How Ideologies Undermine the Gospel

Today’s world is full of distractions pulling believers away from the Great Commission and the West in particular is becoming increasingly post-Christian. Instead of discipling the nations as Jesus commanded, many—particularly the young, influenced by modern education and media—have wandered into modern “cults”: ideologies that promise salvation through human effort, environmental purity, or political revolution. While these movements often contain elements of truth, they ultimately mislead by replacing God’s call with man-centered causes that undermine true human flourishing.

At the root of much of the Western world’s moral and economic decline is not simply bad politics or poor science, but a lack of discipleship in the context of Christian worldview. Without the clear proclamation of the gospel and the grounding of young people in Biblical truth, our culture has become vulnerable to ideologies that stray from both faith and true science.

One of the most dangerous examples is the extreme environmentalist movement. What began as the conservation movement and a reasonable concern for health and stewardship has often shifted into a rigid ideology. It is aided by the idea that life on earth is in a very fragile and delicate balance honed over hundreds of millions of years of evolution (mutations and survival of the fittest) and catastrophic negative feedback mechanisms.  This popular erroneous evolutionary ideology avoids interpreting the geological record and mass extinctions as the result of a worldwide flood wherein God destroyed the earth and brought judgment on the evil of the antediluvian world.  The conclusion of extreme environmentalism or deep ecology is that man is likely to upset this delicate balance when he manages the earth’s resources.

The result is a sinister and desperately evil plot of the arch enemy against human flourishing as the product of excellence in management (subduing the bad things in the environment and reducing toil). We are to develop all the wonderful wild potential of raw materials that God gave us to steward. We are to turn them into maximal value-addition and a superabundance, a cornucopia of unimaginable potential maximizing the blessing to the world as God had designed. This was not only the call of Abraham, but it is rooted in Gen. 1:28, 2:5 and Gen. 2:15 calling mankind to be productive and steward or manage the earth and be in dominion over the environment. 

The extreme environmentalist or deep ecologist ideology propels us into the same fear-based past that Animism and traditional beliefs held us when they were driven to not upset the spirits or the ancestors by bringing change or managing the environment.  That combined with immorality and rebellion left those societies in a stone-age-like existence for thousands of years subject to the precariousness and dangers of the unmanaged environment with all its diseases, predators, and elements of extreme hot and cold, unaided in productivity by machines that reduced toil and made possible a superabundance.

Today social media is flooded with claims like “Food is Medicine,” “Pesticides Should Always Be Avoided,” and “GMOs Are Frankenstein Foods.” Healthy eating matters and wise caution is good stewardship—but rejecting modern medicine and agricultural science in favor of “nature at all costs” reflects a failure of critical thinking. As toxicologists rightly note, “The dose makes the poison.” Likewise, risk must be assessed scientifically, not ideologically. Faith and science must work together synergistically.

Decades ago, Dr. Bruce Ames, a renowned biochemist and toxicologist, revealed through groundbreaking research that many naturally occurring chemicals in plants are just as likely to cause cancer in laboratory animals as synthetic pesticides. He found that humans consume far greater amounts of natural carcinogens daily through foods like apples, coffee, berries, and potatoes than they are ever exposed to through pesticide residues. To eliminate all natural carcinogens from our diets, we would have to forgo nearly all fruits, vegetables, and cooked foods—particularly bread crusts, grilled meats, fried vegetables, and roasted coffee.

Ironically, plants under attack from pests produce far higher levels of their toxic defense chemicals—up to 10,000 times more. Thus, the evidence points to the fact that farming practices that minimize plant stress and subsequent insect attack through proper fertilization, irrigation, and practices that encourage mycorrhizae growth such as mulching for small-scale and no/minimum-till methods for large-scale, whether natural or synthetic, are a more important key to producing safer food than trying to eliminate pesticide residues from the diet.  Pesticide residues are much lower in risk than radon gas, heavy metals, volatiles from new carpets and other plastic products, and indoor smoke from cooking.  That being the case, these more toxic elements in our environment should be addressed first before we get to the pesticide residue level of danger which is far down on the list of relative danger and almost inconsequential in the “noise” of all the other environmental risks.

