ON THE RELIGIOUS LEFT, the great hope these days is that the Religious Right is melting down over Global Warming. Liberal evangelical activist Jim Wallis rejoiced about the crack-up in a recent column, claiming that “the Religious Right is losing control” thanks to environmentalist evangelicals. Wallis, head of “Sojourners” and author of God’s Politics: Why the American Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Just Does Not Get It, is predicting a “sea change” among evangelicals since the Religious Right has “now lost control of the environmental issue.”
The reason for Wallis’s optimism is the newly-created Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), endorsed by 86 religious leaders, which declared early this year that “human-induced climate change is real” and which urged legislation limiting carbon dioxide emissions. Those endorsing the ECI were mostly academics from evangelical colleges, with the notable exception of mega-church pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren. The New York Times and other media outlets lavished much attention on ECI’s stance.
