Texas Christians Cite Conflicting Scripture; Staying 'On Mission'
By ANDREW HIGGINS
September 28, 2007; Page A1
WACO, Texas -- 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."
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