusal to alleviate, famines and epidemics, especially in India, other parts of Asia, and Africa.
• 1920s–1950s: Darwinian naturalist Secular Humanists become strong enough to challenge America’s dominant Christian culture, conquering public education by the 1960s, with minor and unsuccessful counterattacks by Scientific Creationists in the 1980s and Intelligent Design advocates in the 2000s, undermining belief that human beings are the image of God with a God-given right to life, liberty, and property.
• 1950s–1970s: The Progressives’ sexual revolution—put on hold by the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II—revives and, aided by new contraceptive technologies that promise unfettered sexual pleasure without consequences, becomes dominant by the 1970s, with serious destructive effects on marriage, family, and broader society.
• 1962: Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, predicated on Malthusian and Darwinian foundations, launching the preservationist movement and a long series of mostly pseudo-scientific or exaggerated ecological fears that come to dominate the environmental movement and, by the 2000s, American society as a whole. One consequence of Silent Spring was the banning of DDT by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—despite its own scientific studies having shown the chemical was safe for humans and the environment—and the consequent requirement that countries receiving U.S. foreign aid ban it as well, leading to about 2 million deaths every year in poor countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, a result that some environmentalists welcome as reducing overpopulation (though population density in most afflicted countries is lower than in most European countries).
• 1990s–2010s: The environmental movement grows to world prominence, especially with the U.N.’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (1992) and the founding of the Earth Charter, Agenda 21, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Kyoto Protocol; the growth of the animal rights, plant rights, and ecosystem rights movements (all variations on biological egalitarianism); and increasing calls for global governance (for example, through Agenda 21, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiative [ICLEI], and imposing standards of “sustainable development”) to overcome supposedly global environmental crises, especially global warming.

Obviously the roots go back earlier than Malthus, and there are plenty of other players and issues involved, but this is a manageable outline. Battles over creation and evolution, the sanctity of human life, sexuality and marriage, procreation and population control, and environmentalism versus godly dominion over the Earth (Genesis 1:27–28) are not isolated but interconnected battlefronts in the spiritual world war.

In 2010, in Cancun, Mexico, government negotiators from around the world gathered for the seventeenth annual Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP-17) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, trying again to do what they’d failed to do in climate summits year after year: achieve a binding agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to prevent, or at least to mitigate, man-made global warming.

The summit began with a prayer. Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar and moon goddess Ixchel , “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving.” “May she inspire you,” she said to the delegates, “because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools. … Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skillful interlacing of many threads. I am convinced that twenty years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together and think back fondly to Cancun and the inspiration of Ixchel.”

The environmental movement, with over a million formal and informal organizations worldwide, the ten largest of which alone have combined annual budgets in the tens of billions of dollars, has in the last twenty years especially targeted the world’s religious communities—churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and more—infiltrating them to “Green” their messages.

Here in the United States, in 1993, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE) formed, equipped by multi-million dollar grants from large Progressive foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, Pew, Hewlett, Tides, and Heinz, and co-founded by Rev. James Parks Morton, Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, a New Ager who held baptismal ceremonies for animals, and atheist Marxist astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan, who introduced each episode of his phenomenally popular Cosmos program on public television by saying “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”—intentionally borrowing, and mocking, language from God’s description of Himself as the One who is and who was and who is to come.

The Evangelical Environmental Network, born in the offices of Progressive-Left evangelical Ronald J. Sider’s Evangelicals for Social Action, is the evangelical branch of the NRPE and benefits from the massive funding from those foundations—all of which have for decades been major supporters of incentivized and sometimes forced sterilization and abortion as methods of government-organized family planning, like China’s one-child policy, to reduce population growth, and whose support of environmentalist causes is intended in part to promote that.

Environmentalism, as Robert Nelson argued conclusively in The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America, is a full-blown religion, with its own doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation.

It is also the greatest threat to the survival of Western civilization and its institutions of the Rule of Law, government by consent of the governed, and the protection—however incomplete and flawed—of God-given rights to life, to religious and civil and economic liberty, and to property. It is a threat

• greater than the Marxist secularism that spawned the Cold War,
• greater than the Secular Humanism that has now all but disappeared (except in American government-school education), overwhelmed by a vaguely defined “spirituality” all over the West characterized by imported spiritualities of the East; resurgent spiritualities of the ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, and pagan Europe; and the hybrid novel spiritualities of Jungian psychology;
• greater than radical Islam with its jihad.

