Creation Care

Creation care names environmental responsibility as it has been developed and framed specifically within evangelical Protestant Christianity, distinguished from the broader academic field of ecotheology by its consistent grounding in evangelical biblical authority and evangelistic language rather than in the more varied theological methods, including process theology and interfaith dialogue, that characterize ecotheology generally.

Organizations including the Evangelical Environmental Network, founded in the United States in the early 1990s, promoted creation care as a biblically mandated evangelical commitment rather than as a politically liberal or secular environmental cause, framing care for creation as a matter of following Jesus's teaching and honoring God as creator, a framing intended to make environmental concern legible and acceptable within a religious community whose political culture has often been skeptical of the mainstream environmental movement. International evangelical bodies have also taken up creation care language, including the Lausanne Movement's 2010 Cape Town Commitment, which named creation care as a gospel issue within the wider evangelical statement of faith and mission priorities.

Creation care has not achieved uniform acceptance within evangelicalism; the resulting division is a documented internal debate rather than a settled evangelical consensus. Proponents, including signatories of statements such as the Evangelical Climate Initiative, argue that biblical teaching on stewardship of creation makes environmental responsibility a direct extension of evangelical faith commitments rather than an import from secular politics.

Critics within the same broad evangelical movement have argued that environmentalism as commonly framed carries assumptions, including certain views of population, economic growth or the state's role, that sit uneasily with other evangelical commitments, and some have expressed concern that creation care rhetoric risks distracting from evangelism, the movement's central priority, or aligning the church too closely with a specific secular political program. This internal disagreement has made creation care a genuine and sometimes sharp fault line within American evangelicalism specifically, distinct from the broader, less politically contested acceptance environmental concern has generally received within mainline Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox ecotheology.