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God's Green Earth, October 29, 2006
God’s green earth
What environmentalists and evangelicals have in common
The Boston Globe
By Charles A. Radin
October 29, 2006THIS FRIDAY, A DOCUMENTARY called ‘‘The Great Warming’’ will arrive in 34 major US cities. Narrated by Keanu Reeves and Alanis Morissette, and made by liberal, secular Canadians, the film covers much the same ground as Al Gore’s ‘‘An Inconvenient Truth.’’
But there are important differences between the films, differences that may allow ‘‘The Great Warming’’ to speak to mainstream American conservatives—and in particular evangelical Christians—in a way that ‘‘An Inconvenient Truth’’ never could. For one, there is no Al Gore figure in ‘‘The Great Warming.’’ Instead, fishermen, farmers, and ordinary residents of weather-vulnerable places on four continents describe their personal suffering as a result of global warming. For another, the film turns not to politicians or scientists, but to Christian ministers to do its preaching.
The basic sermon is delivered by the likes of the Reverend Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, whose affiliated churches have 30 million members. ‘‘To harm this world by environmental degradation,’’ Cizik warns, ‘‘is an offense against God.’’
This casting of evangelicals in a leading role was no accident, says Karen Coshof, producer of the film. Her husband, director Michael Taylor, saw emerging environmental concerns among US evangelicals in the early days of work on ‘‘The Great Warming’’ and decided to seek them out because, the couple felt, ‘‘this is the one element in American politics that could produce a sea change.’’
The changes seems to have begun. ‘‘The Great Warming’’ is just the latest in a stream of recent calls to action against climate change that are either addressed to evangelicals or authored by them.
Since last spring, for example, more than 100 evangelical leaders have signed on to the Evangelical Climate Initiative. ‘‘For most of us, until recently this has not been treated as a pressing issue or major priority,’’ the document acknowledges. ‘‘But now we have seen and heard enough.’’ The initiative calls for reducing use of fossil fuels through committed, individual action and through urgent steps by the federal government—something that usually is viewed with distaste on the religious right.
Surprisingly, environmental appeals to evangelicals are also coming from prominent scientists, who are reaching out to those on the other side of the great divide over how the world was created. ‘‘The Creation,’’ a new book by eminent Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, is an open letter to a fictive Southern Baptist minister in which the outspoken exponent of Darwinian theory appeals for an evangelical-secular alliance against climate change. ‘‘God’s Universe,’’ a new volume by Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich, argues that faith and science can coexist even in considerations of the nature of life.
Differences over such hot-button subjects as the literal truth of the Bible, the validity of the theory of evolution, and the existence of God remain bitter. But a growing chorus of voices on both sides is arguing for saving the planet first, and worrying about other issues later.
‘‘Dear Pastor,’’ Wilson writes in ‘‘The Creation,’’ ‘‘You have the power to help solve a great problem about which I care deeply....I suggest that we set aside our differences in order to save the Creation.’’
‘‘I’m trying to do something radical, to come out of the tight circle of academic scientists to offer a hand of friendship to religious leaders, and to ask for help,’’ Wilson said in a recent interview. ‘‘I knew it was something few scientists could do comfortably.’’Wilson, a founder of global efforts to preserve biodiversity and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for books on human nature and on ants, has long been an outspoken secularist. Indeed, as some of his critics note, Wilson’s unwavering conviction that life evolved through random mutations, unguided by a higher intelligence, helped create the extreme distrust of science among evangelicals that he is now trying to bridge.
Karl Giberson, a physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College, a Christian school in Quincy, says that Wilson’s writings on religion and the origins of life have made him ‘‘a well-defined enemy of the faith’’ whose invitation to evangelicals to make common cause is comparable ‘‘to Al Qaeda opening a doughnut shop and inviting George Bush.’’
Yet Wilson has an advantage most of his colleagues in academia lack: He was raised a Southern Baptist in Alabama and retains a fluency in the folkways of evangelical Christianity.
Among conservative evangelicals, scientists like Wilson are commonly known as ‘‘enviros,’’ a derisive term associated with Big Government, atheism, population planning, and Democrats. But Wilson, says Richard Cizik, has the capacity to break out of that stereotyping because ‘‘he brings a spirit of humanity that is appealing...and he comes from the right place too.’’
