The environmental movement is getting religion. Armed with the word of God, church faithful are crusading across the country under a banner of holy creation. Millions strong, they are possessed by missionary zeal and the confidence that theirs is a just and righteous cause.

his is not the Christian Coalition in green raiment. And it is not the Sierra Club in yarmulke and hair shirt. America’s new alliance of the religious faithful is propelled by a moral imperative to save what’s left of God’s handiwork. Their collective goal is not a mere policy change but a fundamental transformation within each heart—a conversion to the gospel of sacred stewardship.

Barak Gale was moved to change his life by California redwood groves. An MIT graduate with an impish grin, Gale confirmed his commitment to Jewish activism after participating in a Tisha B’Av, a traditional observance of mourning and fasting, held in a clear-cut beside a three-story deck of redwood logs. The trespass was one of many acts of civil disobedience he has committed since discovering the ancient Jewish tradition of bearing witness. Gale recently closed his San Francisco optometry office to work full time on environmental issues.

Logging also converted the Reverend Owen Owens, an American Baptist minister, into an environmentalist. As a child, he watched the Wisconsin timber industry mow down forests “like miners ripping apart the land.” Years later, the sight of clear-cuts in Colorado reopened the wounds of his youth. “I always thought people had learned better. Some people hadn’t,” says Owens, co-chair of the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation. Since his retirement, he has devoted himself to preserving America’s ancient forests.

Some religious activists find their inspiration in protecting endangered species, some in the challenge to halt global warming. Others find inspiration in the flick of a light powered by “green” energy. All of them believe their strength is in their diversity.

“There is not a single way to accomplish this and no single organization to do it. Our job is to heighten moral awareness,” says Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment.

For policymakers and government officials used to dealing with national environmental organizations and members of their staff, religious environmentalists are a stark contrast in both word and deed. They are unpaid volunteers who believe in miracles. Instead of speaking of natural resources and biodiversity, they use terms like creation’s treasures and Christian cosmology. They quote the Bible and the Torah, not the Organic Act or the National Environmental Policy Act.

Instead of focusing on environmental protections through legislation and lawsuits, they make direct and personal appeals. Gale took his mission to save the Headwaters grove of redwoods, owned by Maxxam Corporation, to the Rabbinic Council of Houston, where Maxxam CEO Charles Hurwitz is a prominent member of a synagogue. Gale and other Jewish environmentalists also shared their anguish over destruction of the forest with Maxxam stockholders. Methodists presented President George W. Bush’s pastor and congregation in Texas with environmental education kits. They plan to make a similar contact with the church the president attends in Washington.

RESPONSE OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS

Until recently, conventional environmental groups have ignored the mission of religion and churches, a misjudgment Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope calls “a profound error.” Today they consider the eco-faith movement a godsend and welcome its members as allies. Religion offers a new line of reasoning to achieve the same goals, says Steve Holmer, executive director of the Washington-based American Lands. “We use science to document fragmentation, biodiversity and water quality. They look to the scriptures.”

Along with their new appreciation for the spiritual dimension, mainstream environmentalists are fully conscious of the perils of treading on holy toes. Eco-faith coalitions represent more than 100 million people—numbers conventional environmental organizations can only dream about. Because they hold a traditional and respected place in society, religious leaders also wield influence beyond the dreams of the most top-down environmental organizations. Leaders of the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and other groups often struggle to articulate what the eco-faith movement represents, but they freely acknowledge its power.

“I see no institution in our civilization that can lead to [our goals] more than the church,” said David Brower, the environmental icon who resurrected the Sierra Club and founded Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute.

Many environmentalists expect green religious leaders to play a key role during the Bush administration. After the Clinton administration, they are girding for a four-year battle with little access to the most powerful players, but eco-faith activists are plotting to take advantage of the religious support Bush enjoys. They will use it to create opportunities not available to other environmentalists.

“We can go where they can’t. Besides, there are a lot more churches than Sierra Club chapters,” says Fred Krueger, coordinator of the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation. He lists members of congress by church affiliation: 150 Catholics, seventy-eight Baptists, sixty-three Methodists, forty-five Presbyterians, thirty- six Episcopalians and thirty-six Jews.

