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Christians Must Make Earth Day Their Own

by Joshua Mercer

Our culture celebrates both religious and secular feast days. When our culture tries to eliminate the religious content from our religious holidays like Christmas, Christians have rightly re-asserted that Christ is “the reason for the season.” (Kudos to the Knights of Columbus for their role in this!)

This is to be commended. (Though, we mustn’t bark at people when they say “Happy Holidays.” You don’t convert people when you lack charity.)

But to really take our message of faith, hope and love out into the world, we must be willing to meet people where they are. When Christians like St. Patrick converted Ireland, they embraced positive elements of the culture and worked to Christianize them.

That’s why my organization, CatholicVote.org, has worked hard to make use of our nation’s secular feast days to talk about the dignity of human life.

The biggest secular feast of them all is the Super Bowl. It’s actually a global phenomenon, watched by almost two billion people. So in 2009, we tried to air a life-affirming ad during the big game. NBC ultimately rejected our ad, but almost two million people viewed our ad online. Thankfully when CBS got the rights to air the game this year, they changed the policy and allowed advocacy ads. We’d like to think we paved the way for the Tim Tebow ad to be aired by Focus on the Family during this year’s Super Bowl.

This year, we tackled Earth Day. It is a secular feast day very popular, especially with youth. For many pro-life and pro-family people, it might not even be on the radar until April 22 arrives and everyone on TV is talking about “going green.”

So we decided to prepare for Earth Day with a campaign that takes our message right to the streets, on the sides of buses, and inside trains and subways to mark the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.

An effective bus ad, however, has to capture your attention right away, because you only have a few seconds to get the message out. And our 12-foot ads in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles did just that.

The ad shows a young girl hugging her mother’s pregnant belly. As a bit of a twist to those who refer to our planet as Mother Earth, we showed the mother’s belly painted like a globe. The slogan said: “Celebrate Nature’s Greatest Gift.”

We interviewed people on the streets of Chicago to get their reaction to the ad; you can watch the video atwww.catholicvote.org

The ad drove home the clear point that if you love the beauty of the environment, you certainly have to remember that the greatest natural treasure of all is human life. After all, we are created in the image of God.

You might still be in shock. Earth Day? Isn’t it a secular, pantheistic, pagan feast day?

But let’s remember: Transforming pagan feasts into Christian celebrations is what our faith has been doing for 2,000 years. So why stop now?

And last time I checked, environmental groups pushing for population control and other anti-human policies do not have a monopoly on caring about our environment.

People of faith have long argued (since Genesis!) that creation is a gift of God that requires our respect and stewardship. So why not go out and tell the world how Earth Day ought to be celebrated? Why not make Earth Day a celebration of the Creator, the plan of creation, and nature’s greatest gift – the human person?

A culture of life and a respect for the environment are certainly not incompatible; in fact, they are harmonious. If someone shows an appreciation for the environment, we shouldn’t scoff but instead applaud this natural sensibility. Let’s try to foster this eco-friendly attitude with a fuller appreciation for God’s plan for humanity and our role on this planet.

Pope Benedict XVI has been dubbed “the green pope” by the secular media. But few have actually tried to understand what he is saying.

The Holy Father has been pushing for a healthy respect for the environment, emphasizing that genuine respect for our planet must include a framework for understanding creation as a gift from God, and God’s plan of truth and love for the world.

In his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict wrote:

If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology.

If we truly care about building a world that respects the environment, we must begin by building a moral culture. Environmentalists are quick to say we must reduce pollution. But we are quick to ask: What about the other threats to our world? In fact, moral pollution does more to harm the environment than inefficient cars or greenhouse gases.

We humans have enormous power over the world. When we succumb to sins of lust, greed, pride and gluttony, our souls gets disfigured. Not to mention the other lives we’ve harmed. The damage done to our surroundings are but one way we recognize these negative consequences.

Quite simply, if we are wasteful and reckless with the environment, maybe it is because we are wasteful and reckless with each other – including the unborn.

The way out of this mess is to present the fullness of the Christian vision of man and his environment. Our Holy Father gave us the sound theology. And we have taken his message to the streets.

Joshua Mercer is Director of Communications and co-founder of CatholicVoteAction.org, a grassroots organization that provides a voice in politics for hundreds of thousands of lay Catholics. Previously, he served as Chairman of Students for Life of America and also Washington Correspondent for the National Catholic Register. Joshua lives with his wife Lori and three children in Michigan.

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The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.