By Jeff Diamant
Clergy and religious organizations have participated for decades in the environmental movement, contributing sermons on the sanctity of the Earth, sharing papal warnings about climate change, lobbying on behalf of renewable energy, and issuing interfaith declarations about preserving the planet for future generations. These efforts have helped introduce the language of morality and sin into debates that often revolve around science, money and partisan politics.
U.S. religious involvement in modern environmental issues dates back at least half a century. The National Council of Churches urged clergy to preach about the environment in their Sunday services prior to the first Earth Day, which was held in 1970.4 Also in 1970, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) publicly supported conservation, declaring that “those who thoughtlessly destroy a God-ordained balance of nature are guilty of sin against God’s creation.” The following year, the NAE pledged cooperation with “any responsible effort to solve critical environmental problems” and called on members to do the same, “even at the cost of personal discomfort or inconvenience.” And Pope Paul VI spoke of the effect of “human activity” on nature, saying humanity “is suddenly becoming aware that by an ill-considered exploitation of nature he [mankind] risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation.”
Still, many religious leaders and groups sat out the environmental movement during most of the 1970s – a time when the movement’s main priorities tended to be pollution and population control, not climate change.5 In fact, some environmentalists in that period cast religion as responsible for a lack of human concern for the planet. On that first Earth Day in 1970, a handbook prepared for thousands of teach-ins contained an essay from Science magazine arguing that Christianity, especially in its Western forms, was the most human-centric religion in the world and played a major role in ecological problems. The author, UCLA historian Lynn White Jr., wrote that the biblical creation story, in establishing human dominance over other creatures, had conditioned people to undervalue non-humans. “[W]e shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man,” White wrote.
But, since the mid- to late-1980s, religious leaders and organizations increasingly have been involved in the environmental movement, especially activism relating to climate change. What follows is a brief account of the history of this involvement, informed by academic scholarship and news coverage on the topic, as well as nearly two dozen interviews with leaders of religious organizations and experts on the subject.
Popes and patriarchs
Since the 1980s, popes and ecumenical patriarchs have brought the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches into the environmental movement, most prominently through encyclicals warning about the need to protect the Earth. While doing this, they have brought the Bible and morality into discussions of pollution, biodiversity, overpopulation and climate change.
In 1985, St. John Paul II, who served as pope from 1978 to 2005, linked environmentalism to the will of God and the creation story in the Book of Genesis. In a speech in Kenya, he cited numerous environmental threats – including deforestation, pollution, soil erosion and acid rain – and said, “The church’s commitment to the conservation and improvement of our environment is linked to a command of God. In the very first pages of the Bible, we read how God created all things and then entrusted them to the care of human beings who were themselves created in his image.” And in 1990, on World Peace Day, he highlighted the emerging “new ecological awareness.” Faced with “widespread destruction of the environment,” he said, “people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past. … Industrial waste, the burning of fossil fuels, unrestricted deforestation, the use of certain types of herbicides, coolants and propellants: All of these are known to harm the atmosphere and environment.”
The next pope, Benedict XVI, also took up the issue repeatedly during his papacy, which lasted from 2005 to 2013. At World Peace Day in 2010, Benedict expounded on a theme that arises frequently in religious debates over environmentalism – the passage in Genesis in which God gives humanity “dominion” over other creatures. People “misunderstood the meaning of God’s command and exploited creation out of a desire to exercise absolute domination over it,” Benedict said. “But the true meaning of God’s original command, as the Book of Genesis clearly shows, was not a simple conferral of authority, but rather a summons to responsibility.”
Francis, who has been pope since 2013, devoted an encyclical to climate change in 2015. Titled “Laudato Si” (or, in English, “Praised Be,”) and subtitled “On Care For Our Common Home,” it noted “a very solid scientific consensus” that climate change is real and “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.” While predicting that the brunt of climate change would especially hurt the poor, Francis warned that “if present trends continue, this century may well witness extraordinary climate change and an unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences for all of us.”
Environmentalism also has been a stated priority of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In 1989, Demetrius, then the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople (a key leader among Orthodox churches), released an encyclical letter proclaiming Sept. 1 as the day Orthodox Christians should pray for the planet. Lamenting the extent of pollution and the extinction of various species, the patriarch warned that “man cannot infinitely and at his pleasure exploit the natural sources of energy. The price of his arrogance will be his self-destruction, if the present situation continues.” (In 2015, Pope Francis also declared Sept. 1 as an annual World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, citing the ecumenical patriarch as inspiration.)
Demetrius’s successor, Bartholomew, who still holds the position, has become known as “the Green Patriarch” for his environmental efforts. In 1997, he declared that polluting the air and water and causing change to the earth’s climate are “sins.”6 He has urged all people to pray for forgiveness “for our contribution – smaller or greater – to the disfigurement and destruction of creation.” And he has expressed the hope that “various ecological initiatives developed by the Ecumenical Patriarchate would result in the parallel creation of ‘green parishes’ and ‘green priests’ throughout the world.”7 In 2008, Time magazine named him among the world’s most influential people, citing his insistence that “ecological questions are essentially spiritual ones.”8
Religious organizations in the U.S.
