More evangelicals concluding God is green

Majority of evangelicals back action
In a poll last month by Ellison Research, 70 percent of self-described evangelicals said they believed global warming would have an impact on future generations, and 64 percent said action should begin immediately.

More than half — 54 percent — said they would be more likely to support candidates who worked to curb global warming.

“We’re putting it in a biblical context,” Cizik said. “We’re saying whatever the past was, it’s a new day. It’s the 21st century, and we are the new evangelicals, and we have a broad agenda. And caring for the Earth is one of those things.”

Climate change has emerged as a significant issue in the presidential campaign, and many of the candidates, Republican and Democratic alike, have sought to seize the environmentalist mantle. But only Republican former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas — otherwise considered among the more conservative candidates in the race — has explicitly aligned himself with the creation care movement.

“My own personal faith reminds me that ‘the earth is the Lord’s’ and that we are not its owners; merely its caretakers,” Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, wrote in his 2007 autobiography, “From Hope to Higher Ground.”

As Huckabee has won favor among evangelicals in Iowa, where he has risen to second in recent Republican polls and assuaged some evangelicals’ concerns that he cannot win, he has begun picking up endorsements from evangelicals who stress his environmental position.

“I would suggest that as stewards of God resources, there needs to be a fresh look at this issue,” Rick Scarborough, head of Vision America, a prominent conservative evangelical group, wrote Thursday. “... Huckabee is forcing Republicans to discuss this issue, and that is healthy.”

Randy Thomas, vice president of Exodus International, an evangelical ministry, wrote last month that, as a private citizen, “I have decided to vote for Huckabee. Yes, it is because he is unabashedly Christian, but it is also that he does care for the environment (in a balanced way … not the “new religion” kind of way).”

And also last month, Don Bosch, an environmental scientist and founder of the Evangelical Ecologist Web site, posted a prominent endorsement of Huckabee.

EPA, evangelicals join forces
Cizik was in Minnesota on Tuesday to publicize the NEA’s partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star for Congregations program, which seeks to persuade churches to become more energy-efficient.

“We are asking all 45,000 churches associated with NAE to, if you will, go green,” he said.

Cizik cited EPA statistics projecting that if all of the estimated 300,000 houses of worship in the United States — “that’s Protestant, Catholic, Muslim mosques, everybody” — were to sign on, “we would save $200 million annually” for core ministerial purposes.

The issue remains contentious among evangelicals, however, and a debate over climate change at the Values Voters Summit last month in Washington demonstrated that divisions are still deep.

“Climate change threatens human lives, and the environment is clearly on the mainstream of the evangelical agenda,” the Rev. Jim Wallis, president of the liberal evangelical group Sojourners/Call to Renewal, told the assembly.

The Rev. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, countered with the conservative evangelical philosophy that God created the world to support humanity, saying: “The Bible says the Earth is for human betterment.”

But “why shouldn’t the churches be leading this?” Cizik asked. “Of course they should be, because that’s God’s mandate to us. ... God said in his own word in Genesis 2:15, ‘Care and protect it.’

“And have we been doing that? I don’t think so.”

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