For God So Loved the World

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Around Earth Day last year, Sirico fired off a mass mailing to religious leaders around the country charging the NRPE with waging an 'audacious, mind-numbing' campaign to promote theologically unorthodox views. Not only was the NRPE wrong on issues like global warming, the letter intimated, but with all of its 'Mother Earth' talk, certain religious groups within the ecoreligious NRPE coalition were flirting with heresy.

Now, with George W. Bush in at the White House, the conservative religious groups are poised to help steer and spin the new administration’s environmental policies. The market-friendly theology of ICES dovetails nicely with Bush’s belief that private enterprise can take the environmental reins. Sirico and his colleagues provide ammunition—the theological and intellectual underpinnings to counter pro-environment arguments from the religious left.
Looking for verses to quote? Robert Royal, ICES member and president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., can provide them. Consider Genesis 1:28: 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.' Or the passage in the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus asks his followers to consider the birds of the air: 'Are you not of more value than they?' (Matthew 6:26). 'The Bible asserts both a hierarchy with humans at the top among the earthly creatures (though not the heavenly), and the greater value of human beings than other living things,' Royal writes.

Adds ICES member Rabbi Daniel Lapin: 'I don’t care for the pantheistic theme that runs through certain areas of the debate—the tendency to view human beings as scabs on the face of the earth.'

For now, the religious factions are facing off in a generally peaceable manner. But with a host of issues coming front and center in the first year of Bush’s presidency—federal land-use policies in the West, opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, genetically engineered foods, global warming—faith-based environmentalists and their newly empowered right-wing counterparts may be led into a holy war on the battlefields of Capitol Hill.

After a presidential campaign in which secular environmental groups like the Sierra Club were among the leading Bush bashers, leaders of the religious environmental movement are hoping that their message might appeal to Republicans predisposed to deflecting the arguments of secular enviros. 'I think Bush might be more open to what religious groups, as opposed to environmental groups, have to say,' says the Reverend Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). 'It’s important that he see the connection between the environment and his faith.'

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