By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 28 1999 (IPS)

Major U.S. religious groups, representing congregations of more than 100 million people, have embarked on a 10-year initiative to bring environmental perspectives to the pulpit.

The 16-million-dollar effort is designed “to integrate environmental stewardship into the mission and ministry of every church, synagogue, and temple in our nation,” according to the sponsoring group, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment.

It will also try to make local and national churches a forum for the discussion of environmental issues by other groups in society, particularly, business and labour, according to Paul Gorman, who heads the Partnership.

The announcement coincided with talks on environmental issues held in Washington Thursday among three dozen prominent citizens, including the head of largest US labour confederation and the chief executive officers of bio-tech giant Monsanto Corporation, United Technologies, and Chevron, one of the world’s biggest oil firms.

The major religious groups participating in the campaign include the US Catholic Conference, the Evangelical Environment Network, the Coalition on Environment and Jewish Life, and the National Council of Churches in Christ.

“Care for God’s creation is becoming a key element of faith life in America,” said Roger Cardinal Mahoney, Archbishop of Los Angeles and chair of the US Catholic Bishops’ Domestic Policy Committee.

The initiative, which will be financed by the participating groups themselves, is a benchmark in the gradual evolution from a hands-off attitude toward environmental issues by most organised religious groups here to a much more assertive role in recent years.

Last year, for example, the same Partnership decided to become actively involved in lobbying for the adoption of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This is the international framework agreement for reducing the emission of so-called “greenhouse gases” that scientists say causes global warming and climate change.

In addition, Jewish and Christian leaders joined in a joint collective statement urging Congress to reauthorize the Endangered Species Act, which they compared to Noah’s ark.

In previous moves, churches had been enlisted in campaigns by poor minorities for “environmental justice” – a phrase which refers to their efforts to force polluting industries located in their communities to clean up their operations or move away.

Underlying these efforts are a number of Biblical injunctions to act as good stewards of God’s creation on earth, beginning with the Genesis’ call to “cultivate and care” for it, and including the 24th Psalm which asserts that “The Earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.”

The initiative, according to its sponsors, is “to bring care for God’s creation to the heart of religious life and to play our part in protecting Earth’s sacred environment.”

“The religious community frankly was slow to engage environmental issues,” having been engaged in more in issues of human welfare, Gorman said.

He added, however, that churches now recognise the environment raises “inescapably religious concerns.”

That is particularly true in discussing how the world – and particularly citizens of wealthy western countries who have been the world’s worst polluters for decades – should deal with environmental threats, such as global warming.

Poor countries have argued that wealthy nations should implement sharp reductions in their greenhouse emissions – even though that could mean changes in their affluent life-styles – before developing countries can be expected to limit their own emissions. Pope John Paul II made a similar argument in his message on the ‘Ecological Crisis’ in 1989.

“We are not diverting from our traditional concerns; we are extending them,” said John Carr, secretary for the Social Development in the US Catholic Conference. “Environmental issues generally – and climate change specifically – have a moral core. Who should bear the burdens of environmental neglect?”

Major national initiatives of the campaign will include the distribution of worship and educational materials and action alerts to tens of thousands of congregations and activists; regional training workshops for thousands of local clergy and lay leaders; and the integration of environmental projects into hundreds of church-run welfare agencies.

Curricula will also be developed for use in divinity schools and seminaries across the United States to help prepare “a next generation of religious leaders for whom ‘care for God’s creation’ will be a defining vocation and priority.”

“Environmental decisions cannot be left solely to science, economics and government,” said Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

“Protecting and preserving the natural environment God created for us will require the fundamental transformation of human hearts and habits, the ultimate challenge for religion,” he said.

At the local level, churches will be encouraged to become involved in grassroots projects, particularly involving environmental justice.

One model, a project carried out by the Catholic archdiocese of Baltimore, is aimed at persuading the huge poultry industry of Maryland’s Eastern Shore to curb its pollution of the area’s rivers and the Chesapeake Bay and improve conditions for the mainly migrant workers who are employed there.

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