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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2005 127COMMENTARY

Right now, I’m thigh-deep in muck. Clad in hip waders, I’m
slogging through a spring-fed bog in northern Maryland.

I’m surrounded by tussock sedge, alder, jewelweed, skunk cab-
bage, and swamp rose. And I’m having a great time.

I’ve done this for a couple of days almost every spring for
the last dozen years. I’m out here as a volunteer to do wildlife
surveys. In particular, we’re looking for the rarest turtle in North
America, Glyptemys muhlenbergii, the little four-inch Bog Turtle.
In the 1970s, they were found in more than 400 sites in our lit-
tle state. In the 1990s, we could only find them in about half
those sites. The other sites had been ditched, drained, bulldozed,
polluted, invaded by non-native plants, bisected by roads for tur-
tle-smashing cars, depleted by collectors, or otherwise made
uninhabitable for these little creatures.

When I meet professional wildlife biologists and other vol-
unteers, they’re surprised that an evangelical (or post-evangeli-
cal, or “younger evangelical,” or whatever) pastor would be out
here doing this sort of thing. They’re not used to seeing mud-
smeared pastors who aren’t afraid to grope around in bog muck
for turtles or who keep track of chorus frogs and Baltimore
checkerspots and Indian paintbrush. I know what they’re think-
ing: Christians, especially ones associated with the term “evan-
gelical,” are part of the problem, not part of the solution. They
listen to James Dobson and Pat Robertson and James Kennedy,
not Wendell Berry and Herman Daly; they focus on the family
and the military, not the environment.

The surface causes of environmental carelessness among con-
servative Protestants are legion, including subcontracting the evan-
gelical mind out to right-wing politicians and greedy business inter-

ests…putting the gospel of Jesus through the strainer of con-
sumerist-capitalism and retaining only the thin broth that this
modern-day Caesar lets pass through...a tendency to be against
whatever “liberals” are for. Even more important, though, are the
deeper theological roots of environmental disinterest — and the
emerging theological values that many of us are embracing instead.

People who are sensitive to creation know that creation is
in constant flux. Continents drift, climates change, magnetic
poles flip-flop, and bogs like this one gradually give way to wet
meadows and then various kinds of forests. There’s a natural suc-
cession out here under the sun, and I think there’s a kind of nat-
ural succession going on theologically for many Christians as
well. Let me mention three of these elements.

First, increased concern for the poor and oppressed leads to
increased concern for all of creation. The same forces that hurt
widows and orphans, minorities and women, children and the
elderly also hurt the songbirds and trout, the ferns and old
growth forests: greed, impatience, selfishness, arrogance, hurry,
anger, competition, irreverence — plus a spirituality that cares
for souls but neglects bodies, that prepares for eternity in heaven
but abandons history on earth.

When greed and consumerism are exposed, when arro-
gance and irreverence are unplugged, when hurry and selfishness
are named and repented of, the world and all it contains (wid-
ows, orphans, trees, soil) are revalued (or re-deemed) and made
sacred again. No, in this emerging view, these little Bog Turtles
we’re looking for today are a priceless treasure, an original cre-
ation of the greatest Artist in (and beyond) history — even
though they are deemed precisely worthless to someone who
would want to build an interstate highway through this bog.

Second, the eschatology of abandonment is being replaced
by an engaging gospel of the kingdom. The phenomenon of
evangelical-dispensational eschatology (doctrine of last things or
end times) makes perfect sense in the modern world.
Understandably, Christians in the power centers of modernity
(England in the 1800s, the United States in the 1900s) saw
nothing ahead in the story of modernity — nothing but
destruction. Their only hope? A skyhook Second Coming,

C O M M E N T A R Y

Consider the Turtles of the Field
1

Many evangelicals find themselves in an emerging theological habitat,
where care of creation is central to mission.

Brian McLaren

1 Published originally in Sojourners Magazine, March 2004; reprinted
with permission from Sojourners, 1-800-714-7474, www.sojo.net).

Bog Turtle (Glyptemys muhlenbergii): These tiny turtles (shell lengths
usually < 9 cm) have a disjunct distribution throughout the eastern
United States. They are federally listed as “threatened” under the 1973
Endangered Species Act and as “endangered” by agencies in states with
extant populations.

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Opinions expressed are those of the author and may or
may not reflect those of the IRCF.



128 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2005 MCLAREN

wrapping up the whole of creation like an empty candy wrap-
per and throwing it in the trash can, and the sooner the better,
so God could bring us all to heaven, beyond time, beyond mat-
ter, beyond this creation entirely. In this model, virtually no con-
tinuity exists between this creation and the new heavenly cre-
ation; this creation is discarded like a non-recyclable milk carton.
Why get sentimental about a cheap container destined for the
cosmic dumpster of nothingness?