In 1990, nearly three dozen Nobel laureates signed a letter urging religious leaders around the world to take environmental issues seriously. One partial outgrowth was the creation of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), founded in the U.S. in 1993. The NRPE helped coordinate efforts to address climate issues by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and three other groups: the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), the National Council of Churches of Christ, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
One of the first things the groups did was send tens of thousands of educational “environmental kits” to congregations around the country. They also dispatched speakers to churches and advised pastors on how to address the issue, which was new to many Christians, said Cassandra Carmichael, executive director of the NRPE. Since then, the groups have continued to lobby politicians about national and regional environmental legislation, raise money for environmental causes, and run their own projects. For example, the EEN raised money in the mid-1990s to preserve the Endangered Species Act, and in 2002 it ran an advertising campaign titled “What would Jesus drive?” urging Americans to buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.
Another organization, Interfaith Power and Light (IPL), was founded in 2000 by the Rev. Canon Sally Bingham, an advocate for environmental issues who became an Episcopal priest hoping to spread awareness of environmentalism in faith circles.9 The group, based in California, quickly spread to other states and expanded to include clergy from other religions including other Christian denominations, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Baha’i. IPL lobbies for local, state and national environmental issues, manages projects to increase awareness of these issues, and sends speakers to congregations to talk about the topic. Among other issues, the group lobbied for landmark California legislation regulating emissions in 2002. Fran Pavley, then a California assemblywoman who authored the legislation, said in an interview that when the law was up for a vote, Bingham. arranged for a pastor to contact a legislator who was wavering. Pavley said the discussion with the pastor led the legislator to cast one of the deciding votes in favor of the law.
During much of this period, there was increasing debate in prominent U.S.-based evangelical periodicals over whether evangelicals should embrace environmental issues, according to a study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Some advocates promoted the idea of discussing environmentalism in religious terms, using phrases such as “creation care” and “environmental stewardship” that would stand out from scientific language commonly used by secular environment groups.10
In 2006, the then-head of the EEN, the Rev. Jim Ball, and the NAE’s chief lobbyist at the time, the Rev. Richard Cizik, helped coordinate the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), an effort to garner support from evangelicals and policymakers on environmental issues. It included a publicity campaign around an open letter signed by 86 evangelical Christian leaders, including such prominent pastors as the Rev. Rick Warren. The statement, titled “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” made four main points. It said that “human-induced climate change is real”; the poor would be most severely affected by it; Christian moral convictions “demand our response to the climate change problem”; and legislators should pass laws requiring reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through “market-based mechanisms such as a cap-and-trade program.” The initiative included full-page ads in The New York Times and Christianity Today.
Over time, many of these efforts have drawn criticism from some conservative Christian observers. The Rev. Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network charged that the “What would Jesus drive?” campaign by the EEN had bordered on blasphemy for “linking Jesus to an anti-SUV campaign.” And among the most prominent critics of environmentalism from a religious perspective were Christian leaders associated with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation (formerly The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance), whose “Declaration of Environmental Stewardship” in 2000 asserted that environmentalists have “exaggerated” risks and favored policies that would impede economic development. Theologically, the Cornwall Alliance argued that the goals of environmentalists contradicted God’s desire in the Book of Genesis that humans should multiply and exercise dominion over the Earth.
In 2006, the group allied with 22 conservative evangelical leaders, including James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Charles (“Chuck”) Colson of Prison Fellowship Ministries, to urge the NAE to avoid endorsing the ECI. In their letter, they pressed the NAE to remain neutral in debates over climate change, arguing that “there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue.”11 In the aftermath, the Rev. Cizik removed his signature from the letter, despite being one of the ECI’s main organizers. (Two years later, Cizik resigned under pressure from the NAE after he publicly supported the ECI, implied he had voted for President Barack Obama and expressed support for civil unions for same-sex couples.12)
Recent actions
In 2010, some 4,200 evangelical leaders from around the world met in South Africa as part of the Lausanne Movement, a network started by the Rev. Billy Graham in the 1970s. They endorsed a document called The Cape Town Commitment, which included, among its global priorities, the need for world leaders to address climate change and poverty simultaneously, on the grounds that climate change “will disproportionately affect those in poorer countries, for it is there that climate extreme will be most severe and where there is little capability to adapt to them.”
Still, several of the religious leaders interviewed for this brief history expressed fatigue or disappointment with the slew of statements, initiatives and declarations by prominent clergy regarding climate change, saying they had learned from the fallout over the ECI that such statements do not indicate widespread support by ordinary people in the pews. More recently, they said, they have focused more directly on trying to change the views of members of individual houses of worship or to use social media to reach religious audiences directly.
In the first decade of the 2000s, “we went after the ‘grasstops’ – the big leaders – without building enough grassroots support to make it as effective as it could have been and should have been,” said the Rev. Mitch Hescox, president and chief executive officer of the Evangelical Environmental Network. “We [adopted] the strategy of going after the top first and hoping it would trickle down. But in the evangelical world, there’s no real hierarchy. Even though there’s an NAE, there’s still local church control, and we didn’t have enough local pastors and church people to really be engaged with the issue,” he said.