Yet instead of embracing the full scope of these scientific findings, media and activist groups have continued to stoke fear, promoting an exaggerated fear of pesticides while ignoring context, dosage, and rigorous science. The vilification of pesticides and the moral panic over climate change have come at a steep cost. Rather than fact-based stewardship discussions, we see fear-based activism replacing scientific literacy. Irresponsible fear-mongering sensationalizing trace amounts of glyphosate in school lunches, for example, leads to broader mistrust of farming and subsequent inappropriate regulations, strangles innovation, and makes food production more expensive and less secure.

History offers stark warnings. Europe’s “Farm to Fork” agenda, aiming to slash pesticide and fertilizer use by 50%, is already jeopardizing food security. Sri Lanka’s disastrous overnight ban on synthetic inputs in 2021 collapsed its agricultural economy within a year, leading to widespread hunger and political chaos. Earlier, India’s Chipko movement—the original “tree-hugging” movement—reflected how environmental extremism could prevent sound resource management, stalling economic development and infrastructure improvements.

Extreme environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump’s initiative MAHA (Make American Healthy Again), though claiming to advocate for health and environmental protection, and while addressing some genuine risks such as obesity driven by excessive consumption of sugar and other carbohydrates, or possible hazards from certain food dyes (though the evidence is equivocal that they pose risks at exposure levels common in the American diet), are ultimately heading down the same destructive path as other extreme environmentalist movements. By drawing conservatives into the same destructive ideological liberal agenda of promoting rigid, anti-technology, anti-modern agriculture ideologies, they risk creating the very crises they claim to prevent. Like Europe’s failed Farm to Fork initiative, India’s Chipko movement’s unintended consequences, and Sri Lanka’s disastrous organic farming mandate, Kennedy’s agenda threatens to waste taxpayer money, undermine food security, drive up costs, and destabilize rural economies with excessive and inappropriate regulations. When environmentalism becomes disconnected from sound science and Biblical stewardship, it tends to foster scarcity, hardship, and dependence, rather than human flourishing and care for creation.

When you add the ideology that “biodiversity is always best, and species proliferation is most important rather than human flourishing” though containing a grain of truth, it helps ferment the perfect storm of drift into dangerous extremes, where nature is worshiped rather than stewarded. Historically, even the Nazi Party adopted extreme environmental views, and figures like Prince Philip infamously suggested that a virus wiping out part of humanity could be beneficial. The Unabomber likewise embraced radical ecology as a justification for violence. Ideologies, when untethered from Biblical truth, easily mutate into horrors.

More subtly, today’s environmental ideologies often marry themselves to socialism or class warfare, replacing personal responsibility and innovation with forced redistribution and control. Like extreme environmentalism, socialism promises utopia but delivers authoritarianism, crushing the freedom and creativity necessary for true flourishing.

The broader result is a generation raised to ignore or trivialize free enterprise’s contribution to human flourishing through a signaling system that maximizes mutually beneficial exchanges of goods and services.  Instead, it sees agriculture, technology, and human development as inherently evil.  Children taught to see the earth as sacred and to be preserved in a pristine form (untouched by human hands) and mankind as a parasite are distracted from the true mission God gave: to steward the earth wisely while spreading the gospel and making disciples (Genesis 1:28, Matthew 28:19–20). Ideological pursuits like saving the planet at all costs become substitutes for spiritual mission—and society drifts further from the only true hope in Christ.

Without course correction, we are on a slippery slope of raising a generation more passionate about “saving” the earth than saving souls. And none of us is off the hook.  Every generation must also ask: What cults or idols have captured our hearts? It may not be extreme environmentalism, it might be consumerism, entertainment, sports, politics, or even comfort. Anything that consumes our time and thoughts excessively distracts us from Christ’s command to transform the lives around us (disciple all nations).  It can become idol-like and distract us from our central mission of discipling the nations.

The world doesn’t need more ideological crusades. It needs the gospel to transform lives. It needs a generation of believers who will reject false “saviors,” return to Christ’s call to “go and make disciples of all nations,” (Mt. 28:19), and bless the world through faith, truth, hard work, and scientific stewardship.

What is God calling you to do?

Will you be part of the true transformation that only comes by “teaching them to observe everything I have commanded them” (Matt. 28:20) which is the only way that maximal blessing can come to all nations? If you want to play a more strategic role in world transformation, let’s talk. Call me, Dan Janzen, 616 676-6684.  The Fellowship of Christian Farmers International is the place to not only talk strategy for reaching the nations, but to become part of a team working most strategically to transform lives around the world.

This article is adapted from one published by Fellowship of Christian Farmers International and is used by permission.

Photo by Frances Gunn on Unsplash.