Eden's Wild Whisper

A sixteen-year-old me wanders languidly along the banks of a Texas lake in a battlefield strewn with debris from man’s war against his own home, brooding over empty Lone Star cans bobbing in the green shoal, abandoned fishing lures rusting on sun-baked rocks, and sooty campfire remnants scarring the shoreline.

As she is in all wars, nature has been betrayed.

I imagine the Creator suspended in a sea of inky nothingness, His radiance slicing through the blackness that would swallow Him if not for His Name. He stands on the precipice of a cosmos that doesn’t yet exist. The Heavenly Host peers anxiously from its celestial perch, eagerly awaiting the words that will shake eternity. Heaven holds its breath in the silence.

He speaks, and the void recoils like a snake bite. Light erupts into the abyss at His command. In the days that follow, He speaks many things into existence—rivers, tigers, stars. Here is virgin Earth in all her radiant splendor. She is good. This, He determines, will be the glorious setting where the story of His most beloved Creation unfolds. A contented nod, and He bends holy knee to newly minted soil, gathers it into palms, and exhales neshamah—the breath of life. Adam opens his eyes.

Rare is the Evangelical lamentation for the oceans defiled, the skies pollution-choked, the forests felled for consumer sprawl

Even in my adolescence, I grappled with humanity’s disdain for the common grace of nature—uncherished either as a mercy from God, the gift of a benevolent universe, or even just as dumb luck thanks to an impersonal explosion of star dust. Above all, I couldn’t fathom how Christians, who supposedly read the epic of Genesis as history, yawned at such flagrant abuses of the natural world.

In the decade since my lake-wandering days as a teenager, I have discovered that my fellow Evangelicals historically focused on the flipside of my conservationist instincts, citing chapter and verse about dominion, subjugation, and the great remaking to come. I don’t dispute any of those verses; I only emphasize the often-forgotten ones. God commanded Adam to subdue and bring order to the Earth, utilizing and enjoying its resources, but He also commanded him to keep it. The original Hebrew text uses the word shamar, which connotes guardianship, protection, and preservation.

We have skirted that part of the mandate. Rare is the Evangelical lamentation for the oceans defiled, the skies pollution-choked, the forests felled for consumer sprawl.

If we were to trace our poor environmental stewardship to its origins, we’d land in the 16th century, when Protestant reformers sought a new Christian path chiseled away from Catholic cosmology—including its sacramental experience of nature.

Nature was good; it remained God’s Creation. But, to quote John Calvin, “in regard to the fabric and admirable arrangement of the universe, how few of us are there who...ever think of the Creator? Do we not rather overlook Him, and sluggishly content ourselves with a view of his works?” In other words, nature, more often than not, distracts from doctrine.

This was the foundation on which Evangelicalism was born in the 18th century. The most significant evolution in Evangelicals’ perspective of nature, however, arrived roughly a century later with the rise of dispensationalism. This highly influential theological framework crowned eschatology as a central aim of Christian thought. This end-times focus, in tandem with cultural and political shifts, distanced many Evangelicals from environmental causes, which were seen as secondary concerns in light of an impending apocalypse.

By the late 20th century, environmentalism, propelled by policies like the Clean Air Act (1970) and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, was increasingly tied to leftist activism, despite initial bipartisan support. Evangelicals, aligned with right-wing politics, largely rejected environmental causes, wary of their association with progressive agendas.

Over 500 years, nature shifted from a revelation of God’s glory to an obstacle to be conquered. Worse yet, the people most likely to stand up for conservation are now those least likely to stand up for God. All sanctity had been wrung out of Creation in the name of anthropocentrism, progress, and a new, secular form of proselytizing.

But this is beginning to change.

A Multitude of Ripples

A new conversation is brewing among some Evangelicals. To borrow a phrase from the master storyteller Martin Shaw, “A lamp is getting lifted.” But this lamp lifting is not illuminating the damage we’ve caused the environment. That’s already been done. This time, the light shines on the damage we’ve caused our souls in our forsaking of things wild and green.

Unlike centralized Evangelical environmental movements of the past, such as those spearheaded by the Evangelical Environmental Network or A Rocha, what’s stirring now is a multitude of ripples from people deeply weary of the gray Western machine that’s exhausting spiritual and biological life in any form.

It’s undeniable that we are so deeply entrenched in a mechanical world of our own making and so out of sync with the one designed for us. Blue light curbs our appetite for blue skies. Most jobs and personal affairs are device-driven, chaining us to a life of screens. True silence is a memory from days past; without a machine hum, our ears ring in protest. The concrete jungles that are our homes, offices, and gyms are temperature-regulated, sterile, and perpetually illuminated with artificial light. Sunrise and sunset be damned; we march on.

Former pantheistic environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth, also a convert to Orthodox Christianity, calls us God’s negligent gardeners. “Our materialistic, scientific society is going all in on the project to conquer the stars, build new intelligences, and ultimately defeat death itself.”

The result? A gnawing fatigue that lives in the murky subconscious, often showing up as inexplicable discontent, brain fatigue, and corrosive anxiety. Our spirits dim like weak light bulbs even as we flood our bodies with more energy, whether electronic or pharmaceutical.

Some of us Evangelicals are finding that the faith we practice isn’t necessarily doing enough to address it. Our souls are saved; our sinful ways are slowly retreating under the weight of sanctification; our church attendance is strong; and yet, something withers still. We need an antidote to neutralize the poison.

Perhaps the healing elixir lies somewhere in the forest—the antithesis of our digital wasteland. Surely, it exists in many natural spaces: a garden, the shade of a tree, on the peak of a mountain, or deep in the wilderness, where Jesus and His Prophets were so often found.

