Godly and Green

The battles against abortion and homosexuality are not the only ones that are being waged by the evangelical community anymore.

Outsiders have increasingly treated the evangelical Christian community as a highly predictable, intellectually monolithic bloc. But more than 30 million Americans are evangelical – or doctrinally conservative – Christians; for them to speak with one voice would be nearly impossible. As the forecasts from the majority of the world’s top scientists continue to suggest that the consequences of global climate change could be Biblical in scope, the issue appears to be gaining importance in the minds of a number of the nation’s evangelical Christians.

Chris LaTondresse, a young evangelical and assistant to Jim Wallis, the president and executive director of Sojourners/Call to Renewal, is living proof of the growing differences within the evangelical movement.

“Somewhere along the line in evangelical thought,” LaTondresse said in a telephone interview, “it became a foregone conclusion that if you are a person of faith, a follower of Jesus, then you vote Republican.” Indeed, evangelical support for Republicans has grown exponentially over the past several decades, peaking with more than three-quarters of evangelicals voting for President George W. Bush in 2004.

Opposing abortion remains important to many if not most evangelicals, but it is the preservation of life in general – everything from preserving the environment to the fight against poverty, genocide and disease – that many evangelicals see as their true message.

“The common thread of evangelicals is championing and lifting up a consistent ethic of human life, but recognizing that that does not ultimately mean abortion is the only issue,” LaTondresse said. “If Republicans or Democrats ignore that which drives the movement, misidentify what drives that value set, they’re going to miss a major segment of electorate.”

For an increasingly vocal group of evangelicals, global warming has found a level of primacy. For some, climate change has taken a place directly in the movement’s driver’s seat, preferably at the helm of a hybrid vehicle.

In 2002, Rev. Jim Ball, president of the Evangelical Environmental Network, helped start the “What Would Jesus Drive Campaign?” to inform people of the impact transportation has on health, national security, and global warming.

“The purpose [of the EEN] is to declare the lordship of Christ over all creation and to articulate a Biblical Christ-centered approach to environmental problems, what we call Creation Care, caring for all of God’s creation,” Ball said.

Ball and Wallis were two of the 86 signatories of the “Evangelical Call to Action” in February 2006. The document said humans have an effect on climate change and called for urgent action on the part of the U.S. government, businesses, churches and citizens. Ball sees a clear connection between the issues of global warming and poverty throughout the world.

“All of the things that our relief and development organizations do are going to be made much harder, and many, many people, upwards of two billion, are going to be threatened with water scarcity in this century,” Ball said.

Not all advocates for the poor, however, are calling for such action, demonstrating the varying beliefs within the evangelical community.

E. Calvin Beisner is the national spokesperson for the Cornwall Alliance, a coalition of religious leaders, academics, scientists and others who promote a Biblical view of environmental stewardship in public policy. He also teaches historical theology and social ethics at Knox Theological Seminary in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. He, too, says he is concerned about how global warming might negatively affect those in underdeveloped countries, but not in the same way as EEN.

“Our position is that recent and foreseeable climate change [has] been largely natural in cause, well within the bounds of historical context, certainly not catastrophic, and that human contribution to it is small enough that human attempts to mitigate it in the future are going to have a miniscule effect,” Beisner said.

He thinks that potentially large sums of money devoted to climate change will be wasted, and that those resources should be devoted to aid the impoverished. The Cornwall Alliance focuses on supporting more traditional environmental initiatives such as sewage sanitation, drinking water purification, and instituting more sophisticated farming methods.

The Cornwall Alliance, formerly called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, urged the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), which represents more than 45,000 churches, to keep references of global warming or climate change out of their seminal document “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.” The findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cornwall said, are far from conclusive and have no place in the NAE’s agenda.

The “For the Health of the Nation” document does not reference climate change, but that has not stopped Rev. Richard Cizik, NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs, from becoming a leading spokesperson for combating climate change – a choice that has made him a pariah among some fellow evangelicals.

In March 2007, several evangelical leaders, lead by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, requested the removal or silencing of Cizik from the NAE, but the group’s board refused.

“I think he’s a little bit ahead of the community,” Ball said of Cizik, “As we are, too, but that’s part of being a leader.”

Climate change is a genuine source of dissent among different sects of evangelicals, but whether the issue will have any significant impact on the voting tendencies of evangelicals in 2008 or beyond is not quite as clear. Both sides recognize their common faith, but believe that reason and science are firmly on their side.

Another possibility floated, especially in light of Rev. Jerry Falwell’s death last May and the aging of other leaders like Dobson, is that a decided rift has grown, between the Old and New Guard: those whose primary initiatives are traditional social conservative issues such as abortion and homosexuality, and who are generally climate change skeptics versus those with a broader conception of evangelicalism, as espoused by LaTondresse, who might be more likely to support action on global warming.

LaTondresse said he recently polled Liberty University, founded by Fallwell, and Bethel University, his own alma mater, asking young evangelicals between 18 and 25, “What is the greatest moral challenge facing your generation?”

Bethel’s response was overcoming poverty, while Liberty said abortion and then gay marriage.

“I do think that if you look at the younger generation of evangelicals, they are more interested in these issues than their elders. I don’t think that’s just a product of being their age. There’s going to be some sticking power here,” LaTondresse said.

Still, Beisner noted that the leading evangelical climatologists – Roy Spencer, John Christy, David Legates – are all his age or younger.

A recent poll by the Barna Group, a market research firm that focuses on religion in America, found that environmental issues are still relatively low on the priority totem poll. Only 35 percent of evangelicals said addressing environmental problems was “absolutely necessary” – a full 25 percentage points below the average from all respondents on this question.

“I could wish that some environmental stewardship issues were higher on polls,” Beisner said. “When it comes to actually influencing how they’re [evangelicals] going to vote, I think this is going to be a fairly minor matter.”

Ball said the biggest factor for evangelical voters in elections is simple to understand.

“Most evangelicals are pro-life.”

Despite the greater emphasis on environmental issues among some evangelicals, it may take an unlikely Democratic shift on the abortion issue to shake up evangelical voting habits.

Ball said, “On the issue of the environment, when the Democrats see that we’re embracing this issue, they’re like ‘Isn’t it so great that they’ve seen the light?’ Well, when is the last time you’ve reconsidered a major thing in your ideology?”