Economic and Environmental Justice


  1. Overview
  2. Our Beliefs
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The Economic and Environmental Justice Program calls the church and society into a greater faithfulness to the biblical vision of wholeness and justice for all of God’s creation. From global warming and environmental racism to worker justice and poverty eradication, the program seeks to restore right relationships among ourselves, others and the created world.

The primary goals of the program are to restore and protect God’s creation, ensure just and sustainable communities, and seek economic opportunity and security for all.

Through education and advocacy, the program helps United Methodists understand the positions of the church on the full range of economic and environmental issues, offers resources to help people of faith live into the biblical vision of wholeness and justice, and encourages engagement with policymakers and other decision-makers to change unjust systems which destroy God's creation and harm God's people.

As our Social Principles clearly state, "let us recognize the responsibility of the church and its members to place a high priority on changes in economic, political, social, and technological lifestyles to support a more ecologically equitable and sustainable world leading to a higher quality of life for all of God's creation." (Social Principles, "The Natural World" ¶160)

Issues

Social Principles

  • 160 The Natural World

    All creation is the Lord’s, and we are responsible for the ways in which we use and abuse it. Water, air, soil, minerals, energy resources, plants, animal life, and space are to be valued and conserved because they are God’s creation and not solely because they are useful to human beings. God has granted us stewardship of creation. We should meet these stewardship duties through acts of loving care and respect. Economic, political, social, and technological developments have increased our human numbers, and lengthened and enriched our lives. However, these developments have led to regional defoliation, dramatic extinction of species, massive human suffering, overpopulation, and misuse and overconsumption of natural and nonrenewable resources, particularly by industrialized societies. This continued course of action jeopardizes the natural heritage that God has entrusted to all generations. Therefore, let us recognize the responsibility of the church and its members to place a high priority on changes in economic, political, social, and technological lifestyles to support a more ecologically equitable and sustainable world leading to a higher quality of life for all of God’s creation.

    Click here to view all of ¶160.

  • 163 The Economic Community

    We claim all economic systems to be under the judgment of God no less than other facets of the created order. Therefore, we recognize the responsibility of governments to develop and implement sound fiscal and monetary policies that provide for the economic life of individuals and corporate entities and that ensure full employment and adequate incomes with a minimum of inflation. We believe private and public economic enterprises are responsible for the social costs of doing business, such as employment and environmental pollution, and that they should be held accountable for these costs. We support measures that would reduce the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. We further support efforts to revise tax structures and to eliminate governmental support programs that now benefit the wealthy at the expense of other persons.

    Click here for all of ¶163.

Networks


Support the Social Justice Endowment Fund

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Faith in Action

This Week's Issue:

August 15, 2008

FIA Editor: Wayne Rhodes

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Walking Humbly, Doing JusticeEdited by J.Richard Peck (Cokesbury 2002)

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