By Mark Tooley, UMAction Executive Director
Note: UMAction is a committee of Institute for Religion and Democracy, an independent agency working for renewal in mainline denominations.
May 1997 – Religious groups claiming to represent over 100 million Americans recently unveiled a $4 million campaign to wed America’s churches to the environmental movement. Called the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, this wellfunded coalition of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leaders recently staged a Washington news conference after conferring with Vice President Al Gore, whose own green theology helped spawn their movement.
“He (Gore) was very helpful in helping the Partnership get started,” admitted Joan Brown Campbell at the news conference, which included not only her own National Council of Churches, but the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the Evangelical Environmental Network and the Coalition of Environment and Jewish Life.
Mr. Gore has been indispensable in winning Catholics and evangelicals to a cause previously reserved mainly for secularists, New Agers, and theologically flexible mainline Protestants. Arguably, Mr. Gore’s mystical environmentalism has more strongly influenced the policies of Americans churches than it has the policies of the administration for which he works.
In 1991 then Sen. Gore unveiled his enviro-theology at the annual earth mass of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Such services typically include the taped cry of a timber wolf and the aquatic grunts of a humpback whale, amid prayers to Ra (ancient Egypt’s sun god) and other ecologically-friendly deities. In attendance were major mainline church leaders like Ms. Campbell who is secretary general of the National Council of Churches.
As Mr. Gore spoke, an elephant, a camel, a vulture, a swarm of bees, dogs, cats, parakeets, plants and other living creatures patiently awaited their annual blessing from the cathedral dean. “Jesus told us that the Kingdom of God is within,” Mr. Gore said. “And if God is within us, is God not also within other living things? Is God not also in the rest of Creation? We are not separate from the earth. God is not separate from the earth.”
Protestants, Catholics and Jews have traditionally affirmed a transcendent God who is indeed separate from the earth, which He regards as merely His footstool (as the Psalms tell us). But the pseudo-pantheism of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine has not deterred leaders from those faith traditions from eagerly joining the Partnership, whose first meeting was hosted by Mr. Gore in October 1993.
Mr. Gore then predicted the unprecedented ecumenical thrust would “trigger the beginning of grassroots activity in tens of thousands of ‘religious congregations across the country.” James Morton, dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and chair of the Partnership, praised Mr. Gore for his crucial role in creating the Partnership, whose offices are in Morton’s cathedral.
Besides trying to “green” 53,000 religious congregations, the Partnership also established a “consultative relationship” with the Union of Concerned Scientists, regularly seeking advise from reliably left leaning scientists like Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, Nobel laureate Dr. Henry Kendall of MIT, and the late Carl Sagan, who called the new relationship between science and religion “an extraordinary departure.”
The Partnership’s first project was a Black Church Summit on Environmental Justice that Mr. Gore hosted in December 1993. The objective was to fight the supposed “targeting” of poor and minority communities for environmental hazards. Mr. Gore claimed that “certain” communities are deliberately exploited by polluters “because the people who do the dumping conceive of themselves as separate from those upon which they do the dumping.”
Ironically, the environmental regulations that the Partnership advocates would melt away jobs and economic development in the very ethnic communities for whose health it is so solicitous. And while undoubtedly lower income neighborhoods are frequently near industrial sites, the allegation that American industry intentionally pollutes minority communities seems excessively conspiratorial.
United Methodist lobbyist Thom White Wolf Fassett, one of 25 religious leaders from the Partnership who visited with Mr, Gore earlier this month, warned of an insidious “environmental triage,” in which decision makers sacrifice some human beings based on a cold “cost benefit analysis.” But the Partnership’s green spirituality is guided not by coherent theology, science, economics, or even common sense, but by a mystical reverence for the earth’s supposedly divine attributes. It is an emotional reaction that stigmatizes human use of the earth’s resources as spiritual rape.
For these reasons, America’s largest Protestant denomination has no affiliation with the Partnership. “We make it very clear we do not worship creation , we worship the God of creation,” Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission told the New York Times in 1994. The National Association of Evangelicals, despite having attended an early meeting, has also declined to participate. Catholic thinker Father John Sirico of the Acton Institute has pointed out, in response to the Partnership, that the Bible says little about the worship of false deities. “Gaia” the ancient Greek earth goddess, frequently appears in the green crusades literature, including Mr, Gore’s Earth in the Balance.
Still, the Partnership has been enormously successful in channeling its green message through some of America’s largest religious institutions. It claims direct knowledge of 2000 congregations involved in environmental justice work. At its press conference this week, it will announce a legislative “action network” of 25,000 clergy and lay church leaders. Information kits have been sent to 100,000 congregations, or nearly one-third of all churches in America. Ironically, most of the funding for this project comes from the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia, whose founder, the late J. Howard Pew was a conservative Presbyterian and founder of Sun Oil. No doubt the Partnership’s enthusiasts would be aghast at what they would allege was the oil man’s despoliation of the earth’s sacred treasures.
Perhaps the Pew Trusts see their funding for the Partnership as atonement for its benefactor’s perceived sins. But the Partnership also claims among its constituency millions of church members who resemble Mr. Pew in viewpoint, if not in wealth. To gain support from those traditional religionists, the Partnership repeats Gore’s claims that it merely seeks to exercise biblical stewardship and to preserve God’s creation.
But the Partnership, like the vice presidents, speaks of humanity’s “relationships” with the earth. Are not relationships reserved for persons, not inanimate objects? Mr. Gore is a politician, not a theologian, and his confusion is excusable. Protestant, Catholic and Jewish religious leaders who confuse Gaia with the biblical deity are another question. Persons of nearly all faiths believe in good stewardship of the earth. But more importantly, they believe in right relations with their fellow humans, and supremely, in proper relations with God Himself. 
