For God So Loved the World

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Of course, religious environmentalists didn’t single-handedly save the Endangered Species Act (which still awaits formal reauthorization). But their activism reinvigorated an argument that ecoactivists had let fall into disuse: the moral right. Rabbi Daniel Swartz, former associate director of the NRPE, who spent a good part of 1995 and 1996 lobbying Capitol Hill on behalf of protections for endangered species, says the religious community 'could tell a congressman, ‘Look, this is part of the grand scheme of creation, it has value, and we must care for it.’ '

Looking Out for the Devil in Disguise

In the past few years, the forces that came together to thwart the Republican attack on the Endangered Species Act have continued the fight, albeit to less dramatic effect. The U.S. Catholic Conference focuses on issues of environmental justice, such as children’s health and agricultural policy. The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life covers global warming, energy policy, envirionmental health, and biodiversity issues. The EEN puts its energy into helping people see the relationship between having healthy families and a healthy environment. The environmental-policy arm of the National Council of Churches focuses on global warming. Of course, it’s one thing to raise the voice of the nation’s congregations to defend the law that saved the bald eagle; getting the faithful fired up about auto emissions standards has proven to be a tougher sell.

'My text this evening is an apology,' Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope told the audience at the 1997 Symposium on Religion, Science, and the Environment, sponsored by the Greek Orthodox Church in Santa Barbara, California. 'The environmental movement for the past quarter-century has made no more profound error than to misunderstand the mission of religion and the churches in preserving the creation.'

Pope’s extraordinary confession, delivered to a gathering packed with everyone from Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt to Bartholomew I, patriarch of the Orthodox Church, enraged some Sierra Club members, but it didn’t come as a surprise to other environmental leaders. Frustrated by years of fighting piecemeal battles to save this or that watershed, they’d been searching for ways to energize not just laws, but also the public’s deep yet largely passive convictions about the environment. What they discovered was the power of churches and synagogues.

The flourishing God-and-greens coalition may cloak itself in upbeat rhetoric, but few church or environmental leaders labor under the illusion that the reconciliation of nature and religion will happen over the course of a few weekend retreats. 'I know a lot of environmentalists who don’t see anything good in being a Christian,' admits Peter Illyn. 'And I know a lot of Christians who don’t see much good in environmentalism.'

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