This movement is not an afternoon stroll in the sunshine or the occasional mountain hike. Nor is it the Christian version of secular society’s digital detoxes, forest bathing retreats, or “earthing” rituals. This is about the union of liturgy and Creation. Or perhaps I should say reunion, for there were many centuries when the two were intertwined.

This return is not what makes us Christian, nor does it make us right in the eyes of God. Only the blood of Jesus holds such power. Instead, this return to a sacramental view of nature works to restore joy, wholeness, and rest—things that ironically become increasingly out of reach the more society “progresses.”

The growing desire to retreat into the natural world—to demystify it as a locus of prayer, gathering, and worship—is akin to the same energies that have propelled renewed interest in homesteading, eco-villages, and local, sustainable food production. Urbanites of all backgrounds and beliefs are forsaking contemporary living, whether wholly or fractionally, to pursue something that feels more like life—more like Eden.

The path back to Eden is a riddle humanity has long endeavored to solve. Yet we have rarely, if ever, succeeded in finding a different answer from the one Adam and Eve found. Knowledge is still the fruit we eat. Bitten apples are everywhere to remind us. Now we have social media, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. It may look as if all is well, but come close enough, and you’ll see the cracks and the worms wriggling inside.

The Quest for Purification

Once we understand this place for what it is—how it erodes those of us who call it home—we know purification is vital. But how does one do that without abandoning one’s entire life? What solace is there for the modern Evangelical who finds his life rooted here in the machine?

To be sure, many practices would direct our hearts back to renewal and health. A few that come to mind are the resuscitation of the village mindset, the revival of objective beauty in art, and a refamiliarization with boredom and other quiet practices. These all push back against machine-driven living.

But nothing, I think, resists this trend better than leaving behind man’s created world to walk in God’s. I have found that His voice gets clearer as the machine hum grows fainter. Unlike the cacophonous buzzing, beeping, and whirring that animate the modern world, birdsong and wind-rustled trees don’t compete with God’s voice. And actually, often those very sounds are His voice, if we have ears to listen.

An end-times focus distanced many Evangelicals from environmental causes, which were seen as secondary concerns in light of an impending apocalypse.

Historically, however, Evangelicals have not. Even those who value nature as God’s good Creation reap no more benefits from it than the atheist biophile. It takes, says British author and Orthodox Christian Phillip Sherrard, “a sacramental understanding of nature” to participate in the sacred dialogue between Creator and Creation that is revealed throughout Scripture.

This divine dance that we are invited to join, Sherrard says, “depends upon the recognition of the actual immanence of nature in the divine, the sense that the creative energies of God did not merely produce the created... but are the ever-present, indwelling, and spontaneous causes of every manifestation of life within it.”

Some Evangelicals may shrink back for fear of heresy. But this is not pantheism. Itis joining in the hymn we are told in Psalm 148, all Creation is singing. Saint John of Damascus echoed the anonymous psalmist’s prayer when he said, “The whole earth is a living icon of the face of God,” as did the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni:” ‘Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.’

This movement also recants the Protestant belief that nature is purely material and exchanges it for the perspective that nature is an extension of God’s voice that ministers to us. As Saint Teresa of Ávila put it, “The soul that loves God finds Him in all things, but especially in the silence of nature, where His presence speaks to the heart.”

And in its most simple but profound form, this movement is introspection; we remember not necessarily who we are but what we are. “A human is soil plus the breath of God,” writes Kingsnorth. Evangelicals tend to cling to the Imago Dei part of that truth and forget the dirt part, but to neglect the latter is a form of rebellion against our bodies.

In New Fellowship

As you’ve likely noticed, I’ve been quoting several Orthodox and Catholic figures, and that perhaps is the sweetest part of this entire awakening: It is spurring fellowship among various ecclesial traditions that have long kept their distance. Christ’s bride is beginning to look less fractured.

Evangelicals, as a whole, do not know what it looks like to cultivate and maintain a sacred perspective of Creation—to reap the spiritual benefits of a life intertwined with God’s spoken cosmos. But our Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican brothers and sisters do. For centuries, these denominations have revered nature as infused with divine presence and grace, often reflecting this belief in their liturgical and theological frameworks. Evangelicals have much to learn from them.

The path from modernity to health and wholeness is a long one. I foresee many books, conversations, and meditative prayers standing between me and that indefinable place where I can experience, in Martin Shaw’s words, the “undomesticated, mossy face of Christ” and “the creativity of a ceremonial life that [weaves]forest and church together.” I am only at the beginning of the path, and already I am beginning to see flickers of light where before there was only dimness.

I will continue this pilgrimage, however slow I may advance. Besides the gnawing fatigue of modernity, there’s something else spurring me forward: As someone who has read and studied many of history’s great writers, I am keenly aware of the importance of setting. It is never—truly never—thoughtless. It is always something the author painstakingly cultivates for a myriad of purposes.

From Brontë to Hemingway to Tolkien, geography, weather, flora, and fauna are dense layers of meaning readers must peel back intentionally if they want to understand the scope of the writer’s craft. The only reason authors do this is because the Great Author did it first when He created mankind’s setting. What a grievous mistake it would be to skip the chapter where the wild beauty of the cosmos unveils the heart of the Creator.

I want to hear the whole story—certainly the one that is documented on pages but also the one that is whispered by the trees. We need both if we are to thrive in this technological frontier that will continue to claw its way forward. As the poet William Wordsworth reminds us: “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her.”

Hailee Boyd is a writer for Blaze Media. Raised on Texas soil, she’s planted here for good.