U.S.-ENVIRONMENT: Evangelicals move against Republican Right

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 31 1996 (IPS) - In the wake of recent Republican efforts to roll back U.S. environmental legislation, a group of Christian evangelical leaders has launched a one million-dollar campaign to protect and strengthen the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The group, which announced its campaign here Wednesday, is basing its initiative on what its calls a Biblical injunction for humans to protect the Earth and all of creation.

“People in their arrogance are destroying God’s creation, yet Congress and special interests are trying to sink the Noah’s Ark of our day — the Endangered Species Act,” said Dr. Calvin De Witt, a zoology professor and co-founder of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN).

The 23-year-old act, the keystone of U.S. biodiversity legislation, came under sustained attack by right-wing Republicans in Congress after their election sweep in November 1994. But, to the surprise of many, the attack has been largely repelled by a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have stood up to their party’s leadership.

Among the leaders of the attack on the ESA have been personalities of the so-called religious right — fundamentalist Christians led by televangelist Pat Robertson who have depicted environmental regulation as an infringement by government on the rights of private property holders.

The evangelical leaders are now taking those forces on, according to DeWitt and Ron Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action. They say that the Bible makes clear that humans are to be “stewards of Creation.”

“God calls us to take care,” according to Vic Gordon, an ordained Baptist minister from Kansas. “The God of the Bible cares deeply about every part of his Creation.”

Evangelical Christians, who are estimated to number between 35 million and 50 million in the United States, are united in their belief that the Biblical text is the authoritative word of God.

Despite the general impression that evangelicals make up a substantial part of the religious right in the United States, recent polls have shown sharp divisions between them and leaders like Robertson on issues ranging from welfare to the environment.

Sider, for example, cited recent surveys showing a strong majority of people who identify themselves as evangelicals supporting the ESA and other environmental measures.

This is only to be expected, according to DeWitt, because the Bible, especially Genesis, is filled with references to caring for Creation. He called the story of Noah’s Ark the “first endangered species act” as Noah is ordered by God to preserve all animal life.

“Few legislative issues ought to be as clear for Christians as this one,” he said. “Christian faith teaches respect for the works of God, and the Endangered Species Act offers real and fair protection for all his creation, including us.”

As Republicans have found out this year, that belief — or its secular counterpart — appears to be shared by a majority of U.S. voters. The ESA, which faces renewal this year, has offered strong protection for species of plants and animals and their habitat which are threatened by human development and activity.

The Republicans came to Washington determined to either kill the act or amend it in ways that would ease its restrictions on industry and land use. They proposed laws that would make it far more difficult to list a species as endangered and would permit development to proceed anyway if the costs of regulation were too burdensome. They also called for landowners to be given much more compensation for lands protected by the ESA.

President Bill Clinton, who ran in 1992 on a strong environmental platform, appeared initially to bend in the face of the Republican onslaught.

For example, he declined to veto a moratorium enacted by Congress on new listings for the ESA. He permitted l^ggers to harvest substantial forest areas that had been protected since the late 1980s by the ESA due to the precarious status of the Northwest spotted owl. He also went along with a 25-percent cut in the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget.

By the end of the 1995, however, voter surveys showed that Republicans were losing public support over their attacks on environmental legislation. Heeding the polls, Clinton himself revived his previous enthusiasm for environmental protection during his State of the Union Address a week ago.

Last week, a leading Republican pollster, Linda DiVall, warned that continued efforts to roll back environmental laws could cost the Republicans dearly in this year’s election. “Our party is out of sync with mainstream American opinion,” she wrote in a report to her Congressional clients.

She found that, by a more than 2-1 margin, voters “have more confidence in the Democrats than Republicans as the party they trust most to protect the environment.” Even a majority of Republicans do not trust their party on this issue, she concluded.

The EEN appears eager to make the most of this turnabout. Its leaders are meeting this week with Republican House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has himself expressed recent doubts about Republican environmental strategy.

DeWitt said the campaign is also aimed at raising evangelicals’ interest in the threats biodiversity faces globally. The Republican Congress has sharply cut U.S. aid to poor countries with serious environmental problems.

The EEN, which is part of Sider’s Evangelicals for Social Action group, includes more than 1000 local churches and 27,000 students on 600 university campuses in the Inter-varsity Christian Fellowship. It wants to knit together a national network of as many as 30,000 “Noah Congregations” over the coming months.

While their forces fall far short of the 1.7 million members of Robertson’s Christian Coalition, one EEN leader said their congregations tend to be more “grassroots-oriented” and less hierarchical.