The Stewardship Wars: Evangelicals are the new environmentalists - Columbia University

By Victoria Schlesinger

June 2005

In June 2004 a select group of Christian evangelicals gathered for a three-day retreat on the quiet shores of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland to contemplate and discuss the Bible. As might be expected, revelations occurred and souls were born again. But during this exclusive meeting, it was the environment that may have been saved and evangelical leaders that were converted.

The most significant conversion to take place was that of the Reverend Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). The centrist group represents 30 million evangelicals in the U.S., from all 51 evangelical denominations, and is best known for driving policy in Washington D.C.

Haggard is a blue-eyed, golden-haired pastor whose success mirrors the classic American evangelical story. In his father-in-law’s basement in Colorado Springs, Haggard began preaching to a handful of eager listeners, and, now, 20 years later that congregation nears 11,000. Today, he’s pastor of the New Life Church, the largest church in Colorado, and became president of the NAE some two years ago.

It’s no secret, and not particularly unusual for an evangelical, that Haggard advocates a free capitalist-driven market rather than one bound by regulations protecting the environment. But it is this fact that makes what happened at the Sandy Cove meeting in Maryland so significant.

The purpose of the tranquil bayside retreat was to discuss Creation Care, an evangelical movement that believes the Bible mandates Christians to be responsible stewards of, rather than unwieldy dominators over, God’s creation.

Leading the Creation Care charge is the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), a non-profit best known for its “What would Jesus Drive?” campaign in 2001. More than 400 print media outlets covered the campaign, which questioned the morality of owning a gas-guzzling SUV as proof of global-warming mounts. Following the campaign, the Reverend Jim Ball, executive director of the network then and now, drove his Prius through the Bible Belt preaching the good news about fuel-efficient cars. At the Sandy Cove retreat, for the first time, these progressive-thinking evangelicals had the open ear of their more conservative brothers who run the NAE.

To kickoff the gathering, Calvin DeWitt, an organizer of the retreat and grandfather of Creation Care, laid out the scriptural basis for the movement in a workshop that Haggard moderated. DeWitt said he was taken aback when Haggard began to challenge his lecture rather than facilitate it.

“I’d gone into my presentation about 20 minutes, and he was just absolutely lambasting me,” said DeWitt, who countered Haggard’s skepticism with passages of scripture. Haggard apparently grew increasingly quiet as DeWitt explained the roots of Creation Care, Genesis 1:28. “God blessed them; and God said to them ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”

According to evangelical environmentalists, ‘dominion’ in fact means ‘stewardship’ when read in the light of Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” DeWitt says the Hebrew word for “keep” also means “serve.”

“The serve word turns the tables on Genesis 1:28,” DeWitt explained. “It reflects the kind of dominion that is to be exercised: the dominion of service.”
Later that same afternoon, DeWitt gave a repeat performance of the workshop to a new group, and Haggard again moderated. But DeWitt revised his talking points and began his lecture citing the scripture that had quieted Haggard during the earlier session.

“I presented all those as a basis for Creation Care, and about midway in he said, ‘Cal, tell them about this. Tell them about that. And this one too,’” DeWitt recalled. As the workshop concluded, Haggard gave DeWitt a big hug as the conference members looked on.

“It was a conversion,” DeWitt said.

While Haggard declined to be interviewed for this article, another retreat attendee corroborated DeWitt’s account. But more significant are Haggard’s statements and actions since the conference, which suggest he now considers protecting God’s creation a Christian duty. In February, he told the Washington Post that a person’s stance on environmental issues reflects his or her values. “There are significant and compelling theological reasons why it should be a banner issue for the Christian right.”

This shift in evangelical thinking has long-term environmental and political implications. It pits against each other the two groups most influential in giving George Bush his second presidential term in 2004: the energy industry and the Christian right. Richard Cizik, NAE’s vice president of governmental affairs, put it this way, “You have two parts of the Bush base that are potentially at odds with one another.”

The groups rallied around Bush for separate reasons, a fact that is becoming increasingly apparent in the environmental policy arena. While the energy industry drives the Administration’s economic and foreign policy decisions, and continually lobbies for looser environmental laws, the Christian right has shaped Bush’s social and domestic agenda. As members of the evangelical leadership, such as Haggard and Cizik, a self-described conservative, think seriously about the effects of global warming and pollution on Christians, particularly those living in poverty, Bush’s corporate backers and social base are nearing a collision.

