The most famous conversion in Christian history is that of Paul, who the Bible says “persecuted The [Christian] Way to death,” before the “scales fell from his eyes” on the road to Damascus, and he became a Christian himself. Jonathan Merritt, a seminary student with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is familiar with that paradigm. “I was an enemy of the environment,” he says. “I approached it with disdain. And then I was sitting in a classroom and I felt like God spoke to me and put this idea in my heart.” The idea–encapsulated in the “Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change”–is a strikingly potent challenge to his denomination’s official stance on global warming and to his own previous scorn. “Yes,” he says with a chuckle, “You could say the scales fell from my eyes.”
Merritt’s conversion may not change the world quite as much as Paul’s, but he has transformed his classroom epiphany into Topic A within his own Convention, the biggest Protestant body in the U.S. with 16 million members — and probably one of the least involved of the American religious bodies in the battle against global warming. Merritt’s declaration states, among other things, “We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice. Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless, and ill-informed. We can do better and that threat is too grave to wait for perfect knowledge before addressing it.” The declaration commends government action but makes no specific policy recommendations, such as a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Most importantly, given its target readership, it argues that stewardship of the planet is just as biblical as the other causes that Baptists press in public, and that “when we destroy God’s creation, it’s similar to ripping pages from the Bible.”
