ECO-CONSCIOUS EVANGELICALS ON THE RISE

by Jedd Ferris

Every morning Reverend Jim Ball goes out for some “spiritual jogging.” That’s what he calls his daily seven-mile run on the W&OD Trail near his home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. It’s the time he takes to reflect about the right path for his evangelical ministry. Ball’s message is fundamentally Christian, but his gospel has a heavy shade of green.

He believes environmental stewardship is a moral obligation that falls directly in line with the tenets of Christ. His definition for planetary conservation is Creation Care, a term that is gaining credence among evangelicals in America. Followers believe they have a biblical call to reduce pollution and environmental degradation and the harm they cause to people and the rest of creation. They see environmental problems as fundamentally spiritual problems.

In 1990 when Ball was working toward his Ph.D. in the seminary of Drew University, a fellow student was studying about a Christian approach to nature. Ball initially dismissed the idea for some of his broader concerns like poverty and global injustice, but he soon realized creating environmental harm was a parallel offense. In many ways Creation Care is a sensible extension of Jesus Christ’s most basic message: Causing people harm by polluting the air or degrading water quality is a direct disobedience of the central Gospel commandments of “Do to others as you would have them do to you” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

“People need to realize that what we’re doing has consequences that can hurt others,” says Ball. “Jesus teaches us to love our neighbors. I don’t think there are too many people in the United States that wouldn’t agree with the golden rule of doing unto others as we would have done to us.”

In the mid-90s Ball started taking a serious look at global warming, and the foundation of his ministry was developed. His dissertation focused on how evangelicals have responded to the ecological crisis.

“I was always concerned with peacemaking and justice, but I soon discovered that the issues of pollution and environmental degradation have impacts on the welfare of people,” Ball says. “If I am going to be a faithful Christian, I have to be concerned about what we’re doing to the rest of creation. From the Biblical point of view, human beings are part of creation. We are not set apart from it.”

Causing people harm by polluting the air or degrading water quality is a direct disobedience of the

central Gospel commandments of “Do to others as you would have them do to you” and

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Practice What You Preach

As the Executive Director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, Ball has spent the past decade trying to get other evangelicals to see the green light, a mission that is not always easy. The Religious Right has usually ignored or discredited environmental issues, which they see as stereotypically reserved for dirt-worshipping, left-wing hippies. But Ball has created some thought-provoking methods to get tree-huggers and church-goers on the same page.

“Our purpose is to declare the lordship of Christ over all creation and to help our community understand our Biblical approach to Creation Care,” he says.

He instituted Creation Sunday, a celebratory day on a Sunday near Earth Day for churches to emphasize Creation Care services that are being practiced by evangelical congregations across the nation. In 2003 Ball and his wife embarked on a well-publicized cross-country road trip campaign called “What Would Jesus Drive?” Cruising American highways in a Toyota Prius, the couple visited churches across the country, spreading the eco-evangelist message. The excursion was a way to get people thinking about their own footprint.

But driving a hybrid isn’t the only way Ball lives by example. He and his wife choose to dwell in a small townhouse in Vienna. Every light socket that will take it is fitted with a compact fluorescent bulb. He won’t turn the heat past 65 in the winter, instead only using a small space heater to warm up the room that he is in. He only uses natural, non-toxic household cleaners and recycled paper products. Still, he can’t change the world with his own personal practices. He needs a broader platform to extend his message, and in recent years he has finally started to get the help that he needs.

Friends in High Places

As climate change is finally starting to become an issue of national concern, the broader scope of the evangelical movement is taking notice. Sure, Ball has been waving the flag for years, but he’ll be the first to admit his reach is limited.

“We’ve tried to engage as many evangelical leaders as we can, because there’s a level of trust that we need to develop with our community,” he says. “They need to hear it from someone they respect and trust. That’s how we’re broadening our core constituency.”

Last February 86 evangelical leaders signed on to the Evangelical Climate Initiative, including mega-pastor Rick Warren, the high-profile, best-selling author of "The Purpose Driven Life." The initiative has called for federal legislation to reduce harmful emissions, stating, “The basic task for all of the world’s inhabitants is to find ways now to begin to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that are the primary cause of human-induced climate change. Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.”

The campaign has been followed up with television ads and Cooling Creation (www.coolingcreation.org), a simple carbon emissions offset program for evangelicals.

Ball has built a working relationship with the relatively new eco-convert, Reverend Richard Cizik, the main Washington lobbyist for the highly influential National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), whose membership numbers around 30 million within 45,000 churches. Although the organization didn’t sign on to the initiative, Cizik has been very vocal about his support for climate change. In an interview for the documentary "The Great Warming," Cizik says, “This newfound passion for Creation Care comes straight from God and the Holy Spirit who is regenerating people’s hearts to realize the imperative of the scriptures to care for God’s world in new ways.”

