Suzii Paynter, director of the public policy arm of Texas's biggest group of
Baptist churches, traveled to central Texas early this year to talk to a local
preacher about a pressing "moral, biblical and theological" issue. She wanted to
discuss coal.
Christians have a biblical mandate to be "good stewards of God's creation," Ms.
Paynter says she told the Rev. Frank Brown, pastor of the Bellmead First Baptist
Church here in the county where President Bush has his ranch. So, Texas Baptists
should demand that controversial plans to build a slew of coal-fired power
plants be put on hold.
Mr. Brown was not impressed. God, the pastor said, is "sovereign over his
creation" and no amount of coal-burning will alter by a "millisecond" his divine
plan for the world. Fighting environmental damage is "like chasing rabbits," he
recalls telling her. It just distracts from core Christian duties to spread the
faith and protect the unborn.
Ms. Paynter and Mr. Brown, devout Baptists both, stand at opposite ends of a
debate over the environment that has been roiling America's potent but often
fractious community of evangelicals. Christians have been arguing about coal in
Texas, oil drilling in Alaska and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. The most
charged issue of all is climate change, a focus of world attention this week
with conferences at the United Nations and in Washington, D.C. America's
Christians are divided on basic questions: How serious is it, what causes it,
and what should mankind do about it?
All sides cite the Bible. Ms. Paynter points to a New Testament passage that
says the good shepherd does not exploit his sheep and to a psalm that declares
"the earth is the Lord's and all its fullness." Mr. Brown quotes an Old
Testament verse promising that "while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease."
Behind the theological disputation, however, is a struggle grounded in the here
and now. Who speaks for American evangelicals, and on what issues? Evangelicals
in the U.S. share a cluster of core principles: belief in the authority of the
Bible, a determination to spread the faith and a commitment to salvation through
Jesus. But defining the group beyond that is difficult. They also have a long
history of quarrels over their agenda and tension over leadership, particularly
since the rise in the 1970s of the formidable political force known as the
"religious right."
The dispute over the environment has gained urgency in the run-up to next year's
presidential election. Liberal Christians have long championed green issues.
Some of their more conservative brethren, particularly in Washington, then
joined them in that cause. Now, as anxiety over the environment seeps into the
evangelical heartland of the South, pastors and ordinary believers are also
wrestling with what was long scorned as a left-wing fetish. A look at how the
struggle is playing out in Texas shows the different forces at work -- and
suggests its outcome is unlikely to be resolved soon.
"Global warming is a proxy battle," says the Rev. Jim Ball, a graduate of Baylor
University, a Baptist college in Waco, and now head of the Evangelical
Environmental Network, a group set up in 1994. The combatants are "those moving
forward on a broader agenda, and those who want to keep evangelicals focused on
just three things -- abortion, judges and gay marriage."
The split is also a struggle between generations, says the Rev. Benjamin Cole, a
31-year-old Baptist preacher from Texas. A blogger on Southern Baptist affairs,
Mr. Cole says some younger evangelicals are tiring of lock-step loyalty to the
Republican Party. "We wake up each morning and see an elephant on the pillow
next to us," he says.
But many veteran leaders of the religious right regard the green movement as a
dangerous distraction. Shortly before his death in May, Virginia Baptist
preacher the Rev. Jerry Falwell denounced the clamor over global warming as
"Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus."
Evangelical Christians have been the Republican Party's most-loyal constituency
in recent years. In 2004, 78% of white evangelicals voted for George W. Bush,
according to exit polls. Democrats are working hard to dent this alliance.
Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a churchgoing Roman Catholic,
frequently refers to scripture to support her calls for action against global
warming.
"They've really got traction going when it comes to planting trees and reducing
greenhouse gases," says Paul Weyrich, an early pioneer of Republican outreach to
conservative Christians who heads the Free Congress Foundation, a Washington
think tank.
An episode this spring brought national attention to the brewing dispute. Mr.
