For God So Loved the World

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Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), the nation’s largest interfaith coalition—member groups include mainline and African American Protestants, Jews, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox and evangelical Christians—believes the current ecofaith activism reflects a profound shift in religious belief. 'This isn’t just another issue for us,' he says. 'It goes to the heart of what it means to be a faithful Jew, Christian, or Muslim.'

The influence of faith-based environmentalists has become so great, in fact, that it’s inspired something of a counterreformation—and some preemptive defensiveness on behalf of the new Bush administration.

In 1999, more than two dozen theologians, economists, and environmental experts gathered at a conference center in West Cornwall, Connecticut, to discuss what they saw as the alarming direction of religious environmentalism. The result, the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, attacked many of mainstream environmentalism’s most deeply held assumptions. 'Many people mistakenly view humans as principally consumers and polluters rather than producers and stewards,' the Declaration states. 'Consequently, they ignore our potential, as bearers of God’s image, to add to the earth’s abundance.'

The organizer of the Cornwall gathering was Father Robert Sirico, 49, a Catholic priest and president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Last year, Sirico became the chief spokesman for the newly formed Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship (ICES), a group of conservative Christian and Jewish clergy and scholars. Sirico says ICES is a politically centrist effort, but the ICES roster reads like a who’s who of the religious right: Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Campus Crusade for Christ founder William Bright, conservative radio host Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Watergate felon and Prison Fellowship Ministries founder Charles Colson. What’s more, ICES’s positions tilt unerringly to the right. Global warming? Overblown, says ICES. Population crisis? What population crisis? asks ICES. Rampant species loss? Not our problem. These fashionable causes, the council asserts, sap attention and re-sources from more pressing environmental issues, such as Third World sanitation.

While Sirico repudiates the tendency of right-wing anti-environmentalism to reject the moral necessity of good stewardship, he charges that left-wing groups—'epitomized by the work of some in the leadership of the National Council of Churches'—use environmental rhetoric to forward agendas that have more to do with class warfare and anti-corporatism than with healing the planet. 'Increasingly, sermons are integrating this political worldview, which is hostile to a free economy and human creativity, to the detriment of the natural world, and the sides were clearly drawn by April 2000 and the 30th anniversary human family,' he warns.

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