For God So Loved the World

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Illyn launches his rap: 'What my group is trying to do, we’re Christian environmentalists trying to protect the earth. We’re working to save the last bits of wild nature as part of our earthly stewardship. You play guitar, right?'

'Yeah.'

'So you’re tapping into your faith through your art,' says the preacher. 'Look around you—at those hills, at that river. That’s God’s art.'

'Right, right,' says Peters.

'I have people tell me, ‘It’s all about the human soul; Jesus died just for us,’ ' Illyn continues, anticipating a rebuttal. 'Well, I say, make your heart bigger, dude.' Peters smiles and nods his head. Illyn has found a believer. The two exchange addresses and make tentative plans to go llama hiking at next year’s festival. 'God bless, Peter,' says the guitarist as they part.

At the river Illyn slips off his sneakers and cools his feet. The llama, ornery bastard, refuses to drink and aims a load of poop at the preacher’s shoe. The sun refracts off the water into a bushel of stars that tumble across the mile-wide Columbia, forcing Illyn to squint. 'You know, God created the world and he called it good,' he muses. 'Now we’ve got six different kinds of salmon going extinct right here in this river. You can’t tell me that’s good. You can’t tell me God’s pleased.'

The Greening of American Religion (and Conservatives’ Counterreformation)

Peter Illyn’s crusade is but one sign of the greening of religious communities across the nation. After a long silence, many of America’s 155 million church and synagogue members are hearing a call to action. As Illyn wages his one-man crusade to bring environmental awareness to America’s evangelical youth, national ecofaith leaders are helping to frame the larger debate, swing votes, and broker agreements on national environmental issues.

It’s hard to find a big environmental issue that the 'faith community' hasn’t begun to affect in the past two years. The National Council of Churches, the nation’s largest coalition of Protestant and Orthodox Christian denominations, is in the midst of a campaign to push for national and international action on global warming. In Southern California, a group called Christians Caring for Creation has taken the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to court to protect the endangered Alameda whipsnake and arroyo toad. In Northern California, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the nation’s leading organization of Reform Judaism, teamed up with a local group known as the Redwood Rabbis to bring pressure on corporate raider Charles Hurwitz—a prominent member of Houston’s Jewish community and CEO of Maxxam Corporation, the conglomerate that organized a hostile takeover of the Pacific Lumber Company and initiated a massive clear-cutting operation—to find a way to preserve a portion of the redwood Headwaters Forest. And perhaps most startling, after a three-year study, eight Roman Catholic bishops in the Pacific Northwest have published a pastoral letter addressing the Columbia River’s salmon crisis, an extraordinary document that could become the moral cornerstone for a regional recovery plan.

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