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Warming Draws Evangelicals Into Environmentalist Fold
Strong Push-Back
Pastor Joel Hunter, center, oversees volunteers studying Northland Church trash to assess environmental impact.
(By Phelan M. Ebenhack For The Washington Post)
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The "greening" of Hunter and others still elicits scorn from many evangelicals, including Focus on the Family's James Dobson and Prison Fellowship's Charles W. "Chuck" Colson. They question whether humankind really deserves the blame for Earth's recent warming and argue that their battles against abortion and same-sex marriage should take precedence.
Even some of Hunter's own congregants remain skeptical: Glenda Martinet refers to his sermons when she's urging her kids to stop wasting electricity, but her husband, Gary, notes that NASA scientists have detected warming on Mars. "Obviously they must have a bunch of SUVs running around there we can't spot," he joked as he walked into one of Hunter's Saturday-night services.
But the fledgling alliance has begun to reshape attitudes among some evangelical and environmental leaders. Hunter, who helped gather about 4,000 signatures during the 2006 election for an initiative opposing same-sex marriage, talks of moving beyond "below-the-belt issues" such as homosexuality and abortion. And Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope is reaching out to the 40 percent of Sierra Club members who are religiously observant.
"We don't have a Sierra Club prayer circle -- that's conceivable, but we don't have that yet," Pope said. But he noted: "It's the role of faith in our lives to help us act on something that is inconvenient and is, in some ways, abstract."
And Hunter, who knows that a handful of his congregants have left his church in response to his environmental activism, said that he is comfortable with the shifting direction of his religious mission. In November he turned down the presidency of the Christian Coalition after deciding that the group was not fully committed to fighting climate change and world poverty.
"There's something in me that really admired Gandhi -- these people who did what was right, no matter what it cost," he said.
Staff researcher Eddy Palanzo contributed to this report.