Quiet criticism in Washington circles of evangelical environmentalists for creating a potential fissure in the Republican Party has not stopped Cizik from articulating the conflict in no uncertain terms, “Corporate America is not looking out at all for the concerns of evangelical Christians. They could care less.”

The NAE knows it can’t make corporate America accept Jesus as its savior, but it can pressure them to negotiate so as to keep free-market advocates in power.

***

As the Sandy Cove retreat ended, the changes it inspired began. The attendees wrote a covenant, or a religious promise, to promote environmental awareness and establish an evangelical consensus statement on climate change by June 2005. Of the several dozen attendees, 29 evangelicals signed the covenant. Among them were Ted Haggard; Sir John Houghton, a renowned British physicist; the Reverend Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy and research for the very conservative Southern Baptist Ethics Commission; John Wilson, editor of Christianity Today; and Richard Cizik.

A handful of the signers have taken the covenant seriously and slipped the hot-button issue onto the evangelical agenda. Four months after Sandy Cove, in October, the NAE released a statement titled “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility,” in which evangelicals presented a unified stance on other issues besides the traditional questions of abortion and marriage.

The document attempts to erase the image that evangelicals care only about “the pelvic issues,” and instead are concerned with the gamut of civic matters, including poverty, human rights, nonviolence and the environment. The NAE’s board unanimously supported the document and Cizik said, “What we are doing is setting an agenda for the 21st century on all these levels…which we believe will motivate the largest voting population group in America to its public Christian duty.”

A final brief section of the statement titled “We labor to protect God’s creation” summarized Creation Care and then closed with some specific demands: “We urge government to encourage fuel efficiency, reduce pollution, encourage sustainable use of natural resources, and provide for the proper care of wildlife and their natural habitat.”

The slim Health of the Nation document was only the beginning of the NAE’s plan to define and expand public policy in evangelical terms. On March 10, the organization released its 384-page book Toward an Evangelical Public Policy: Political Strategies for the Health of the Nation, published by Baker Book House. It fully fleshes out what the Health of the Nation document only summarizes.

Some of the evangelical community’s most conservative leaders have given the book their blessing, including the Reverend Jim Dobson, founder of the conservative and much-publicized non-profit Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Vincent Synan, president of Pat Robertson’s Divinity School of Regent University.
While the book will be heavily circulated in Washington DC, it is also intended for a mainstream audience, and will be available in national bookstores and online.

“We’re hoping the book will help educate the evangelical community,” explained Diane Knippers, an NAE board member and co-editor of the book. “Everybody’s got their one little focus, but evangelicals as a whole are interested in these things.”

Convincing conservative evangelical leaders to support the book, and in particular its environmental section, hasn’t been easy, Cizik said, and the reason why strikes at the very nature of what it means to be evangelical. The predecessors of today’s evangelicals were the most stridently independent Christians to come out of the Protestant Reformation, a group that is deeply suspicious and resistant to hierarchy or any effort to institutionalize the teachings of Christ. The result is a decentralized religion with more than 50 denominations, and many thousands of independent churches.

Persuading leaders of the notoriously independent faith to ban together on such a range of matters was unprecedented, but to ask conservative and liberal evangelicals to agree on environmental issues almost brought down the tenuous collaboration. For some ultra-conservative evangelical leaders, simply agreeing to discuss Creation Care in the Health of the Nation document was a concession in the name of unity.

“One of the fears I had was that inclusion of the environmental chapter would be an issue that might compromise the document to some conservatives,” said Cizik, chief among those who has taken the covenant to heart. “But was that going to negate doing it? Absolutely not. We’re committed to what we believe are the Biblical principals. And caring for the environment is one of them, plain as staring us in the face.”

When the NAE decided during its 2001 conference in Dallas Ft. Worth that it wanted an expanded and cohesive public policy, immediately its greatest hurdle was the community’s independence. NAE leaders now describe the evangelicals’ fierce independence as the primary roadblock to furthering their powerful political influence. Cizik calls the evangelicals’ lack of organized leadership and strident opinions the “hamstrings” of the community.
“They contribute to never having a serious public agenda,” Cizik said.
When a group’s founding belief is that “everyone has a right to his own opinion,” and it survives those differing views with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, consensus becomes a precarious new goal.

