For many young evangelicals engaged in climate action today, the environmental justice movement can feel like a rediscovered calling. Yet this sense of discovery raises an uncomfortable question: if environmental justice aligns so closely with Christian ethics, why did the modern evangelical church play such a limited role in its early development?
Answering this question requires looking not at what evangelicals believed about the environment, but at how the evangelical faith shaped moral attention, what it trained believers to see, and what it left unseen.
Moral Formation in Modern Evangelicalism
The modern evangelical church in the United States was highly effective at forming Christians around certain ethical priorities. Evangelical life emphasized personal conversion, individual responsibility, and moral witness in personal matters. These emphases were not inherently opposed to justice. However, they were narrowly scoped.
Environmental harm, which we commonly know today to be experienced unevenly across racial and economic lines, did not fit easily into an evangelical moral framework focused on individual behavior rather than collective systems. New issues such as pollution, zoning decisions, and industrial siting appeared distant from the language of sin and salvation that dominated evangelical preaching and teaching.
As a result, environmental injustice was not denied so much as rendered morally peripheral.
The Cost of a Colorblind Moral Lens
A defining feature of late 20th-century evangelicalism was its commitment to racial “colorblindness.” While often well-intentioned, this framework made it difficult to recognize environmental racism as a distinct injustice. If society was understood primarily through individual choice rather than structural inequality, then disproportionate environmental harm could be interpreted as accidental or economically inevitable rather than morally culpable.
Black churches, by contrast, approached environmental harm through lived experience. Communities facing polluted water, toxic air, and unsafe housing encountered environmental injustice as embodied, immediate, and cumulative. Faith communities shaped by these realities developed a theological grammar that connected environment, health, and racial inequality without needing to name the issue as “environmentalism” at all.
This difference in moral perception helps explain why environmental justice was popularized outside the Church.
Black History Month as a Mirror
Black History Month invites institutions not only to celebrate contributions, but to examine silences. For evangelicals, the history of the environmental justice movement reveals a silence shaped by theological habits and cultural alignments rather than explicit opposition.
The movement’s early leaders—many of whom were Black Christians—did not wait for permission from the greater Church. They acted because faith demanded a response to suffering. Their leadership challenges evangelicals today to reconsider what counts as a “gospel issue” and how that impacts our calling to live out our faith in our daily lives.
Recognizing this history requires all of us in the evangelical body to undergo moral recalibration.
YECA and a Re-Formed Evangelical Witness
Young Evangelicals for Climate Action represents a generation shaped by different formative pressures: direct witness and experiences of the consequences of climate change, global inequality, racial reckoning, and a renewed emphasis on holistic Christian discipleship. Young evangelicals are encountering environmental justice as a necessary correction.
YECA’s work embraces a vision where:
- Communal responsibility is valued hand-in-hand with individual ethics
- Justice-conscious engagement replaces colorblind frameworks
- Concrete solidarity with affected communities transcends abstract stewardship
We hear and respond to the call on modern evangelicalism to expand our witness. YECA equips young evangelicals to engage with our leaders and communities from a place of renewed commitment to justice. With this framework, we place emphasis on areas that are most likely to face climate disaster first and worst - such as BIPOC and low-wealth communities.
Accountability as a Condition for Hope
Hope without historical honesty risks becoming sentimentality. Accountability without hope risks paralysis. Environmental justice demands both.
By learning from Black Christian leaders at the forefront of the environmental justice movement, young evangelicals can participate with humility. Black History Month provides a moment to recognize that environmental justice is a witness that black churches carried forward at great cost.
The task now is to join that work faithfully.
Sources
- Bullard, Robert D., Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality.
- United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States (1987).
https://environmentaljusticebook.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/toxic-wastes-and-race-ucc-1987.pdf - Emerson, Michael O., and Christian Smith. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/divided-by-faith-9780195147076 - Taylor, Dorceta E., Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility.
- Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. Mission and resources.
https://www.yecaction.org/
