Contempt for the Earth is Contempt for God

President Donald Trump has been repeating a disturbing phrase: “Drill, baby, drill.” He even said it in his inaugural address. Later that day, in an executive order Trump opened up Alaskan wildlife refuges for oil exploration. In another executive order, he revoked a ban imposed by former President Joe Biden on new offshore oil and gas development along most of the country’s coastlines. Trump also withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the international treaty on climate change that was adopted by 196 countries in December of 2015. He is also firing hundreds of employees at the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump calls oil “liquid gold,” saying, “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.” Toward that end, on February 14 Trump signed an executive order to create a new “National Energy Dominance Council,” aimed at increasing the country’s oil and gas production.

And so we are yet again plunging headfirst into the exploitation of the earth’s resources for private gain, to the detriment of our planet.

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Our dependence on oil is killing us. It is wreaking havoc on our planet, pumping more carbon dioxide into the air than our ecosystem can tolerate, creating a climate catastrophe where natural disasters are more frequent and more devastating. Our climate is changing drastically, transforming life on earth in epic proportions. Places we know and love are becoming uninhabitable. The conditions in which we exist are growing increasingly hostile and calamitous.

Scientists have been telling us, it’s the carbon dioxide. We need to severely cut down our emissions. In response, a global eco-movement has emerged, beckoning us to make the necessary changes to our policies and businesses to halt climate change and live sustainably with our environment. But we are failing. 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the global average temperature surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius, which was what the Paris Agreement was conceived to avoid.

In light of these facts, Trump’s stance displays a callousness and contempt for the earth that is truly staggering. His commitment is not to the health of our planet but to the profits of the wealthiest members of society. The ultra rich maintain the largest carbon footprint. It is the richest 1% of the population who are driving climate change. And Trump governs for them above all else.

Trump’s commitment to “Drill, baby, drill,” is not just absurdly stupid, it is sin. It is evil. For what is evil but that which destroys life? Maintaining this evil requires a certain theology, a certain devaluation of this life and of the earth. The theologian Mary-Jane Rubenstein calls it “materiophobic mantheism.”1 This theology separates God from the earth and imposes on creation a hierarchy of God over man and man over nature. Nature belongs to man to dispense with as he pleases. Nature is at man’s disposal. And men are disposing of it.

What we need is a different kind of theology, one that does not sacrifice the earth on the altar of man, but reveres the earth as the altar of God. As Rubenstein observed, “it is only when matter is understood to be lifeless that it can be used unconditionally, and without permission, to create profit or property.”2

Away with all materiophobia!
Away with all earth-slandering!3
Away with all denigrations of the natural world!
We need a theological appreciation for the vitality and, indeed, the divinity of nature.

It is this appreciation that we get with the philosopher-theologian Baruch Spinoza. Against the idea that God is separate from nature, Spinoza wrote, “there can be no substance external to God.”4 If we are talking about God as something external to nature, then we do not have God in mind. For God is infinite, which necessarily means God cannot be limited or determined by something finite. Something outside the finite would also have to be finite.5 But God is infinite, and therefore inseparable from the substance of all things. Or, rather, “There can be, or be conceived, no other substance but God.”6

Matter is therefore not the passive, inconsequential plaything of men, to be endlessly exploited and abused. Matter is one with God. In God “we live and move and have our being,” as Paul said (Acts 17:28). Our relationship to nature is therefore a relationship to God. How we treat the earth is how we treat God.

It turns out, we can wound God. We can crucify God. We do this by upsetting the natural balance of our ecosystem and destroying more life than we create. Our planet is filled with incredible biodiversity, and every living thing is interconnected. When we pump more carbon dioxide in the air than our planet can process, we start killing the planet. Earth’s biodiversity dwindles, as various species struggle to survive under diminished returns. We are facing a heap of extinctions, and countless species are living a sad existence in small pockets of refuge as we turn more and more of the planet into vast centers of pollution and lifeless wasteland.

Revelation 11:18 in the Bible offers the solution:

Those who destroy the earth should be destroyed.

It is time to arrest the system of death we have created and overcome the ultra-rich who are driving climate change. It is time to sabotage the polluters and end their era of earth-exploitation. It is time to rescue our planet from the hands of profit-seeking agents of death. It is past time, in fact. The hour is late.

Woe to the polluters and planet-murderers!
Woe to those who travel in private jets and large yachts!
Woe to those who invest in fossil fuels and get rich off death!

The redemption of the earth will be the redemption of God.
Blessed are those who redeem the earth.
Blessed are those whose gift is life.
Blessed are those who thwart the steps of polluters and ruin the designs of the rich.

Blessed will we be when we have destroyed those who destroy the earth.

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