This pop-evangelical eschatology made one understandable
but serious mistake: It assumed that modernity was all there was
or ever would be. Just as the early Christians could not imagine
the gospel outlasting the Roman Empire (unless they got the
point of the Apocalypse of John), 19th and 20th century evan-
gelicals couldn’t imagine the gospel outlasting modernity, the
empire of reason, consumerism, and individualism. For pop-
evangelical eschatology to proliferate and maintain hegemony, it
had to reinterpret the Hebrew prophets. Their prophetic visions
of reconciliation and shalom within history (metaphorically con-
veyed via lions and lambs, children and serpents, swords and
plowshares, spears and pruning hooks) had to be pushed beyond
history, either into a spiritualized heaven or a millennial middle
ground — between history and eternity, so to speak.

The eschatology of abandonment also had to marginalize
Jesus (which they did, to a degree, by letting Jesus remain as sav-
ior but promoting Paul to master-teacher). But now, as more
and more of us rediscover Jesus as master-teacher, we are struck
by the centrality of “the kingdom of God” in Jesus’ message (and
Paul’s too). And it is clear to us that this kingdom is not just
about heaven after we die: It’s about God’s will (or wish) being
“done on earth” now, in history.

In this kingdom, Jesus said, sparrows matter. Lilies of the
field matter. Yes, people matter even more, but it’s not a matter
of either/or; it’s a matter of degree in a world where everything
that is good matters — where everything God made matters.
God sent Jesus into the world with a saving love, and Jesus sends
us with a similar saving love — love for the orphans and wid-
ows, the prostitutes and lepers, the poor and forgotten to be
sure, but also for the little creatures who suffer from the same
selfish greed and arrogance that oppress vulnerable humans.

Third, the hallowed concept of private ownership is being
confronted by the biblical concept of stewardship. If liberal
Christianity was tempted in the last century to become the civil
religion of socialism that reverences state ownership, then cer-
tainly conservative Christianity has since become the happy mis-
tress of capitalism that enshrines private ownership. No wonder
then that private ownership and private enterprise are defended
by many conservative Christians as vigorously as the doctrine of
the Trinity or salvation by grace.

For increasing numbers of us who consider ourselves post-
liberal and post-conservative, words like private (meaning per-
sonal and individual), ownership (meaning autonomous per-
sonal and individual control), and enterprise (meaning
autonomous, personal, individual control over projects that use
God’s world for our purposes) seem to fly in the face of king-
dom values. Values such as community (meaning seeing beyond
the individual to the communal), fellowship (which means shar-
ing, holding in common with the community, not grasping as
“mine!”), and mission (meaning our participation in God’s proj-
ects in God’s world for God’s purposes).

Can there be some alternative to the extremes that either
deny or enshrine private ownership? Could a biblical steward-
ship that celebrates God’s ultimate ownership someday fuel a
new grace-based economy — just as private ownership currently
fuels our greed-based consumerist economy (or as government
ownership fuels a control-based socialist economy)?

A stewardship economy doesn’t see every majestic mountain
as a potential site for strip-mining operations, nor does it see
forests as board-feet of marketable lumber, nor does it see this
spring-fed emergent wetland (drained and bulldozed) as a lucra-
tive site for a “housing development” (an unfitting term if there
ever was one, since bulldozers and pavement un-develop in hours
what it took God’s creation centuries to develop). Rather, what-
ever we “own” (including the molecules and cells that constitute
our bodies) is really lent and entrusted to us by God, received by
us and reverently used for a time, after which we must let go one
way or another — either through giving and voluntary sharing,
or through dying and involuntary relinquishing.

So, what do we do differently in this emerging theological
habitat, this new stage in the spiritual forest succession? That
remains to be seen. But for starters, we see differently, and we
care differently, and we value differently — and if those differ-
ences catch on, with Christianity being the largest religion in the
world, there are bound to be good effects in our world.

Ultimately, those effects will have to go beyond the impor-
tant but limited conservation actions of individuals (recycling,
reusing, abstaining, etc.).

The effects of caring will have to change our systems —
transportation systems that depend on fossil fuels and that divide
and devastate our nonhuman neighbors’ habitats, housing sys-
tems that maximize human impact through suburban sprawl,
farming systems that violate rather than steward land, advertis-
ing systems that make us want more stuff that we don’t need and
that will soon fill even more square miles with trash. Even our
family systems will need reconsideration. For example, we may
realize that nuclear family (of so much Christian focus) and
“subatomic family” (i.e., the nuclear family further split by
divorce) both require (and waste) more resources than the truly
traditional family — the extended or “molecular” one. Could
extended families and intentional households ever make a come-
back? If they do, it will be good news for all of creation —
including humans.

Okay. Enough talk. I need to continue my survey. It’s one
little way as a member of my watershed (one’s watershed being
one’s most important creational address, by the way — more
important than nation, state, or zip code) that I can express my
care for creation. A care that flows from my identity: a creature
who wants to care for other creatures, because I am made in the
image of a Creator who cares for us all. I hope you’ll find your
own ways to express care too, wherever your creational address.

Brian McLaren, founding pastor of Cedar Ridge
Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland, is co-
author of Adventures in Missing the Point: How the
Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel and
author of A Generous Orthodoxy.




