Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Earth

Growing up in a Southern, progressive Christian church and going to seminary, we often made fun of the Jonathan Edwards’ style ‘fire and brimstone’ preachers throughout West Tennessee. Their vision of the future and the afterlife was dark and ominous. 

In hindsight, we should have taken their fiery spirit more seriously. 

We’re facing a future where their ugly, prophetic visions of hell-on-Earth actually seem to be coming at least partially true. The planet is burning. Smoke from fires hundreds of miles away makes the air unbreathable. Entire ecosystems are threatened and collapsing. And it’s only going to get much, much worse – especially with our decisions not to decarbonize. 

For as wrong as I know their theology to be, there’s something deeply unnerving that they got some aspect of it right. Unnatural disasters are not the acts of a vengeful God seeking justice but of a frail and greedy humanity choosing death and hoping it’s death “for thee, not for me.”

Some of those pastors would have said the end of the world was coming because of human sin. I don’t agree with their cosmology, but the notion that human brokenness has led us down this path is pretty astute. 

I’m less concerned about their diagnosis, though, which seems a fairly accurate understanding of depravity, and more concerned about their prognosis.

At the very time we need people to understand our future doesn’t have to be this way, that this is an active choice we are making to our detriment, I’m increasingly concerned they’ll see a warming planet as a net positive for ushering in the eschaton – quite literally a “baptism by fire.” 

Put another way, as the planet burns, I worry the “Jesus is coming back” crowd will only grow more fervent and certain in helping him supposedly get here more quickly.  This is an issue we need to be thinking about now, because in an age where conspiracy theories explode and cross the world long before the truth can ever catch up, we must prepare for those who will powerfully say, “Let it burn.” 

Or start the fire themselves.

It’s that power grab, that obsession with control – even controlling the supposed return of Jesus – on which their own brokenness and ignorance is exposed. That anyone could think they have to destroy life to usher in the return of someone who stood for the very life they are destroying so wildly distorts their own faith and its most basic tenets that it ceases to be about faith or spirituality at all and suddenly becomes solely a story of their own greed and power. 

But their impulse is worth a word or two. We do need to start a fire – though not a physical one. We need a fervency for our planet – particularly for caring for it. It should look and feel like a kind of spiritual reawakening to what actually matters. Our desire to decarbonize and save the planet must be a movement that spreads akin wildfire, because it will take all of us, each with different parts to play, to tackle and mobilize at the scale we need to transition to a livable future. 

The Christian right cannot win that fight. 

If they do, it will be our planetary undoing, and the futures Jonathan Edwards warned about will have been won – though the winner will only be an embrace of ecocide, and the opposite of everything Jesus taught.