But over four years of diplomatic conversations, many of the authority-skittish evangelical leaders have gradually come together. According to Cizik, it required showing each leader the long-term benefits of collaboration, namely power in numbers.

The NAE sent copies of Toward an Evangelical Public Policy to 100 “gatekeepers of the faith,” asking for their comments and endorsements, which resulted in round after round of line edits. Each “gatekeeper” requested, or demanded, minute edits. The Reverend Jim Dobson, a family psychologist leading the fight against same-sex marriage, refused to back the book until Cizik removed a sentence critical of evangelicals only interested in single political issues, such as abortion.

“It was just a little nuance in the document that I consented to change. But you see it brings Dobson on board,” Cizik said.

Garnering endorsements from staunch conservatives also entailed a bit of craftiness, such as approaching them first to support the book. The NAE feared that conservatives would reject it on sight if they saw backing from progressive evangelicals, particularly in the case of Creation Care.

***

A long list of reasons addresses why the environment is a taboo topic for evangelicals. Top among them is that very few evangelicals have ever thought about conservation. When most evangelical pastors are asked about their stance on Creation Care, they respond, “I don’t know. I never thought about that. Why don’t you call the Washington office?”

According to Cizik, “You could repeat that answer 10 million times over. ‘No one’s ever thought of it.’”

But counter to Cizik’s view was a study asking evangelicals how many supported stronger environmental regulations, conducted by John Green, director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron, Ohio. The study found that a surprising 52 percent agreed stronger regulations were needed and 48 percent considered the environment an important issue when choosing candidates. Green’s study is titled “The American Religious Landscape and Politics, 2004.”

While some evangelicals may be concerned about pollution and conservation, they don’t do anything about it because they so dislike environmentalists and liberals, two bone-chilling words synonymous with pantheism, notions of Mother Earth, and godlessness.

“A lot of conservative evangelicals think the environmentalists are wackos. The environmentalists think the evangelicals are wacko,” said Ball, speaking on behalf of his organization EEN.

Since the inception of the environmental movement in the 1970s, it has attracted the New Age crowd, some of whom believe nature embodies spiritual and religious qualities. According to Ball, evangelical leaders, then and now, tie this New Age thinking to environmental concerns and discount the lot as unchristian.

But if pagans were a turn-off for evangelicals, scientists have been a deal breaker. Science remains the principal foe of the belief that God created the world, and without this precept the entire belief system of fundamental evangelicals begins to unravel. As a result, many conservative evangelicals dismiss science as part of a liberal agenda.

“No evangelical would want a sense of godless science,” Ball said. “Or at least get to know the scientists to make sure they don’t have their own agenda that doesn’t have anything to do with the science but promoting atheism.”

***

Further complicating the evangelical relationship to conservation and science, are the two wildly different groups of evangelical environmentalists. The EEN progressive crowd and the Acton Institute fundamentalist group have been sparring for years.

The Acton Institute, which refused to be interviewed for this article, also believes the Bible mandates Christians to be good stewards of the earth. But its definition of stewardship pivots around promoting a free market with minimal environmental regulations and dismissing popular environmental concerns.

“Some unfounded or undue concerns include fears of destructive manmade global warming, over-population, and rampant species loss,” reads the group’s Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which it published in 2000. Some of the most conservative evangelicals signed the declaration.

At the other end of the spectrum, the EEN produced a document in 1994 titled “An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation,” which more than 100 evangelicals signed. Its summary of pressing environmental problems stands in stark contrast to the Cornwall document.

“These degradations of creation can be summed up as 1) land degradation; 2) deforestation; 3) species extinction; 4) water degradation; 5) global toxification; 6) the alteration of atmosphere; 7) human and cultural degradation. With continued population growth, these degradations will become more severe.”

Members from both camps signed on to the NAE document, which could be interpreted as either a sign of reconciliation or tenuous ceasefire.
The two groups emerged as long ago as the early 1970s when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson began preaching the value of personal salvation. Their contemporary DeWitt, who spoke at the Sandy Cove conference, was deeply troubled by their navel-gazing message.

