‘Outside’: ‘Religious Greens’

BY DEBRA E. BLUM

If an article in the March issue of the magazine Outside is on target, the Bush administration is about to face a faith-based movement it didn’t bargain for: faith-based environmentalism.

“With the Bush administration threatening to roll back some of the past decade’s environmental advances,” the article says, “local religious greens may once again have to step into the national spotlight.”

At the same time, what the article calls “national eco-faith leaders” — big groups like the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. that are working on such issues as global warming — have already joined the environmental lobby.

“After a long silence,” the article says, “many of America’s 155 million church and synagogue members are hearing a biblical call to action.”

The last call came six years ago when members of Congress, under the leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, vowed to gut the Endangered Species Act. Just as their religious-right counterparts had entered the political fray on behalf of social issues, the article says, faith-based environmentalists mobilized to save protections for endangered species.

Religious environmentalists didn’t single-handedly save the Endangered Species Act, says the article, but “their activism reinvigorated an argument that eco-activists had let fall into disuse: the moral right.”

Faith-based environmentalism does have its flip side, the article notes. Evangelicals and other conservative religious groups have their own brand of eco-theology that is decidedly less green. And they, too, “are prowling the halls of Capitol Hill, looking to convince senators and representatives that theirs is the better interpretation of ‘stewardship,’” the article says.

Secular groups, such as the Sierra Club, are beginning to see merit in joining forces with their religious brethren, the article says. It quotes from a speech given a few years ago by a Sierra Club leader that said that the environmental movement “has made no more profound error than to misunderstand the mission of religion and the churches in preserving the creation.”

That may be even more true under the Bush administration, the article says. With their traditional Democratic allies gone from power, it says, secular environmental organizations may look increasingly to the “religious greens” to help them find friends among the conservatives.