The 60-year -old National Association of Evangelicals represents 45,000 churches in America and has traditionally been reliably conservative when it speaks politically. But the NAE’s longtime Washington representative, Richard Cizik, has pulled the NAE in a new direction with support for greater government regulation aimed at global warming.
Cizik’s burst of environmental activism earned him a full-page photo in Vanity Fair’s special “green issue” in May. He also is interviewed in the Keanu Reeves-narrated documentary, “The Great Warming,” which aims to chronicle the purported victims of climate change.
Some prominent evangelicals are distressed by Cizik’s warm embraceof “creation care.” Focus on the Family’s James Dobson targeted Cizik in a May radio broadcast. “Cizik is convinced that global warming should be the most important social issue that confronts us,” Dobson reported. “In fact, he has stated last week that those who are skeptical of global warming are immoral, that is pretty close to being a quote.”
Dobson complained that Cizik was elevating global warming over defense of marriage, sanctity of life, God in the public square and teen-age sexual abstinence. Dobson worried that anti-emissions regulations that Cizik supports would “paralyze industry and put millions of people out of work.” The “net effect” of proposed international regulation of emissions, targeting the U.S. but omitting much of the world, is “anti-capitalistic and an underlying hatred for America,” Dobson alleged.
A few months before, Dobson had joined Prison Fellowship leader Charles Colson and Southern Baptist spokesman Richard Land in urging Cizik’s NAE not to formally endorse the Evangelical Climate Initiative, an anti-global warming manifesto signed mostly by evangelical academics. The NAE board subsequently voted to abstain from ECI and Cizik withdrew his signature.
But Cizik was not silent in response to Dobson’s May 19 national radio broadcast. His tersely cordial May 22 letter to Dobson appeared for a time on NAE’s Web site. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” Cizik acidly wrote, quoting from Proverbs.
“It’s not my intent to steer evangelicals into a partisan political debate about the environment, or even global warming, but to elevate our concern about both and thereby reclaim territory in the public domain for a biblical version of ‘creation care,’ ” Cizik responded. He denied ever claiming global warming was the “most important issue” facing the country, insisted that reports of his calling global warming skeptics “immoral” were false, and said he did not support the Kyoto Treaty, preferring solutions more based on free market incentives.
Cizik insisted to Dobson that he is only reframing environmental issues, as with other issues, “from a thoroughly Christian worldview, and to propose legislative solutions along those lines.” No doubt, Cizik will steam ahead with his concerns about global warming, to the dissatisfaction of Dobson and other evangelical skeptics.
Apparently chief among those skeptics is the 16.4 million member Southern Baptist Convention, America’s second largest religious body. At its June assembly in Greensboro, N.C., more than 11,000 Southern Baptist “messengers” approved a resolution throwing cold war on evangelical environmentalists.
The Southern Baptists warned against those who have “rejected God the Father in favor of deifying ‘Mother Earth,’ made environmentalism into a neo-pagan religion, and elevated animal and plant life to the place of equal-or greater-value with human life.” They stalwartly resolved to “resist alliances with extreme environmental groups whose positions contradict biblical principles” and “oppose solutions based on questionable science, which bar access to natural resources and unnecessarily restrict economic development, resulting in less economic opportunity for our poorest citizens.”
In their reference to environmentalism as a “wedge” issue among evangelicals, the Southern Baptists perhaps had in mind Religious Left activist Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Call to Renewal. He and other religionists on the left hope Global Warming will disengage at least some evangelicals from their Republican voting habits, based on social issues. “Jim Wallis, of Sojourners, is another who holds to very liberal views on those [social] issues that I talked about and instead [he] feels that this is the one [global warming] that should outrank everything else,” James Dobson warned in his radio broadcast.
Dobson was adamant that evangelicals must not be distracted. “We here atFocus on the Family still believe that we should devote our primary energies to the preservation of marriage, the protection of unborn babies, the support of religious liberty, and to morality and decency in the culture,” he announced.
Undoubtedly, Dobson speaks for more evangelicals than does Jim Wallis or Richard Cizik. But look for future rumblings about global warming among evangelicals, or least among their leaders.
Mark Tooley is the director of The Institution on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C.
