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For the place where religious reflection about the environment is most needed is among evangelical Protestants in the United States—a bloc whose leaders have been at best indecisive about environmental issues. A column I wrote for Christianity Today in 2005 suggesting that climate change was real, and that prompt action to avert its worst effects was justified, produced more letters than the magazine received for the other five years' worth of columns combined. All but one were strenuously opposed to my position. The Evangelical Climate Initiative, with 86 principal signatories, has been contested by a smaller group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, and intense pressure forced Ted Haggard, then president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a participant in the dialogues that led to the ECI's statement, to withdraw his personal, and the NAE's institutional, support of the document.
Evangelical leaders' concerns about environmental activism, including the current flashpoint of climate change, come down to two basic concerns that have yet to be effectively dispelled. The first is the suspicion that "creation care" is a wedge issue designed to split evangelical voters from their allegiance to the Republican party (a concern not allayed by the roster of blue-state foundations that underwrote the launch of the ECI), or, more broadly, that it represents a left-wing attempt to undermine free enterprise and economic growth. The second concern, which for all the politicization of the evangelical movement is still the more fundamental and gripping one, is that environmentalism is a thinly disguised pantheism that sees the earth as "God's body" and human beings as merely transient—or parasitic—parts of the evolutionary web of life.
Evangelical environmentalists have worked strenuously to counter these two concerns. The ECI statement and other major evangelical documents on creation care have gone out of their way to affirm human enterprise and have avoided taking a position on the Kyoto Protocol or, indeed, any specific piece of legislation—though this has not stopped critics from the Christian Right from trying to tar the eci with the Kyoto brush. The coining of the phrase "creation care" is accompanied by repeated emphasis on the orthodox bona fides of evangelicals who advocate it, especially their affirmation that the Creator is distinct from the Creation, and that there is nothing about caring for the earth that requires us to worship it. Yet the suspicions remain, making progress agonizingly slow on mobilizing key evangelical leaders—even though 66 percent of evangelicals say that they would support paying up to $180 a year in additional taxes to mitigate climate change.
Alas, Gottlieb's survey of "greener faith" could not be more calculated to inflame the suspicions of the politically and theologically conservative. When he turns his attention to Christians, at least, Gottlieb displays a touching confidence that even very radical activists are mainstream representatives of the faith, both politically and theologically.
So the Sisters of Earth, "an informal network of some three hundred Catholic nuns," do not "couch their concerns in leftist rhetoric." Perish the thought! But, "as politically committed environmentalists, they engage in 'disrupting shareholder meetings of corporate polluters, contesting the construction of garbage incinerators, and combating suburban sprawls [sic].'" One wonders what they would be doing if they did couch their concerns in leftist rhetoric.
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