Cizik calls Wilson’s effort ‘‘a sincere outreach to us. If we put our heads and hearts together, we can ultimately change America’s tepid response to environmental warming.’’ That is possible because of the important place evangelicals occupy in the Republican Party’s political base, he says.
Wilson’s appeal has been warmly welcomed by some leading evangelicals. But they also stress that support for environmental stewardship has been growing rapidly in a faith community where it was almost anathema a few years ago. And as Cizik and ‘‘Warming’’ director Taylor both noted, evangelicals are increasingly embracing environmental preservation for their own religious reasons.
Paul Gorman, executive director of the Amherst-based National Religious Partnership for the Environment, says he believed even when the partnership began in 1993, with just a handful of evangelicals, ‘‘that the evangelical community would come more fully into the environmentalist perspective—what they would call ’creation care’—when they had the opportunity from within their own distinctive teachings, traditions, and cultures to consider ’What does this mean to us? What does our Scripture tell us?’
‘‘It is their own testimony, their own prayer and fresh understanding of Scripture,’’ Gorman said, that is producing the current surge in evangelical interest in climate change.
Evangelical environmentalists cite numerous passages of the Old and New Testaments in support of their position. One favorite is Genesis 2:15, which says God put man in the Garden of Eden ‘‘to dress it and to keep it.’’ Another is Revelation 11:18, in which the heavenly elders call on God ‘‘to destroy those who destroy the earth.’’
Evangelical youth leaders and Christian college students are currently preparing a forceful declaration of their own, calling for legislation to curb global warming, urging evangelical leaders who have not embraced the cause to do so, and cautioning politicians that ‘‘we are the voices of tomorrow’s evangelical voters.’’ For them, the inspiration for making creation care a top priority arises directly from the teachings of Jesus about human relations.
‘‘This is a moral crisis,’’ the draft declaration states. ‘‘If we don’t alter our actions, global warming is likely to kill millions of people....The most severely impacted will be the poor, and Jesus said that what we do to ’the least of these’ we do to him.’’
The declaration has not yet been made public. An activist who provided a copy of the document to the Globe said it will be released when it has 1,000 signatories. Currently, the activist said, there are more than 600.
Of course, not all evangelicals are signing on to the environmental movement. The possibility of evangelist-environmentalist collaboration—and of a split in the evangelical movement over environmental issues—was explored in a recent PBS documentary, ‘‘Is God Green?,’’ produced by Bill Moyers. The program highlighted growing tensions between evangelicals who have become environmental activists and those who still are solid supporters of the Bush administration’s industry-friendly policies.
Yet some vocal evangelical skeptics of climate change have recently changed their tune. Pat Robertson, one of the best-known and most-caricatured preachers on the religious right, was a critic of assertions that a major climate change was underway. Then, in August, he declared that the blistering national heat wave was ‘‘making a convert out of me. It is getting hotter, and the ice caps are melting...we really need to address the burning of fossil fuels.’’
An important, if not obvious, commonality between Wilson and the evangelicals may be the deeply personal passion for the cause that the biologist shares with those who have been reborn in Christ.
This spirit permeates the pages of Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action by evangelist J. Matthew Sleeth, who was chief of a hospital emergency room on the Maine coast until he decided to work full time to win converts to the environmentalist cause.
Sleeth was an environmentalist before he was an evangelical, he says, and when he accepted Christ as his savior five years ago he assessed his environmentalism along with every other aspect of his previous life. He decided his recycling, carpooling, and energy-saving efforts fell far short of what God required.
‘‘When I read the Bible, what I see is Christ saying: ’Love one another as I love you.’ That supersedes everything else,’’ he said. ‘‘That has to extend to how am I treating the neighbor I have never met.’’
Sleeth quit practicing medicine for money, wrote his book as a how-to guide for Christians who want to live more lightly on the earth, and became a traveling lecturer for the Christian environmental movement. He sold his house, gave away most of his possessions, and moved to Kentucky to save money.
The attempt to create an evangelical-environmentalist alliance ‘‘is bringing together people from very, very different backgrounds who have a common need,’’ Sleeth said. Now ‘‘we have to make a plan to be just human beings, to serve God, to take care of the future. It’s not going to happen by accident.’’
Charles A. Radin is Globe reporter.