More evangelicals concluding God is green

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

The evangelical awakening to climate change is still a work in progress, but as the politically powerful movement becomes more active in environmentalism, political leaders will have to take notice or risk losing their jobs, a prominent evangelical leader said Tuesday.

Since President Bush’s re-election in 2004, a movement called “creation care,” which asserts that Christians are the stewards of God’s creation, has rapidly been been gathering momentum, said the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals, or NAE.

“What is really happening is that American evangelicals are becoming, well, green, if you will,” Cizik said in an interview with MSNBC-TV’s Joe Scarborough.

The American evangelical community is in the midst of a wrenching shift in thinking on the environment. As recently as this spring, politically influential evangelicals were locked in a showdown over climate change, when 25 conservative evangelical leaders demanded that the NAE fire Cizik for his environmental advocacy.

The association’s refusal — rebuffing such influential conservative figures as James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; former Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer; and  Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council — marked a turning point for green evangelicals, emboldening them to take creation care into the political arena.

“This is going to be an issue which evangelicals are going to look at when they cast their ballots,” Cizik said.

“I think it should be on par with all the other issues,” like abortion and same-sex marriage, he said. “When you think about it ... hundreds of millions of people around the globe are already being impacted by climate change.”

‘New day’ as conservative elders fade
For most of the movement’s history, American evangelicals as a rule steered clear of politics, heeding leaders who preached against risking contamination by secular culture.

But in the 1970s, a generation of deeply conservative activists attracted by the open courting of Ronald Reagan, who was preparing his successful run for president, broke with tradition and began talking about reforming that secular culture. That movement provided the foundation for the rise to prominence of conservative political pastors like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Rev. Pat Robertson and a coalition of dissidents who seized control of the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 1980s.

Those conservative evangelical leaders largely rejected the environmental movement, both because of its liberal heritage and because of the biblical injunction that Christians should worship the creator, not his creation. With their focus on conservative social issues like abortion, they kept environmentalism marginalized as an evangelical issue.

In a sermon shortly before his death in May, Falwell criticized “naive Christian leaders” for being “duped” by environmentalism, which he told his congregation at Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., was “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” from evangelism.

Since the re-election of President Bush in 2004, however, and especially in the past two years — as awareness of climate change and disenchantment with the war in Iraq have crystallized — moderate and liberal evangelicals have been willing to step out of the shadows and confront the conservative leaders most Americans identify with evangelicalism.

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