Weyrich joined two dozen other conservative Christian leaders in warning that
global warming "is dividing and demoralizing" evangelicals. In a letter to the
National Association of Evangelicals, they denounced the umbrella group's
Washington-based vice president for governmental affairs, Richard Cizik, an
outspoken champion of action against global warming. They demanded that he shut
up or resign.
The NAE's board backed Mr. Cizik, who has continued to speak out. Combating
climate change, says Mr. Cizik, is no longer just for "latte-sipping,
endive-eating elitists from Harvard" but a core issue for all Christians.
How many evangelicals share this view is hard to assess. Each side has its own
poll results. A summer survey commissioned by the Evangelical Climate
Initiative, group of prominent Christians alarmed by rising temperatures, found
that 70% think climate change will pose a "serious threat" to future generations
and 64% want immediate action to curb it. The unpublished survey, due to be
released next month, was carried out by Ellison Research, a private company. A
separate poll carried out around the same time by Barna Group, a conservative
Christian research outfit, used a narrower definition of evangelicals and found
that only 33% consider global warming a "major problem."
Splits among Baptists in the South are particularly pronounced. Former Vice
President Al Gore, a churchgoing Baptist from Tennessee, has become the nation's
best-known campaigner against global warming. But the Southern Baptist
Convention, which claims more than 16 million members, stands with skeptics. "We
don't believe in global warming," said a veteran preacher at the convention's
annual meeting this June in San Antonio, Texas. The meeting passed a resolution
that dismissed as "very dangerous" proposals to regulate carbon-dioxide
emissions and asserted that scientists disagree on the cause of rising
temperatures.
Earlier this year, an international panel of hundreds of scientists concluded
that human activity is "very likely" the main driver of global warming.
David Gushee, a Southern Baptist professor of Christian ethics, denounced the
San Antonio resolution as akin to the organization's previous refusal to combat
racism. Mr. Gushee, who helped draft a Southern Baptist Convention apology for
past racism in 1995, says, "I don't want to be writing another resolution of
regret in 50 years time" about the environment.
American evangelicals are a vast community with sometimes widely divergent
views. They are generally thought to number upwards of 100 million people but
estimates vary widely depending on how they are defined. In the 19th century,
evangelicals split on the issue of slavery. The civil-rights movement in the
1960s caused further splintering, as did a host of theological and personal
squabbles. The 1960s also saw wrangling over the environment.
In speeches at Wheaton College in 1968, Francis Schaeffer, a hugely influential
evangelical intellectual who died in 1984, criticized fellow Christians for
neglecting "God's creation." Though a conservative, he hailed "hippies" for
their attacks on "the poverty of modern man's concept of nature." His remarks
were collected in a 1970 book, "Pollution and the Death of Man."
But Mr. Schaeffer's call to arms over the environment was soon drowned out by
another cause he championed: the war on abortion. He became a fiery leader of
pro-life Christians following the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing the
procedure.
"Suddenly, abortion was a litmus test for everything," recalls Mr. Schaeffer's
son, Frank, who followed in his father's footsteps but has now broken with
conservative evangelicals. Frank Schaeffer, who has just written a memoir called
"Crazy for God," says the late Mr. Falwell and others "deformed and distorted"
his father's legacy. He is rooting for those who want to widen the evangelical
agenda to include action on global warming.
Francis Schaeffer's role as both a pioneer of the pro-life movement and an early
environmentalist underscores the varied strands of the conservative evangelical
movement. Those strands are on full display in Texas.
One fan of the late Mr. Schaeffer is the Rev. Jack Graham, chief pastor of
Prestonwood Baptist Church, a stadiumlike house of worship in Plano, Texas, that
seats 7,000 faithful. Mr. Graham, a former president of the Southern Baptist
Convention, is a big supporter of President Bush, but says he is happy to
challenge stereotypes about evangelicals. "We don't believe the Earth is flat,"
he says.
Yet his skepticism about science runs deep. Prestonwood's bookshop stocks a host
of books seeking to debunk the theory of evolution, and its parking lot is
packed each Sunday with gas-guzzling sports-utility vehicles. "I have a lot more
people asking, 'How can I get through the week?' than about the future of the
planet," says Mr. Graham. Christians, he says, have to be careful not to
"worship creation instead of the Creator."