Although they are working for the same protections that concern secular environmentalists—clean water, clean air, wetlands and wildlife habitat—religious activists often use a different process. They capitalize on the personal bonds developed over years among pastors and members of their congregations. When the bishop of Mississippi speaks to Trent Lott, for example, the conversation carries the weight of a relationship that is decades old and laden with community ties.

NO COMMERCIAL LOGGING

Among the most radical positions taken by any church group is a crusade to end commercial logging on public land coordinated by the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation. The coalition of Catholics and Pentecostals, Jews, Methodists and Baptists wants to stop all cutting, including ancient and old-growth forests, and redirect money now spent for logging into restoration and training for displaced forest workers. They have developed action kits, held conferences and sponsored three trips to Washington, D.C., where they lobbied key legislators and government officials.

“We will go anywhere, debate anyone, anytime on the righteousness of the religious perspective on forests,” says Krueger, the coordinator for the Religious Campaign.

An intense wiry man with a graying beard, Krueger, a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, works out of a three-room office above a Sizzling Tandor Indian restaurant in downtown Santa Rosa, California. He intercepts questions midsentence and turns most of his answers into brief sermons, which he ends with a bright, confrontational smile.

The Religious Campaign grew out of a series of 1997 wilderness potluck outings. Krueger advertised the three-day sessions to explore the spiritual lessons of wilderness and then waited to see who would show up and what would happen. A lot did—enough to embolden Krueger to broadcast an on-line invitation to anyone interested in developing a religious strategy for managing forests. More than forty people from twelve states gathered in Redwood National Park on the Northern California coast. The result is a broad-based alliance dedicated to zero commercial logging on public lands.

During their first lobbying trip to Washington, members of the Religious Campaign scored meetings with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck and a host of federal representatives. It was “a graced time,” says Brother Keith Warner, a Franciscan friar. “It was miraculous for the way we were able to get doors opened to us.” The visit reached its symbolic climax when a bald eagle left its handler on the Capitol steps, flew to the lawn and joined the group assembled in prayer.

Like other eco-faith activists, Religious Campaign members cite biblical passages, from Genesis to Revelations, to verify that forests are part of God’s original design, which he intended to flourish and prosper. Anything that diminishes forest health is disrespectful of God, they say.

“We cannot be right with God without also being right with our neighbor and the earth,” Krueger says.

QUANTIFYING SPIRITUAL VALUES

To add to its biblical justifications for ending commercial logging on public lands, the Religious Campaign has placed a value on national forests from a religious perspective. A twelve-page treatise written by the Reverend Peter Moore-Kochlacs uses U.S. Treasury figures to compute a $1.1 billion loss for the national forest logging program in 1996. It then analyzes the intangible costs of federal logging, placing a dollar value on the spiritual worth of preserving forests, their worth to future generations and the value of their undiscovered biological resources. By putting a monetary cost on these intangibles, Moore-Kochlacs concludes that America’s public forests are thirty times more valuable if they’re left uncut than if they’re logged.

Quantifying the spiritual value of forests is territory that conventional environmentalists have not dared tread. It is one of many jolts from the religious community that have shaken environmentalists and policymakers out of their standard judgments and knee-jerk responses. These environmentalists—and they prefer to be called conservationists—represent a different world-view.

“We are not familiar advocates with a familiar message,” says Gorman, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment director.

If it does nothing else, the eco-faith movement is forcing advocates on all sides of the environmental debate to rethink their science-based arguments and find new ways to express them. That disturbs many scientists who fear church activism will dilute their rational analyses and replace them with what some have called “irrational ideology.” Others worry that upsetting the time-honored separation between science and religion will create dangerous divisions.

For politicians who represent the industrial wise-use movement, the emergence of religious environmentalists is a threat serious enough to confront publicly. After Evangelical Christians testified on behalf of the Endangered Species Act in support of its reauthorization, Republican representatives Don Young of Alaska and Richard Pombo of California wrote letters admonishing church members to stick to religion and leave ecology to the experts.

