Green Sins?

April 22 is Earth Day.

I remember the first Earth Day when I was a young adolescent and Boy Scout. We pulled a red, Radio Flyer wagon around our neighborhood collecting newspapers that our fathers helped us take to a recycling location. In return, our county government planted dogwood trees along a major route in the community.

Recycling was actually a rather popular activity in the county. We had neither public nor private curbside garbage service and on Saturday mornings citizens loaded their garbage cans in the back of their station wagons or in their car trunks and took all their rubbish to a public school parking lot where county garbage trucks waited. You had to dump it yourself into the chomping, mechanical maw of the truck and then you could put newspapers in a walk-in dumpster. No matter who you were, rich or poor, this was how you had to get rid of your trash and recycling was part of the deal. It was quite a community gathering.

Sometime in the 1980’s we seem to have lost interest in do-it-yourself environmentalism. We went for more powerful automobiles at the expense of fuel efficiency. We began to recycle less and consume more disposable goods and power- whatever the cost. Today, the lessons of financial conservatism and frugality learned during the great depression are unknown to generations of young Americans.

What role does religion play in all this?

At one time, the social philosophy known as the “Protestant Work Ethic” taught that prosperity is a sign of God’s favor on account of an individual’s personal righteousness. While we still adhere to the importance of work ethic, religious Americans don’t often see prosperity as a sign of righteousness any more. But at the same time, many Americans don’t hold the old time religion view of personal sin either. A common view now is that we are all basically good people who are misled into bad choices. It’s a kind of therapeutic view of human sinfulness.

So, the Vatican, not the expected spokesman for Reformed Protestantism, is getting tough on sin.

They’re even getting tough on environmental sin. In March, Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti listed some “new” sins during a newspaper interview in Rome. Among the social sins on the Vatican’s updated list are: stem cell research involving embryo destruction, human cloning, and ecological offenses. It isn’t exactly clear what environmental sins are from the Reuters report of this story, but apparently they are generally classified as acts that cause harm to the environment and therefore threaten the human race.

The question is: in a global culture in which people decreasingly define human nature as sinful, will the Vatican proclamation have any impact at all on the faithful?