Nonetheless, he says, they must not abuse nature, either. Mr. Graham is agnostic
on the main cause of global warming but thinks science is "tilting towards human
activity as contributing to the state of the world."
Prestonwood last year began a drive to save energy and, in December, was named
America's "best green church" at a Dallas conference of church builders,
suppliers and managers. It recently installed a computerized system to control
its outdoor sprinklers and cut down on wasteful watering of its 140-acre
grounds. The church has throttled back on air conditioning, started switching to
environmentally friendly fluorescent light bulbs and taken lights out of many
vending machines. A full-time "energy manager" prowls the premises after hours,
leaving admonishing notes for staff who neglect to turn off lights and
computers.
One big motive for all this is money. Prestonwood, which has its own school, TV
station, five basketball courts and eight sports fields, has cut its utility
bills by $1.1 million since summer last year, when it hired Dallas-based Energy
Education Inc. to advise it on how to save energy. But, says Mr. Graham, another
reason is the Bible. "Biblical Christianity," he says, quoting Francis
Schaeffer, "has a real answer to the ecological crisis."
Other Texas Christians are also trying to conserve energy, including Ms.
Paynter, who heads the Christian Life Commission, the public-policy branch of
the Baptist General Convention of Texas, a group that Mr. Graham views as
insufficiently conservative. Ms. Paynter's Baptist church in Austin, pastored by
her husband, teaches "creation care" at summer Bible camp, gets a portion of its
power from a renewable-energy grid and has set up recycling bins.
But unlike Mr. Graham, Ms. Paynter is in no doubt about man's role in global
warming and considers air quality and other environmental issues as matters of
urgent concern. She says her interest was sparked when, at an event for
children, she noticed that about 10 of 35 kids present had asthma inhalers.
In poorer, more rural parts of Texas, however, green issues still struggle for a
hearing from believers infused with "end times" theology, the conviction that
the world will inevitably come to a cataclysmic end and that nothing can or
should be done to delay this.
After his discussion with Mrs. Paynter, Mr. Brown, the Baptist preacher in
Bellmead near Waco, wrote a lengthy blog entry denouncing environmentalism as a
red herring. "Our concern is not to spend hours and hours on how to keep the
globe from warming; that is the enemy of hope," he wrote. "Our command is
that...we storm the gates of Hell and keep the enemy on the run by the grace of
GOD!"
When Ms. Paynter urged Baptists to join the coal power-station debate, she got
angry phone calls and messages from outraged preachers and ordinary Baptists. "I
do hope our tithes and offerings are not supporting this type of activity," read
one email. "Let's stay on mission and keep proclaiming the gospel of our Lord
Jesus Christ."
But other Baptists cheered. Mary Darden, a deacon of a big Baptist church next
to Waco's Baylor University, organized a group called "Keep Waco Green." Though
a firm Democrat, she rallied both liberals and conservatives in opposition to
plans by TXU Corp. and another utility to create what environmentalists called a
"ring of fire" around Waco with plans to build four coal-fired power plants in
the region.
The Waco region's Baptist association helped out by informing members about a
public meeting to protest the plants.
In March, opponents of the plants declared victory after investors announced a
buyout of TXU and promised to scale back on their expansion plans. Ms. Darden
organized a celebratory dinner and dance. The "Coal Plant Victory Bash" was
attended by secular environmentalists, a conservative state legislator and
Christians of all political stripes. Among them was John Wessler, a conservative
Christian and a "Keep Waco Green" activist. "God created a balance and we were
about to go way out of balance in Waco," he says.
Mr. Wessler, a health-care adviser, says he got involved out of fear that the
plants might spew toxins such as mercury and hurt the health of his family. His
daughter has asthma. Now he says he's paying more attention to global warming,
too, and thinks it "logical" that man is to blame. He's thought about buying a
Toyota Prius hybrid car to replace an old Mercedes. But, he says, "I'm not there
yet."