Rhetorical Features of Green Evangelicalism

摘要

Christian evangelicals and environmentalists are often viewed as holding irreconcilable and mutually exclusive perspectives. We argue that examination of the discourses of environmentalism and an emerging evangelical Christian discourse that we call "green evangelicalism" shows there are more grounds in common than is typically supposed. Using a conceptual framework that integrates Dryzek's ideas about how to map environmental discourses with Burke's concepts of terministic screens, orientation, and identification, we locate the discursive parameters of a distinctly green evangelicalism as it is manifested in response to the problem of climate change. Comparing the discursive map of green evangelicalism with charts of other environmental discourses enables us to locate rhetorical opportunities and obstacles for generating identification among otherwise distinctive orientations toward environmental problems.