A Greener Spirit: Evangelicals Embrace "Creation Care"

"A Greener Spirit" is a series Change.org will run over the next few weeks profiling players in the growing faith-based environmental movement. The series begins with today’s look at a recent trend among American evangelicals: the theology of "creation care." Looks at the "religious left," Jewish, Muslims and interfaith campaigns will follow.

Change.org’s Ben Proffer recently told us about a troubling DVD series called “Resisting the Green Dragon,” an anti-environmental program from religious-right groups like Focus on the Family. Fortunately, these groups do not represent most of the world’s faith traditions, or even all of evangelical Christianity.

To prove that, I’ll profile several faith-based environmental campaigns over the next few weeks. I myself am a mainline Protestant whose undergraduate thesis was on evangelical politics, but I’ll also look at Jewish, Muslim, and interfaith campaigns.

While there are certainly fundamentalist Christians who believe God gave humans "dominion" over the earth, many others believe that we are called to be good stewards of it. In the Genesis creation story, God called creation "good," and the belief goes that we should honor – not destroy – what God calls good. Other Biblical passages, like Psalm 104, use natural imagery to evoke God’s glory, and when Jesus needed to pray, he went alone to natural places. These passages and more seem to demand a certain level of respect for the environment from believers.

Perhaps the loudest evangelical voice on climate change is the Rev. Rich Cizik. Until December 2008, Cizik was the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals – an organization made up of dozens of major conservative denominations. Today, he is the co-founder of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. "As a biblical Christian," he said in an April article on Grist.com, "I agree with St. Francis that every square inch on Earth belongs to Christ. If we don't pay attention to global climate change, it's pretty obvious that tens and or even hundreds of millions of people are going to die."

Cizik is not alone. The Evangelical Climate Initiative of 2006 was a major document affirming these principles, signed by 86 prominent evangelicals – including best-selling author Pastor Rick Warren, numerous other megachurch pastors, and 39 evangelical college presidents.

One of those signers was the Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor to the 12,000 members of Florida’s Northland Church. In 2006, Hunter was named President-elect of the Christian Coalition, a group that could fairly be called the backbone of the religious right for much of the 1990s. Hunter parted ways with the Coalition’s board before actually taking office, but the fact that they were even willing to consider his focus on climate change should raise some eyebrows. Flash forward four years to 2010, and the Coalition offered its support to the Senate’s Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate bill.

This change in environmental attitudes comes amidst a larger shift in evangelical priorities. The new generation of evangelical leaders is just as conservative as were their predecessors, but they are less hateful about it. Instead of using wedge issues to pull the country apart, pastors like Warren and Hunter are willing to work with politicians of both parties, and are focused on a much broader array of issues than just abortion and school prayer. In fact, a 2008 PBS poll even found that a plurality of evangelicals under 30 support either gay marriage or civil unions.

To get your church, synagogue or mosque on a greener path, my first tip is to introduce courses on faith and the environment into your adult education program. For numerous free, downloadable curriculums from multiple faiths and denominations, check out Interfaith Power & Light or the Evangelical Environmental Network. If you're willing to shell out $15, than I also strongly recommend Earth Ministry's series on Ken Burns's National Parks documentaries, including DVD clips. Christian and interfaith versions are available. I've taught the Christian version several times, to both adult and high school groups, and it always goes over well.

Image: Rick Warren, a signer of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, is the senior pastor at California's evangelical Saddleback Church, the eight-largest church in the country. Courtesy Flickr user All About You God.

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