Snail darters, spotted owls and California red-legged frogs found an unexpected champion on Capitol Hill last year–a coalition of evangelical Christians.
For years evangelicals have drawn the national spotlight with their conservative stands on issues such as pornography and school prayer. But in this case they were lobbying hard to keep their traditional Republican allies in Congress from watering down the Endangered Species Act.
Theirs was no cute-and-furry-critters pitch. The Evangelical Environmental Network, claiming the backing of 1,000 churches, said its mandate came directly from the Bible: God did not tell Noah to save the animals he liked, he told Noah to save them all. As modern-day stewards of God’s creation, Christians must do no less, organizers said.
The Republicans backed down.
Last week, the Evangelical Environmental Network was back on Capitol Hill, along with the National Council of Churches, the U.S. Catholic Conference and the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, joined under the umbrella of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment.
Twenty-five of their leaders met with Vice President Al Gore, congressional leaders and administration officials, to deliver a message: Organized religion is taking the environment seriously, and it intends to make sure Washington does the same. Among their examples was a Chicago congregation fighting blight in the West Garfield Park neighborhood.
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Though some individual congregations have dabbled in environmental causes for decades, the last five years have seen a critical mass of religious organizations–including many seen as politically conservative–devote themselves to causes ranging from toxic-waste cleanup to ecological diversity.
For some, like the Evangelical Network, the mission is seen as a direct command from God, as set out in Bible passages such as Genesis 1:26, which says that mankind shall have dominion over all creatures, including “every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
For others, like the Roman Catholic bishops, interest in the environment comes out of a belief that pollution and environmental degradation are directly linked to poverty, and therefore must be a part of the church’s “justice ministry.”
Nor is the new eco-religious movement limited to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Dalai Lama, perhaps the best known Buddhist in the world, has spoken at great length on the spiritual need to live in harmony with the natural world.
There are critics. Some religious scholars dispute any claim of a theological imperative–either in the Bible, or in Eastern traditions–to concentrate on the environment. They suggest that the new interest has more to do with secular fashion than spiritual mandate.
Others, especially inside organized religion, have worried that preaching the environmental message threatens to put trees and animals, instead of God, at the center of the universe.
“There is a certain pantheistic element in all this,” said Rev. Robert Dugan of the National Association of Evangelicals.
Dugan, the NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs in Washington, attended a meeting of the Evangelical Environmental Network when the group was being formed back in 1993.
But after listening to the plans and positions of some of the leaders, he decided not to lend the name of the NAE–and its 42,500-member congregations–to the effort.
It was not that Dugan quibbled with the biblical call to be stewards of creation; he was just not certain that all evangelicals were ready to pick sides in ongoing political and scientific disputes.
Rev. Stan LeQuire, director of the Pennsylvania-based Evangelical Environmental Network, said that his group takes great pains to draw a clear line between a Bible-based environmentalism and certain parts of the secular movement.
“We worship the creator, not creation,” LeQuire said. “This is not a fad. This is a way of expressing love for God’s works. Our wakeup call comes from the Scripture.”
“What we have discovered is that care for creation is a central message of biblical theology. That message has either been lost or neglected, with a few notable exceptions,” said Paul Gorman, director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, also founded in 1993.
For Rev. Mary Nelson, whose story Gorman delivered to Al Gore on Wednesday, religion and the environment are impossible to separate.
Nelson is a Lutheran minister and the president of Bethel New Life, a community development organization in West Garfield Park.
Like many West Side neighborhoods, West Garfield Park was wracked in the 1960s–by white flight, by rioting, and by the slow deterioration of the heavy industries that dominated the landscape.
The members of Bethel Lutheran Church, where Nelson’s brother was pastor, soon realized that if they did not make some effort to save the neighborhood, there would be no souls around to save.
Bethel’s community ministry now employs 400 people, doing everything from caring for the elderly to commercial development.
But if Nelson’s definition of environmentalism is broader and more complicated than protecting the creatures that creep upon the earth, she too has a Bible passage that is a touchstone for her work.
“If you put an end to oppression, to every gesture of contempt, and to every evil word; if you give food to the hungry and satisfy those in need, then the darkness around you will turn to the brightness of noon,” reads Isaiah 58:9, the beginning of Bethel New Life’s mission statement.
Sometimes, as when Bethel New Life protested an incinerator that had become a blight in the community, that mission meant teaming up with organizations such as Greenpeace.
More often Bethel New Life’s initiatives suggest an urban definition of environmentalism that seems far removed from the Sierra Club and Audubon Society.
Recently, Bethel New Life pushed not only to keep the Green Line elevated train operating, but lobbied transit officials to build a new, showcase stop at Pulaski Road.
Gorman, of the National Partnership, explained that if the combination of Judeo-Christian belief and environmental activism seems to have sprung up in the last five years–long after the religions were born and decades after environmentalism became a secular sensation–it is because only now have environmental problems become an inescapable part of human life.
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“I think that this has now become an irreversible current in religious life,” Gorman said.
Both he and the Evangelistic Environmental Network’s LeQuire acknowledged that it is still a small current. Environmentalism is embraced by only a minority of Christians.
But, LeQuire said, it only takes a minority to get the point across, to other people of faith and society as a whole.
“I’m a Baptist from the hills of Tennessee, so I can tell you, when you get one chigger on you, it sure can itch,” he said. “It’s not very big, but it gets your attention.”