“There was no reference at all to Creation, to God as the Creator. Everything was focused on the self and individual salvation,” DeWitt said. “What was emerging was a perspective on the world that was very strongly individualistic and it was in danger of supplanting, I felt, a richer and fuller Christianity and evangelical Christianity.”

To counterbalance the fundamentalist message, DeWitt sought out practicing scientists from every evangelical denomination at 60 of the top Christian colleges and universities. He engaged them in a debate about Genesis 1:15 that was prompted by an article published in 1967 by Science blaming the world’s ecological crisis on the Christian concept of dominion.

The article’s author, Lynne White Jr., who was an evangelical, set in motion a wave of scriptural analysis. Christian scholars from many sects returned to the Bible’s Hebrew to examine the translation in the context of the entire Old Testament. Consensus emerged over the succeeding decades, according to DeWitt, that “A good translation of ‘dominion,’ in context, would be ‘stewardship.’ But if you look at it just in its verse, it means dominion of the harshest kind.”

With a network of evangelical scientists established, DeWitt started teaching a mandate of progressive Christian stewardship to students and professors through the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies, which offers science courses and workshops with a Christian perspective.

“That’s been a 30-year process, and I think it is perhaps the major reason for what we can currently call an evangelical movement on the environment,” DeWitt said.

***

Because of DeWitt, a younger generation of evangelicals more comfortable with science and how it relates to their faith are influencing older centrist evangelicals, such as those running the NAE.

Among the science-savvy evangelicals is the Reverend Jim Ball, who found God at age 13 while growing up in the Bible Belt and in recent years consulted for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a secular non-profit group of renowned scientists and activists working on environmental issues. While attending Drew University in New Jersey in the early 1990s, Ball wrote his dissertation on the evangelical response to the environmental crisis.

“I went to graduate school to ground myself in Christian thought so that I can tackle social action kinds of issues from my beliefs and values,” Ball said. As executive director of EEN since 1994, he has produced the organization’s monthly magazine Creation Care (circ. 8,000) and planned conferences, such as the one at Sandy Cove.

The EEN describes its mission as to "declare the Lordship of Christ over all creation" (Colossus 1:15-20), and to provide the magazine’s readers with “biblically informed and timely articles on topics ranging from how to protect your loved ones against environmental threats to how you can more fully praise the Creator for the wonder of His creation.”

Regarding other contentious issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, Ball said he has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach among EEN members.
“This is not where we want to get involved. We’re already carrying the tremendous weight of controversy associated with ‘Are we involved with a liberal issue?’” Ball said.

But he went as far as to speculate that all EEN members are anti-abortion, and while they probably won’t condone gay marriage, they do support some gay rights, such as visitation in hospitals.

“People don’t want folks disenfranchised in that way, but I think the majority of our people would want a sense of protecting marriage,” Ball said.
John Green’s survey called evangelicals like Ball a “modernist” (although Ball says he prefers the term progressive) and said they tend to vote Democrat or Independent, and are opposed to free trade, but favor anti-abortion laws and a traditional definition of marriage.

***

Progressives like Ball are carefully disseminating their message to the old guard. It was Ball who convinced Cizik, now the NAE’s staunchest environmentalist, to attend a conference on global warming hosted by Oxford University in 2001. It featured a group of top evangelical scientists, including Sir John Houghton, a physics professor at Oxford who has held leadership positions in numerous British environmental agencies. It was at that conference that Cizik experienced his environmental conversion and was persuaded that climate change is a real problem.

“I was convinced of the evidence because the scholars who were presenting it were scholars who shared my faith conviction, which made a difference. And then I had a clear sense that I could do something…I had a change of heart…that’s what a conversion experience is, a change of heart. I not only had a change of heart but I personally sensed the conviction that I can do something to change this,” Cizik said.

Having grown up in a conservative family on an alfalfa hay and cherry orchard farm in Washington State, Cizik said his tie to the environment has always been strong. His rural upbringing met both politics and religion during his senior year in college, and the three have been intertwined since. That year Cizik became an officer in student government and a born again Christian. He said, “One of the first decisions I made as a young Christian was ‘Boy, this should say something about my politics, and should engage me with the public sector.’”