Timber industry officials are also outspoken in their opposition. “What we need from the church is healing,” says Ed Montgomery, a Lutheran and a Georgia-Pacific Corportation forester. “I don’t see the church’s role as one of encouraging environmental activism.”

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Secular science and religion have collided for centuries over issues of morality. What’s happening now is the beginning of a rapprochement, a dialogue over differing perspectives but similar goals, says Walt Grazer, director of the Environmental Justice Program of the U.S. Catholic Conference.

It was a recent nudge from the scientific community that prodded religious leaders out of their political disengagement from environmental issues. In 1991, a group of thirty-two Nobel laureates and other eminent scientists issued a call for help. Scientific data, laws and economic incentives are critical to understanding the web of life, they wrote, but they are not enough to halt the ecosystem destruction spreading across the planet. What’s needed, the scientists said, is an infusion of “a vision of the sacred ... as a universal moral priority.”

Religious leaders responded to this unprecedented appeal by establishing the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, a broad spectrum of faith groups that represent more than 100 million Americans. Launched in 1993, the partnership includes the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life and the Evangelical Environmental Network. It has been endorsed by virtually every major religious denomination except Southern Baptists.

The partnership is designed to weave the care for God’s creation across all organized religion. It’s not designed to be “yet another campaign on yet another issue,” says Gorman.

“If the need is to address fundamental values of civilization, care for creation must be integrated throughout religious life—must come to the heart of what it means to be religious,” he says.

But religious environmentalists are struggling to defend themselves against the dogma of dominion. What some call “the curse of Christianity” was promulgated by Lynn White, a UCLA historian, in a series of widely read essays published around 1970. White blamed the Judeo-Christian tradition for elevating humans and devaluing nature. The source of that tradition is the Old Testament assertion that man has dominion over the earth and “that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man,” White wrote.

Members of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, tied closely to the wise-use movement, have adopted God’s instructions in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it.” They cite it as a scriptural basis for logging, mining and other extraction industries and a mandate to support jobs in resource-dependent communities.

Religious environmentalists say that is a misreading of the scriptures. Dominion means to care for, not to dominate. Care must span the full spectrum of God’s creation, from microrhizomes and unnamed insects to fish, birds and mammals—even human beings. That is the basis for their commitment to retrain loggers, miners and other workers whose jobs are displaced by changes in natural resource policy. Eco-faith leaders consistently pledge their concern for social and economic justice.

Despite their good intentions, many of the programs they promote are long on rhetoric and short on content. The Religious Campaign lobbies for an end to commercial logging on public land, but campaign leaders do not discuss—or seem aware of—the differences between service contracts, stewardship contracts and timber sales. They preach economic justice for loggers who would be put out of work by a ban on commercial timber sales but are vague about how they would retrain them. Krueger is not familiar with existing efforts to link woods workers with restoration jobs.

Even some participants in the Religious Campaign are critical of its neglect of the rural communities most affected by changes in national forest management. Instead of lobbying politicians in Washington, they should be developing ties with workers at the grassroots level, says Warner, the friar who lives at the Saint Francis Retreat in San Juan Bautista, California. “The faith community needs to spend a little less attention on protections and a lot more effort on creating alternative institutions that are community-based and ecologically sustainable,” he says.

HISTORIC PRECEDENCE

Leaders of the eco-faith movement are learning as they go, says Krueger, and they are confident because their involvement in environmental issues follows the model of history. Churches have been involved in every major American movement of social change: abolition, civil rights, the Vietnam War. They have moved causes from the fringe to the mainstream.

Religion’s commitment to the environment will have equal significance, church leaders say. They bring extraordinary hope to the cause. Given the realities of environmental destruction today, it is a faith that can be only divinely inspired. This is less a crusade with tangible goals than a morally driven process.

Despite the optimism that pervades the eco-faith movement, religious leaders make no claims for their ultimate success. They don’t practice politics in four-year cycles but campaign for a lifetime—and beyond. They crusade for individual changes. If they truly love their neighbors, do justice and walk humbly with God, they believe the environment will eventually flourish with the bounty of creation. It may take a miracle, but, they say, miracles happen.