THE FAITHFUL CONSUMER March 06

…connecting faith and the environment

By Sarah Streed

I was brought up in an evangelical church—Excelsior Covenant Church in Minnesota. The members were mostly teachers, probably because that’s with whom my parents felt comfortable. (My father was a high school English teacher for 35 years and my mother went back to work as a nursery school teacher when my youngest brother entered middle school.) Even though I had doubts and unease about the rigidity of Evangelical doctrine, I ended up going to Wheaton College after high school. However, being a student at the “Evangelical Harvard,” as Wheaton was called, only highlighted more clearly my differences with fellow church members. For example, a charismatic church member could say that God told him such-and-such and the whole church would sway to that view, even if it was—to me—a question of personal taste or belief, rather than God speaking. I became increasingly drawn to what I saw as a broader, more tolerant view of God and the world, and during my last years at Wheaton, left the evangelical fold for good.

However, the evangelical world still has a pull on me, and when the recent brouhaha on the environment erupted within the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), I paid close attention. It started with the NAE issuing “An Evangelical Call to Action,” a document basically confronting the Bush Administration with its feeble attempts to combat global warming. (The Bush administration’s opposition has placed the U.S. in the position of being one of four industrialized nations that does not support the Kyoto Protocol.) This was heartening news and I wrote about it in WICEC’s quarterly newsletter, Ethical Energy: “After years of insisting that human activities do not cause global warming, evangelical Christians are finally seeing the light. …” I then quoted UW-Madison Professor Cal DeWitt, known as the nation’s leading evangelical scientist, who I had interviewed for the article: “There is now high confidence in the scientific evidence of human influence on climate as detailed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and endorsed by 18 of the world’s leading Academies of Science.”

I ended with, “The question of where evangelicals are going to side politically on the issue of the environment is crucial as the world’s nations discuss the Kyoto Protocol. If evangelicals, among President Bush’s strongest supporters, pressure the Republican Party, things could change.”

Then an email arrived in my Inbox with a copy of “A Letter to the NAE on the Issue of Global Warming.” The letter said that the NAE shouldn’t take a stance on global warming as Evangelicals were not in consensus on the issue and was signed by a number of prominent evangelicals, including Rev. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and Charles Colson, Nixon’s so-called hatchet man and author of Born Again, an account of his conversion while imprisoned for Watergate. (Colson was also the speaker at my Wheaton College graduation.) Shortly after, the dissent within the Evangelical ranks reached the secular world with coverage in a Newsweek article featuring Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the NAE, and his insistence that Evangelicals do have a responsibility to care for Creation.

Why am I recounting all this? Because I am convinced that people of faith today must—in order to live out that faith—support the Kyoto Protocol and other efforts to combat global warming. The NAE, with its original “Call to Action,” was following the words of the Bible: “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?” and, “ As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” (James 2:14, 26) When Creation is in peril, we must not only mouth words of faith, but actively work to save it. It is time to confront the far Right, who have put themselves at the forefront of the political scene, with their own creed. They claim to love God and abide by His word, yet they do not protect his Creation when instructed to do so from Genesis on. They overwhelmingly voted for President Bush, a man whose deeds do not match his words. President Bush has stated that “[he] pray[s] every day,” yet he has consistently rolled back environmental protections. It is time for the far Right to recognize that deeds need to fulfill words of faith. I believe the majority of Evangelicals are recognizing this as evidenced by the NAE “Call to Action” that asked Congress and the Bush administration to restrict carbon-dioxide emissions.

February’s tip: Join an environmental group and actively work to save God’s Creation: Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, River Alliance, Audubon Society—there are a multitude of choices.

Sarah Streed is a board member of the Wisconsin Interfaith Climate & Energy Campaign (WICEC) and runs Write Stuff Works (www.writestuffworks.com ) a writing business. She lives in Stoughton, Wisconsin with her husband and children. Email smstreed@sbcglobal.net

All rights reserved by Sarah Streed.

Back to Faithful Consumer Page