Evangelicals rethink their public face

Evangelical environmentalism
The NAE document, meanwhile, calls for social action on issues that, while of great concern to many evangelicals, have been overshadowed in the public arena by hot-button topics like abortion and same-sex marriage. More attention must be paid to employment, labor, housing, health care, education, human rights, racial equality and the environment, it says.

Sargent, of Gordon College, said in an interview that while the NAE statement “brings no surprises,” some of its principles could be difficult to accept for some “on the conservative side of the spectrum.”

“Some of this statement is to challenge the larger evangelical community to have a broader perspective,” he said, and leaders of conservative congregations, especially, “might have to give reasons for why they chose to sign it.”

Most controversially, the NAE statement explicitly throws its weight behind the growing “creation care” environmental movement, which asserts that Christians are stewards of God’s creation. It is led by the Evangelical Environmental Network, best known for its “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign.

“As evangelical leaders, we need to step up to our responsibilities to be leaders in the fight for clean air and water, to stop the burning of rain forests, cruelty to animals, overuse of pesticides, and the countless other issues that result from our consumer-oriented lifestyles,” R. Scott Rodin, former president of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, wrote in the book of essays that accompanied the report.

Conservative resistance
Many conservative evangelicals have traditionally 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. Already, the statement has put the NAE at odds with allies of conservative evangelicals in Congress and the Bush administration.

“We want to have a spiritual country, and I would hate to think that we give in, and particularly organizations like the NAE, to a bunch of far-left-wing environmentalists,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said last month in an interview on “The 700 Club,” which airs on the Rev. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

The trade journals Inside Fuels & Vehicles and Energy Washington Week, meanwhile, reported that NAE leaders were coming under pressure from the White House, which has pursued increasing drilling for oil and natural gas in previously protected areas.

But Sargent said conservative evangelicals were likely to lose ground in that battle.

“Part of the resistance to creation care has been because of the strong support for capitalism in the Cold War era,” he said. “I think, in an era where the Cold War has faded and capitalism is not pitted so strongly against social issues, there is much less of a desire to embrace capitalism with all of its imperfections and more of a desire to have a responsible capitalism much more alert to the ways in which it can damage things that are important.”

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