Ecology movement now getting religion

By Robert Schlesinger, The Boston Globe
Sunday, 7/8/2001
Page A 1 (Copyright 2001)

WASHINGTON - A growing number of environmentalists are invoking religious teachings to support their cause, creating a new branch of the conservation movement that some faith-based activists have dubbed Creation Care.

The ecumenical movement reached a new level last month when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, meeting in Atlanta, called for the government to take steps to deal with climate change. It also has been active at the grass-roots level, including a rally outside sport-utility dealerships in Lynn last month in which protesters posed the question, “WWJD - What would Jesus Drive?”

Its leaders say the movement's focus is not politics, but morality. “We like to say - in the Judeo-Christian tradition - environmentalism didn't start with Earth Day, it began with Genesis,” said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment in New York.

Critics of the movement question how much religious leaders should be involved with the contentious and highly political issues, and they worry that religion could be subsumed to an earthly agenda.

Stewardship of the environment ”doesn't mean putting things under a glass dome and preserving them, and it certainly doesn't mean that anything that is pristine and wild is better,” said the Rev. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, a Michigan-based policy institute that studies the interrelation of economics and moral theology.

Followers of the movement view faith-based environmentalism as a natural extension of religion, one that carries a moral obligation to act. Protecting God's creation is central to their agenda, they say.

“Because I confess Christ to be my savior and Lord, because he died to reconcile all things, I can't be hurting what he died to reconcile me to,” said the Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network in Washington, D.C.

The belief extends across Catholic, evangelical, Protestant, and Jewish groups.

“The concept of stewardship is at the heart of the religious rhetoric of human responsibility,” said Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. “A reverence for nature is part of the religious sensibility.”

Also vital is the idea of environmental protection as the kind of social justice that religious institutions have supported for decades.

While these arguments have been around in one form or another for a long time, religious and environmental movements primarily had existed on opposing sides of the political spectrum, with conservatism fueled by people of faith while environmentalism grew out of and helped nourish progressive politics. Only in the past dozen years have religions formally started to address environmental concerns.

In 1989, Pope John Paul II issued a message on “The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility.” In 1990, Carl Sagan organized 32 eminent scientists to sign an open letter to the world religious community, calling for their help on issues like global warming.

The National Religious Partnership for the Environment was founded in 1992. Its constituent groups say they now serve 100 million Americans.

The new-style environmentalists gained attention in the early months of Republican control of Congress in 1995, when they successfully fought to preserve the Endangered Species Act after it came under attack from GOP lawmakers. More recently, they have focused on the threat of global warming, and in the meantime getting noticed by the White House.

When the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Christie Whitman, made the case to President Bush in March that the administration should take action on global warming, she cited the growing movement.

“For the first time the world's religious communities have started to engage in this issue,” Whitman wrote in a memorandum to the president. “Their solutions vary widely, but the fervor of the focus was clear.”

That growing strength has mirrored increasing environmental awareness among the public.

“Religious leaders, theologians, and clergy have really taken up the question of the environment much more thoroughly,” said John Green, who studies religion in politics at the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron.

“That's been a dramatic shift: It's very rare these days to go into a church and see people preach against environmentalism and see it as some sort of plot.”

The strong moral component of faith-based conservation makes the messages harder to dismiss than if they came from a ''traditional'' environmental perspective. Kalee Kreider of the National Environmental Trust cites the civil rights and nuclear-freeze movements and the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa as proof of religion's reach.

“It wasn't interest groups on each side that won,” Kreider said. “It was the faith community and the moral center and the breadth of that movement that really made the difference in the end.”

But such critics as Sirico, whose institute has formed an Inter-Faith Council for Environmental Stewardship to promote a more conservative view of religious environmentalism, argue that while environmental stewardship is a legitimate concept, it has been misunderstood. As stewards, they say, humans are above the rest of God's creation, a hierarchy that gets blurred in the synthesis of religion and environmentalism.

“If you don't have that hierarchy in creation, if you don't see humanity as unique, you ultimately end up with some sort of moral relativism,” Sirico said.

Others see problems squaring specific conflicts. For example, many environmental activists favor population control, which is antithetical to Catholic beliefs.

“I'm a bit disturbed that people put so much emphasis on population,” said Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and the author of a book on religion and the environment. “That's a misfocused argument ... because as religious people we value human beings.”

Some activists predict that if environmental problems are not addressed, they will fester, leading to political consequences.

The Rev. Fred Small of the First Church Unitarian of Littleton, Mass., said: “Elections follow paradigm shifts, and I think that as people of faith and religious leaders embrace the environment as a paramount concern, that will naturally be reflected in their voting.”

Robert Schlesinger can be reached by e-mail at schlesinger@globe.com