Nine years ago Cizik became the NAE’s vice president of governmental affairs and has since played an integral part in passing six social bills of consequence to evangelicals. As a conservative with a successful political track record, Cizik finds himself in a unique position to speak out with authority on traditionally liberal issues. He and the EEN have decided to zero in on emissions regulations and said unofficially that they support the Climate Stewardship Act sponsored by senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.).

The bill proposes a moderate cap on U.S. fossil fuel emissions and creates a middle road between the Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush Administration criticized as too restrictive, and the president’s alternative plan, which many have called ineffective. The act was first introduced to the U.S. Senate in 2003, but had its roots in the 2000 presidential election when former Vice President Al Gore and Senator Lieberman ran a campaign that placed environmental concerns high on its priority list. During a campaign speech in Wausau, Wis., Lieberman said, “If you believe in God, I think it’s hard not to be an environmentalist, because you see the environment as the work of God.”

The bill’s 2003 version lost in a 43 to 55 vote but has since been revised. Given the increasingly prominent role of religion in environmental policy discussions, a Republican senator and an out-spoken religious Democratic senator may represent a winning combination when they reintroduce the bill in the 109th session. Cizik intimated that he has his eye on the vote of evangelical senators in coal-producing states since the bill previously lost by such a slim margin. He said, “There’s real political power in those eight or nine votes.”

Cizik, Ball and DeWitt have more faith in their ability to sway congressional votes than in reaching the White House with their Creation Care message. Not only have they found it nearly impossible to gain the president’s ear, but Cizik isn’t convinced Bush would be spiritually moved by the Creation Care message.

“Does George Bush have a full-orbed Christian social ethic? Nobody I know says he does. He has a faith, and it’s formative at various levels, but would anyone say that George Bush thinks deeply about any of these theological issues? No. Not even his best friends say so. Or those who know him and love him would say so.”

But Bush may in fact be typical of many American evangelicals who support unregulated industry on the one hand and cherish the wilderness on the other. Few have yet to thoughtfully reconcile the conflicting interests of the two camps.

According to Cizik, many evangelicals mistakenly empathize with Bush’s abhorrence of regulations because they too are businessmen. They do not differentiate, however, between the impact of regulations on small businesses, which comprise the backbone of the evangelical community, verses huge corporations.

“That’s why evangelicals just, in a knee jerk fashion, vote the way they do,” Cizik said. “But once we can get it personal and show somebody’s baby who has been damaged by mercury poisoning in their mother’s milk, then you can convince people they should do something.”

While Cizik has grand visions for his constituency of evangelical voters, he’s the first to recognize the Creation Care movement is in its nascent stages.
“We’re in no position as a fledgling environmental evangelical movement to challenge them [the energy industry]. Not now. Will we? Maybe, at some future point, but that’s in a certain sense up to us and up to God.”

It might seem natural for the budding evangelical conservation movement to seek out alliances with other conservation experts, but true to their independent nature, the evangelicals want nothing to do with the secular environmental community. Not yet anyway.

Ball is the first to say evangelical environmentalists are not ready to partner with secular groups and won’t be for some time. “I want us to have our own voice on climate change and have our own evangelical statement on that, and after we’ve really established our own voice, then we start looking for other types of partnerships with others.”

Some concrete signs exist that evangelicals are willing to collaborate with mainstream environmentalists, but as with scientists, they must be born again Christians. For example, Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation, which boasts four million members, attended the Sandy Cove conference. He too is an evangelical Christian, and as president of the largest non-profit environmental group in the U.S., is in a position to bridge the secular and religion divide in the environmental movement, according to Cizik. However, Schweiger did not sign the Sandy Cove Covenant.

When talking about the future of the evangelical constituency, Cizik’s eyes light up and his speech becomes passionate. “We are, and observant Catholics are, the new, I call it, the center of gravity. Not just for America, but period. They are the center of gravity for America that keeps the paragon of freedom and the rest of the world today.”

But when it comes to the future health of God’s creation, Cizik’s voice holds a note of sad doubt. “You put together that constituency and you have the future of America,” he said. “And the future of America on environmental issues too. It just remains to be seen how it’s going to play out.”