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Ultimately, since God created it all and God is sovereign and God will judge it all in the end, it's only God-type solutions that will work. All the other attempted solutions that various human beings will try will fail.

You're using biblically-based arguments to say we should protect the environment. Should Christians impose that reasoning on the rest of society?

There's nothing wrong with the biblically based argument as long as there's also a compelling state interest for people who don't believe in the Bible. The environment is everybody's concern. Everybody breathes the same air, everybody swims in the same ocean, everybody drinks out of the same water. Right now all we're doing is heightening the awareness among evangelicals that it's okay to be like me. I am a white, heterosexual, conservative Republican evangelical, and I am an environmentalist. And that needs to be okay. But in some circles, they would assume a white, heterosexual, conservative Republican evangelical can't possibly be an environmentalist. That's the switch we want to make.

Are you pro-business and conservative out of pragmatism or out of theological conviction?

I am pro-business and pro-free market because we have 6.4 billion people on the face of the earth, and that is the only way we're going to be able to create enough wealth, provide enough goods and services and meet the needs of enough poor people.

It's a pragmatic approach. We have a responsibility to the poor and needy. There is no way we can give enough cans of peas and give away enough toys at Christmas time to meet everybody's need. We have to stimulate wealth. We know from the 20th century which government policies and economic policies create poverty and which government and economic policies create wealth. And so, all we have to do is apply those.

In my recent discussions with Prime Minister Tony Blair, we had an in-depth discussion about how the West can implement policies in poverty-stricken areas like portions of Africa, so they can start creating wealth. Hong Kong and South Korea and Singapore and Australia and New Zealand and the United States are not wealthy countries because we took wealth from somebody else. We're wealthy countries because we learned how to create wealth. And so, we want that exported all over the world, and I think Christians should be pro-free market and pro-free trade because we have an obligation to help poor people have their needs met.

What are you trying to accomplish at NAE?

We're trying to broaden the umbrella. NAE is the largest evangelical group in America already. We just had a huge group of Hispanic evangelicals join, and right now we're working with a lot of African American evangelicals to join. And so what we're trying to do is increase the representative voice of evangelicalism and demonstrate the unity there is in the body.

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November (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49