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Kentucky doctor says caring for Earth is not an option for Christians, it’s a responsibility

By Peter Smith, Louisville Courier-Journal

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

And the verse was printed in green. And so were more than 1,000 other Bible verses that deal with Earth and all things that live upon it (much like some other Bibles put the words of Jesus in red).

And the Bible was printed on recycled paper, with environmentally friendly soy-based ink.

“The Green Bible,” published by the mass-market religious publisher HarperOne, is interspersed with writings on the environment by such figures as Pope John Paul II, Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Kentucky author and environmentalist Wendell Berry.

Chosen to write the main introduction to this Bible is a Kentucky doctor who gave up his medical practice to travel and write full-time on the subject.

Dr. J. Matthew Sleeth, who lives in Wilmore, a small college town south of Lexington, is helping spread a message slowly taking root among fellow evangelical Christians, who traditionally have been skeptical of environmental causes — that caring for the Earth is “not an option, it’s a commandment.”

The soft-spoken but earnest Sleeth calls himself an unabashed “evangelical tree hugger” and says he’s in good company.

“In the Bible, the first page has a tree — the tree of life,” he said. “The last page has a tree on it — the tree of life. … The Earth is the Lord’s. That’s what the 24th Psalm says. And we’ve treated it like it’s ours.”

A Moral Crisis

“The Green Bible” — complete with a commentary, “green subject index” and list of Web sites on environmentalism — has sold 1,000 copies a week since its release earlier this month. HarperOne is confident enough of selling its original run of 25,000 to print an additional 3,000, publisher Mark Tauber said.

The Bible is designed to reach a “wide audience” of both religious and nonreligious people who may not realize its theme of “creation care,” Tauber said.

Leading environmentalist Bill McKibben endorsed it as “the book we’ve been waiting for.”

But not everyone has been waiting for it.

A 2007 survey by the Barna Group, an evangelical research service, found evangelicals recycle less than other Americans and are less likely than people in other religious categories to consider global warming a serious challenge.

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, said recently in his daily radio program that the use of such things as soy-based ink “just looks like feel-good-ism” and that many verses highlighted in green in the book actually have nothing to do with caring for nature.

Sleeth noted that when he speaks at churches, some ask, “Won’t people start worshipping trees?”

He said he finds it ironic that the question is asked “by someone who belongs to the only religion on the planet that brings a tree into their house once a year, sings songs to it, decorates it, and puts little statues of their God underneath it.”

Richard Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a leader of efforts to galvanize evangelicals on the environment, calls Sleeth a “prophet.”

“Sleeth rightly frames this crisis as a moral one in which there is a clear right and a clear wrong,” Cizik said.

‘The World Is Dying’

A decade ago, Sleeth would have been an unlikely candidate to have such a role.

He was a prosperous doctor living on the Vermont-New Hampshire border, with a large house and a fast car with a teak dashboard.

But he was also haunted.

Haunted by the lifeless 8-year-old girl in a green bathing suit who had been playing in the water on a hot, hazy day before succumbing to an asthma attack in an emergency room where Sleeth was working.

And haunted by the preschool girl innocently coloring a get-well card for her mother, who had just died of breast cancer — a disease that has grown so rapidly during the past quarter century that he is convinced by studies suggesting a connection with environmental pollution.

Sleeth said he and his family were vacationing about eight years ago on a remote Florida island when he told his wife what troubled him: “The world is dying.”

That crystallized a long pilgrimage that sent Sleeth, who had rarely attended church, searching various religious texts.

He became a Christian after reading the Gospel of St. Matthew, which he said taught him “not to judge others” — or feel superior to the neighbor who drove a bigger gas guzzler than he did — and to “clean up our own act.”

His family traded in the big house for a smaller one, the fast car for a hybrid Prius. He quit his medical job, telling a baffled hospital board member he planned to do what became the title of his first book: “Serve God, Save the Planet.”

A Family Vocation

He and his wife, Nancy, moved to Kentucky in 2006 when their son, Clark, and daughter, Emma, began attending Asbury College, a Christian school in Wilmore.

Now, he makes a living as a writer and speaker, spreading a message that has become a family vocation.

Emma Sleeth, 18, published her own book of environmental tips for teenagers earlier this year, “It’s Easy Being Green: One Student’s Guide to Serving God and Saving the Planet.”

Emma said she had found plenty of books about the environment for teens in general and for Christian adults, “but there wasn’t anything out there for Christian kids.

“I wrote the book I wanted to read (but) couldn’t find,” she said.

And Nancy Sleeth has a forthcoming book called, “Go Green, Save Green,” in which she suggests ways families can cut electric usage in each room of their houses.

“It’s a family ministry from the start,” she said. “You don’t make changes like that without involving everybody.”

Their ranch-style house looks surprisingly ordinary — no solar panels but rather subtle things such as clotheslines, insulated windows, compact fluorescent bulbs and an organic garden.

The Sleeths say the savings from their lifestyle changes has resulted in electric bills as low as $15 a month.

They said they don’t always do the greenest thing. They use air conditioning, partly because of Matthew’s asthma, which they acknowledged increases the power-plant emissions linked to people’s breathing problems.

And they agonize over the carbon-emission trail that Matthew Sleeth leaves behind with a speaking schedule that takes him on the road as many as 250 days a year.

Sleeth said the family is still “on a journey” in its efforts. He hopes enough evangelicals take up the cause that he can “work myself out of a job.”

 

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