Several of those interviewed said that their groups’ grassroots efforts have gone on for decades and have succeeded in adding a religious component to how many people think about environmental issues. Cassandra Carmichael of the NRPE said that when her organization started sending speakers to houses of worship in the 1990s, “people in the pews were asking questions like, ‘… Why are you talking about the environment and faith together?’” That has changed, she said. “I don’t get that anymore. I think the concept of environmental stewardship is much more grounded in congregants’ minds now than it was [back] then.”
Joelle Novey, director of an affiliate of Interfaith Power & Light that covers the District of Columbia, Maryland and Northern Virginia, said her team of four staffers is “in grassroots relationships with congregations all over this region. … I’ve spoken almost every weekend for years and years now.” She says that while those who invite IPL to houses of worship generally are already sympathetic to the group’s agenda, the congregations as a whole tend to be more politically mixed, and that many congregants have never before encountered someone with her message in a church.
“Too many people have come to see belief in climate science as a political team issue,” Novey said. “But what’s so beautiful about this is, the time slot I speak on a Sunday is the same slot where the previous Sunday they talked about feeding the hungry or the next week about caring for elders. So I can frame climate as a moral issue.”
Interacting with government officials about environmental policies and rules remains a high priority for these groups. For example, the IPL affiliate of D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia has joined with other environmental groups to inform the D.C. Council about gas leaks measured across the city, hoping the Council will switch the city’s energy source from natural gas to renewable electricity, Novey said. And the NRPE has worked with Black clergy to solicit more than 5,000 public comments about the impact of heavy-duty trucks in communities, Carmichael said. “If we can clean up and make those trucks all electric so they’re not polluting, then the community that benefits the most from that cleanup is the Black community,” she said. “It showcases that there is considerable interest and passion in speaking out from a place of faith regarding environmental concerns.”
The Jewish group “Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action,” which formed in 2020, lobbied Jewish members of Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, urging them to include money that would address climate change ($369 billion wound up being included in the bill). The group’s talking points made it into the Congressional Record courtesy of Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is Jewish. Citing a representative of Dayenu, Cardin noted that the Senate’s consideration of the Inflation Reduction Act began on Tisha B’Av, a Jewish day of collective mourning, but that “this day of despair is also the day that new hope and the potential of a rebuilt, reimagined, redeemed world is born. These investments in clean energy and transportation can help us emerge from climate-fueled disasters to a more hopeful, clean energy future for generations to come.”
Other Jewish groups also have worked over the years to spread environmental awareness among Jews, including “Shomrei Adamah” (Keepers of the Earth), which closed in 1996, and “Hazon: The Jewish Lab for Sustainability.” Among Muslims, the Islamic Society of North America in 2014 formed a “Green Masjid Task Group” – now the ISNA Green Initiative – to raise awareness about environmental issues and to encourage environmentally friendly practices at mosques and Islamic schools. In addition, the group “Green the Church” focuses similar efforts at predominantly Black churches, and the Unitarian Universalist Association accredits Unitarian Universalist congregations as “Green Sanctuaries” if they qualify.
Actions also continue at the global level. In October 2021, prior to the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Scotland, an interfaith group of 40 religious leaders including Pope Francis, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist leaders called for wealthy nations to reduce their carbon emissions and help poorer countries do the same. “Future generations will never forgive us if we miss the opportunity to protect our common home,” the statement read. “We have inherited a garden, we must not leave a desert to our children.” The Dalai Lama, who co-authored a book on the subject, contributed his own message to COP26: “Global warming is an urgent reality. None of us is able to change the past. But we are all in a position to contribute to a better future.”
Elsewhere around the world, GreenFaith, an interfaith organization founded in 1992, has organized protests to raise awareness on issues including rising sea levels and environmental damage from the use of fossil fuels. And Muslim leaders, scholars and teachers from 20 countries issued the “Islamic Declaration on Climate Change” in 2015, calling for “well-off nations and oil-producing states” to lead efforts to phase out greenhouse gas emissions.
It can be hard to measure the impact on lay people of all these religion-related calls to action, declarations, books and encyclicals. Stephen Ellingson, author of a book on religious environmentalist groups, said he suspects that “the only people who read the official statements of the religious denominations are people who go to annual meetings, staffers, and someone who has an ax to grind. If you asked a rank-and-file Methodist or Presbyterian what’s the official position on the environment for your denominations, they’d probably say, ‘I don’t know.’”
Still, Joelle Novey contends that the grassroots efforts of these organizations have made a difference. “The framing of climate change as a moral issue has won the day,” she said, citing language used by Cardin, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “… And for millions of other folks who attend houses of worship in the U.S. today, messages around ‘Creation care’ and ‘bal tashchit’ [not wasting], or the equivalent, have become mainstream core messages of their faith communities,” Novey said. “I don’t think that would’ve been true when those people’s parents were going to church.”
