"Green Like God" by Jonathan Merritt

208 pages

I'm very much into being environmentally conscious, but I think a lot of what's being written about it is overly simplistic and repetitive. Then there is the feeling that a lot of the people who are "going green" are only doing so because it's trendy. What happens when it's not cool anymore? So I was skeptical when I picked up this book. I thought it was refreshing to see a Christian book focused on the environment, but part of me wondered if it was just trying to be different and prove that Christians are as cool as everybody else. However, I was pleasantly surprised. Merritt provides strong evidence from the Bible to support everything he writes. It's clear that he's motivated by what God says, not by what society is into at the moment. His first argument is that God made the Earth, said it was good, and gave us responsibility over it, so we should treat it with respect. I've heard this before from other Christian environmentalists, but Merritt explains it better than I've heard before. He also says that we hurt other people when we hurt the environment, which is something that I hadn't considered at all before. Climate change causes famines and food shortages, and pollution poisons lungs. In order to truly take care of our neighbors and our future descendants, we should take care of the environment. Merritt offers a few suggestions for green living, but for the most part he sticks to the theology and leaves the tips for other books, which I think was a good move because there are plenty of those books out there. I liked this book just as it is. It made me care more about the enivronment--for the right reasons.