Even Pat Robertson recently changed his tune, last year stating on his widely watched 700 Club television show that he is a “convert” on global warming and that he believes “it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the air.”

But there will always be naysayers, and major players in the evangelical movement have been miffed at the movement’s recent eco-awareness. In March James Dobson of Focus on the Family wrote the NAE a letter calling for the resignation of Cizik if he did not stop calling for evangelical action on climate change. In February the late evangelical icon Jerry Falwell gave a sermon at his Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., called “The Myth of Global Warming.” In it he said,” The endless hysteria and alarmism over alleged global warming has increasingly become a national and international nuisance and loses credibility with every passing day. The entire myth has little to do with science and much to do with politics. Its greatest proponents are the United Nations (no friends of America), liberal politicians, radical environmentalists, liberal clergymen, Hollywood, and pseudo-scientists.”

He went on to acknowledge that many evangelical leaders have taken up the cause and he was “raising a flag of opposition to this alarmism about global warming and urging all believers to refuse to be duped by these ‘earthism’ worshippers.”

Playing Politics

An obvious reason many evangelical leaders are refusing to dip their feet in the green pool is the political divisiveness of environmentalism. It’s no secret that evangelicals look for candidates that will attempt to ban same-sex marriage and abolish abortion, and those candidates usually come from the Republican side of the aisle.

But Ball sees no difference between pro-life and pro-earth. To make this point he once held up a sign that read “Stop Mercury Poisoning of the Unborn” at an anti-abortion rally. While he refused to discuss his personal politics, he says that the environment needs to move beyond partisanship.

“I am trying to help Republicans understand that this shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” he says. “When people stop thinking about it in those terms, then we’ll start to see a lot more progress. I don’t understand why the Republicans allow the Democrats to own this issue. As attitudes about sustainability are slowly turning into values in society, that just doesn’t make sense.”

As the next election starts to heat up, Ball believes Creation Care could play a big part with the decisions of swing evangelicals, especially in states where voters have the option of a pro-life democrat. Or Republicans-who rely on evangelicals as 40 percent of the party base-might be forced to change.

“It has been the leadership of the Republican party, sad to say, that has not shown the leadership it should on environmental issue,” said Cizik in the Warming interview. “If the largest single population group in the Republican coalition were to say ‘We want you to take leadership on climate change, on clean air, on pure water, on the stewardship of our natural resources,’ the Republicans running for the White House in 2008 will have to listen.”

While it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact number of evangelicals in America, some estimate their numbers to be between 80 and 100 million. And if there’s anything we’ve learned about evangelicals in recent years, it’s that they get out and vote. If Creation Care continues to become increasingly important, evangelicals just might be the group that saves the world. •

RELIGION AND THE

ENVIRONMENT

Jewish

Jewish environmentalism is deeply rooted in spiritual tradition. The practice of Shabbat, where Jewish people rest on the Sabbath (Saturday) of every week, and Shmitta, where harvest land is rested every seventh year, emphasize the concept of allowing resources time to regenerate. Other Jewish traditions include peah, in which the corner of a field is left unharvested to allow the poor to harvest food for themselves, and bal tashchit, which prohibits “wanton destruction.”

BUDDHIST

The first of the five precepts of Buddhism is “let us not harm, but respect all forms of life.” This concept of ahimsa-or nonviolence-includes not harming the earth, fellow beings, or oneself in word, thought, or action. Buddhists view all life as interconnected, and the concepts of dependent origination and interpenetration assert that there is no separation between self and the world around us. Buddhists teachings traditionally encourage practitioners to live a simple, humble life in which they consume only what they need.

ISLAMIC

Much of the basis for Islamic thought on environmentalism springs from the Qur’anic teaching of tawhid (trust), khalifa (stewardship) and amana (trust). Tawhid implies a unity in everything on earth. Islamic environmentalists believe that since God is in everything, abusing any of God’s creations is wrong. The concepts of khalifa and amana mean that God has trusted his creations to mankind and that stewardship of these creations is an essential part of the religion.

HINDU

Hindu people believe that all material manifestations are shadows of spiritual entities. The Bhagavad Gita instructs Hindus not to try to change Nature, not even to try to improve it. Hindu environmental thought involves attempts to work with nature, not for or against it. The concept of Feng Shui is an example of this. Feng Shui involves the placement of architecture in such a way that works with the flow of nature to provide comfort for the dwellers without disturbing the environment.

-Nick Ianniello