Book Review: ‘Serve God Save the Planet’

Inexplicably, many christians are set squarely against Environmentalism. It’s hard to understand why the same type of rhetoric usually reserved for Evolution and Abortion is leveled at climate change, but it’s there. Over the last decade, while this old-school evangelicalism slowly ages and digs in its heels, a growing number of christians have ’switched sides.’ “Creation Care“, “Earth Stewardship“, “Christian Environmentalism”, whatever name you want to file it under at the Family Bookstore, the movement towards establishing a christian environmental ethic is becoming increasingly, if not mainstream, less fringe. In “Serve God Save the Planet” J. Matthew Sleeth makes a moving, articulate, and convincing case for why christians need to care about the environmental impact their lives have on our planet.

Sleeth is not an academic or a scientist. He is a medical doctor, but whether that MD after his name gets him any cache on his environmental views is up for debate. So instead of a lot of charts (there are exactly none), climatology data, statistics (there are a little), and photos of polars bears, you get short readable chapters filled with anecdotes about how and why the Sleeth family decided to change their relationship with God and the planet. And it’s pretty hardcore. They unplug from their suburban lives, moving into a rural area, become small-plot farmers, examine how each aspect of their lives impacts the local and global environment, and permanently and drastically change their lifestyles. The strength of Sleeth’s argument is that he isn’t some poindexter rubbing our faces in global warming, he’s just a regular guy that stopped closing his eyes to the realities of the destruction human beings have caused to our earthly home. More importantly he constantly weighs our commitment to creation with our relationship to God. God the Creator and God the Sustainer fall to the wayside when we embrace habits and lifestyles that damage nature. “If God made nature to sustain us, and if we reject his sustaining gifts, will there be no consequences?” Indeed.

Each chapter breaks down a cultural ill and makes suggestions on what we can do in our individual lives to move away from it. Each ill has a spiritual and environmental component, and Sleeth shares stories of how he and his family have rejected each and embraced a solution. Some examples: downsizing your possessions (no dryer! one car! smaller house!), growing your own food, carefully recycling and composting, drastically reduced power consumption. But Sleeth also unleashes a screed against consumerism, materialism, TV, overpopulation, and healthcare (he is a doctor after all) — without sounding crazy. I can’t recommend this book enough to my friends that haven’t had a good resource to see beyond the politics of this issue. In fact Sleeth never once mentions politics or uses the phrase “carbon footprint”. And for those of you already convinced we are destroying the planet, this book is a fresh voice from a christian perspective with a ton of practical advice. Sleeth provides an appendix with a family energy audit, an appliance guide and an almost impossibly challenging To-Do List. It’s a quick read, well-written, with each chapter structured as a stand-alone source of information.

Each of us must choose how we relate to the earth. Sleeth’s environmentalism is missionary work: he encourages us to change our families so that we might be better ministers to our community and the world. I’ll end with this zinger from chapter 5 (”Moving from Faith to Works”):

Our relationship to God’s gifts can be one of entitlement, ignorance, and gluttony or one of praise, thanks and temperance…Are you, like the [Good] Samaritan, ready to move along the path from ignorance to awareness and from compassion to action?