“WHAT ARE WE DOING TO GOD’S EARTH?” questioned a leading American evangelical periodical in May 1970 (p. 23). As historian Neall W. Pogue recounts in The Nature of the Christian Right, in the aftermath of the first official Earth Day observance the spring of that year, “mainstream” American evangelical leaders in the United States mirrored the nation’s growing concern over widespread environmental degradation. In Pogue’s telling, these prominent leaders embraced in response neither a human-centered, utilitarian approach of dominion over nature nor an environmental apathy rooted in premillennial premonitions of the earth’s fiery demise. Instead, starting in the 1970s, they unexpectedly championed a “philosophy” of “Christian environmental stewardship” before abruptly abandoning it in the early 1990s (pp. 2, 174).

Pogue’s account argues “Christian environmental stewardship” first found fertile expression in the thought of American evangelical Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer’s landmark book Pollution and the Death of Man tilled the soil...

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