To borrow a literary device from the Prophet Amos, for three reasons and for four, environmentalism is a greater threat than all of these:

• First, because, unlike the Soviet Union and its satellites in the Cold War, and unlike Islamic jihad, which were or are external and clearly recognized as enemies by the overwhelming majority of people in the free world, environmentalism is internal and thought by most to be friend, not foe.
• Second, because, unlike arid and nihilistic Secular Humanism, it speaks to the inherent spiritual yearnings of human souls and provides plausible answers to dogged questions about how we got here, what causes suffering, and how suffering might come to an end.
• Third, because it incorporates the strengths of all three of those other threats: the utopian vision of Marxism, the scientific façade of Secular Humanism, and the religious fanaticism of jihad.
• And fourth, because it encompasses all those vague spiritualities that have already overwhelmed Secular Humanism and now threaten the Christian faith.

Dark Green Religion, as nature religionist Bron Taylor names the many strands of religious environmentalism in the title of his brilliant book, divinizes and resacralizes nature and so subjugates mankind to her, turning upside down the order revealed in Genesis 1:28. Its ideas are promulgated by Green organizations all over the world and are the sum and substance of the United Nations’ Earth Charter.

In short, the worldwide environmental movement today unites pagan religion, ecological utopianism, and socialist politics and economics to create a vision for a global government that is the conscious goal of those who lead it. Like the Earth Charter, the environmental movement seeks a fundamental transformation of the values, institutions, and practices on which modern civilization has rested.

A hundred years ago—about fifty years after Darwin’s Origin of Species—the Darwinist movement had grown large and powerful enough to challenge the Christian teaching that previously prevailed not only in American churches but throughout American society, including the public schools. Darwinism attacked Genesis 1:27, “God created man in his own image … male and female ….” The result has been the tragic undermining of human dignity and the growing prevalence of all kinds of depravity, including abortion and euthanasia, which attack the sanctity of human life, and homosexuality, which attacks the God-ordained sexual differences and roles of human life.

Today, fifty years after Carson’s Silent Spring, the Christian church stands with regard to environmentalism where it stood a century ago with regard to Darwinism. At that time, some Christians strove valiantly, some were deceived, some were unaware, and some capitulated to Darwinism’s attack on Genesis 1:27. We largely lost that battle, and the sad consequences are obvious all around us. Our response to environmentalism’s attack on Genesis 1:28 today must be better. To restore the teaching and reclaim the blessings of Genesis 1:28, we must exercise a wise, courageous, powerful, spiritual warfare, tearing down ideological strongholds, taking “every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4–5).

In 2012 the Cornwall Alliance launched In His Image, a multi-year educational effort to help Christian ministries fighting on many battlefronts in this spiritual world war to see the big picture and begin to cooperate better to restore the glory, dignity, and purpose of people in God’s created order. As part of that, we’re working on a new gospel presentation and training program that addresses young people’s longing for dignity and purpose in the face of environmentalism’s misanthropic view of people as parasites on the Earth. We need to help people recover the blessings of Genesis 1:28.

We at the Cornwall Alliance will continue to focus on the four elements of our mission: to magnify the glory of God in creation, the wisdom of His truth in environmental stewardship, the kindness of His mercy in lifting the needy out of poverty, and the wonders of His grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

At the same time, evangelicals fighting on many battlefronts need to see the interconnections and begin acting more strategically and, we pray, effectively to reshape how people think of human beings and our role on Earth—to reassert the sanctity of human life and sexuality, the beauty and centrality of marriage, the goodness of human multiplication, and the dignity of human work and godly dominion over the Earth.

Will you help us? One way is to ask your church, school, or other organization to host a Cornwall Alliance speaker. Just 300 people contributing a tax-deductible gift of $28 per month (an amount inspired by Genesis 1:28) will provide the budget to help us:

• Reach over 500 churches in 10 states, and conduct special pastors’ briefings, beginning with a few states and, God willing, spreading nationwide.
• Educate political leaders in our nation’s capital and state legislatures.
• Reach out to over 2,500 reporters and producers in the mainstream and Christian media.
• Provide study guides and materials to teachers, students, and laymen in select states about the grave dangers of the Green radical environmental agenda, and the blessings of genuinely Biblical Earth stewardship.
• Begin to develop an evangelism program based on Genesis 1:27–28 that uses environmental issues as a platform for the Gospel, and shows how true image-bearing can only occur through a relationship with the perfect Image of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.

You can make your donation online by clicking here or using the “Donate” button on this and most pages of our website. Please consider it prayerfully, and then join with us in this spiritual world war!

 

 

Updated April 2, 2016.