Climate of Our Future

Climate Crisis Coalition

Evangelicals and Environmentalists Find Common Ground
By Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post, August 8, 2007
“The emerging rapprochement [between global-warming activists and American evangelicals] is regarded by some as a sign of how dramatically U.S. public sentiment has shifted on global warming in recent years. It also has begun, in modest ways, to transform how the two groups define themselves… Joel C. Hunter (Senior Pastor of Northland Church, in suburban Orlando FL) came to the cause not on his own but rather through a six-year effort by British religious leaders to mobilize their U.S. counterparts on the issue. ‘The United States is absolutely key to the question of climate change,’ said Sir John T. Houghton, a British atmospheric scientist and an evangelical. For nearly a decade, Houghton — who said he has long sought to ‘put my science alongside my faith’ — worked to convince Hunter and other American evangelical leaders that their shared beliefs should compel them to focus on global warming… National Association of Evangelicals lobbyist Richard Cizik quips that ‘When I die, God isn’t going to ask me Did I create the Earth in six days or five days? but ‘What did you do with what I gave you?‘… 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.”