The Green Revelation

There are some things, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson says, that are OK for Evangelicals to talk about; there are also some things, he continues, his brow aslant and his finger a-waggin’, that are not OK for Evangelicals to talk about.

Ready? Here’s a list.

OK: what Dobson calls “the great moral issues of our time,” i.e., “the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.”

Not OK: ask Richard Cizik.Sun Podcast: A podcast is available for this column. Click here [1] to listen to or to download it.

Cizik is the vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals — and it is a part that fits him perfectly. Amanda Griscom Little, a writer who has interviewed Cizik for Grist Magazine, describes the long-time man of the cloth as “a pro-Bush Bible-brandishing reverend zealously opposed to abortion, gay marriage and embryonic stem-cell research.”

This much you might have expected. But — in a March 1 letter addressed to L. Roy Taylor, the NAE’s Chairman of the Board — Dobson and a host of familiar faces from the Religious Right assert that this very same purveyor of old-time religion is nothing less than a “threat to the unity and integrity of the Association.”

Why — pray tell — is this, you ask? Because, they say, “Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time ...”

Ah.

Yep, Cizik is one of a growing number of Evangelicals who have added the environment to their list of what they consider to be, well, you know — the great moral issues of our time. He and like-minded folks in the conservative Christian community operate under the mantra of “creation care”; it is man’s duty, they argue, to be true to his God-given role as the ever-vigilant steward of the Earth by actively seeking to protect the natural world. Part of that, for them, means doing what it takes to combat climate change.

Of course — nay, unfortunately — not all conservatives (so-called, anyway) agree.

In late June 2001, that most distinguished of Cornell alums, Ann Coulter ’84, appeared as a guest on the Fox News program Hannity & Colmes; sometime during the course of the show, the topic of environmental conservation came up. Coulter had this to say in a back-and-forth with liberal counterpart Peter Fenn:

COULTER: God gave us the earth.

FENN: Oh, OK.

COULTER: We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas.

FENN: Oh, this is a great idea.

COULTER: God said, “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

FENN: Oh, terrific. We’re Americans, so we should consume as much of the earth’s resources —

COULTER: Yes. Yes!

FENN: — as fast as we possibly can.

COULTER: As opposed to living like the Indians.

Whoa. “That,” Cizik would respond, as he did when Griscom Little asked him about a similar viewpoint during their exchange, “is a deeply flawed interpretation. Dominion does not mean domination. It implies responsibility — to cultivate and care for the earth, not to sully it with bad environmental practices.”

For more traditional environmentalists, much of this likely comes as a surprise; the relationship they have shared with Evangelicals, after all, has never been a particularly smooth one. Remarks like Coulter’s — combined with a perceived chilliness on the part of conservative Christians in general towards any cause ostensibly associated with the Left — seem to have led those in the environmental movement to assume the worst long ago. Evangelicalism, they grew to believe, was one -ism that they simply could not hope to reconcile with their own.

And there are, to be sure, some reflections of truth in that.

John Green Ph.D ’83, a political science professor at the University of Akron, explained it this way to the Washington Post in February 2005: “While Evangelicals are open to being good stewards of God’s creation, they believe people should only worship God, not creation. This may sound like splitting hairs. But Evangelicals don’t see it that way. Their stereotype of environmentalists would be Druids who worship trees.”

Needless to say, the stereotype is, for the most part, a false one. Not all environmentalists worship trees — but equally important to remember is that not all Evangelicals worship Ann Coulter. The sooner both sides are able to come to these realizations, the sooner they’ll be able to join hands and pursue their shared goals as allies.

It wouldn’t be the first time Evangelical America has reached out to groups far different from its own to get things done.

“I say,” Cizik told his Grist interviewer two years ago, “if we’ve worked with Free Tibet on religious freedom, the Congressional Black Caucus on slavery, Gloria Steinem and feminists on rape and the gay and lesbian lobby on AIDS, why can’t we work with environmentalists?”

The Southern Baptist in the form of your humble columnist can only cheer on Cizik and his brand of “creation care” — and hope that the greater Evangelical community will follow suit.

So far, Evangelical leaders seem to be leaning in that direction.

Following the release of the letter from Dobson, et al., that implored the NAE to either discipline or dismiss its number two man, the New York Times reported that Leith Anderson, Cizik’s boss and the association’s president, boiled his relationship with his VP down to three words: “I’m behind him.”

Christians and environmentalists of all stripes would do well to position themselves similarly.

Mark Coombs is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mpc39@cornell.edu. If You Can Keep It appears Thursdays.