By Reverend Laurie DeMott

And it does seem like green is the in color for altar hangings these days. Christian Evangelicals who used to spend all of their time worrying about abortion and homosexuality are now calculating the carbon footprints of their sanctuaries. Greek Orthodox nuns have developed organic farming techniques to use in convent gardens that are so successful they have become models for agriculturalists. In 2005, the Oklahoma Conference of the United Methodist Church adopted a resolution encouraging all of the churches in their conference to begin to use renewable energy sources for some portion of their energy needs. And that's just Christians. Last year in northern Michigan, nine faith communities participated in the Earth Keeper Clean Sweep program, collecting used pharmaceuticals from their congregants in order to keep prescription drugs out of the Great Lakes watershed: the participating communities were Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Methodist, Unitarian Universalist, Baha'i, Jewish, and Zen Buddhist. In the last decade, religious groups have begun to add stewardship of the earth to their historic care of the hungry, the oppressed, and the poor.

But the real miraculous change of the last few years in ecological thinking is not that faith is going green. After all, faithful people have given thanks for the beauty of God’s earth for as far back as we have religious writings, and so the recent ecological awakening for people of faith should be more accurately described as a reawakening. Reclaiming our call to responsible environmental stewardship has been surprisingly easy once we decided to do it: we are just returning to our roots.

The real miraculous change of the past decade, then, is not the reawakening of the church but is that secular environmentalists are suddenly courting people of faith. To recognize what a tremendous shift in thinking this is, you have to go back to the late 60s, when a professor of history, Lynn White, Jr., wrote an article in which he blamed the environmental crisis on Judeo-Christian theology. He argued that the belief that God gave human beings dominion over the earth has been responsible for the wanton destruction human society has visited upon our own habitat. This article became a rallying cry for the environmental movement and for decades, environmentalists were suspicious of religion, Christianity in particular. Lately, however, there has been a decided shift in attitude revealed most tellingly in 2006 when the famous biologist E. O. Wilson published a book called The Creation. In this book, Wilson makes an appeal to a fictional Southern Baptist minister arguing that Christian congregations need to hear preaching about the importance of preserving the natural world. Wilson, who admits he is a secular humanist, writes in his book, "Religion and science are the two most powerful forces in the world today.... If religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem would soon be solved."

After decades of scorning religion, secular environmentalists are suddenly courting the faithful. Why the change? Why is a secular thinker like E. O. Wilson suddenly willing to bury the hatchet between science and faith and implore religious people to come on board with him?

If we were cynical, we might say that it is simply a matter of cold calculated math. For example, we have all heard the statistics about the energy saved when we replace incandescent lightbulbs with florescent bulbs: each replaced bulb reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 1000 pounds over the life of that bulb. Well, there are an estimated 225 million Christians in the US. That means if every Christian in our country replaced just one lightbulb, we would reduce carbon emissions by (if I’ve got my decimal places right) 225 billion pounds. And that’s just one lightbulb. I’ve replaced all of the bulbs in my house except for the one in my bedside lamp (because I like to wake up to the warm glow of incandescent light) which means I’ve replaced about 15 bulbs. If all pastors did that and encouraged their congregations to follow suit, we get into math that is beyond my ability to calculate!

And so, some environmentalists, recognizing the power of sheer numbers, are courting the faithful because it is simply numerically stupid not to.

But I believe there is something more than cold calculation going on which has caused environmentalists to look to religion for some help. I believe that the environmental movement has hit the same wall that so many other social movements have discovered throughout history.

Facts will only carry a social movement so far. W.E.B. DuBois, a famous 20th century Black activist and writer, remembers learning that lesson early in his career. In 1896, having received a degree from Harvard University, DuBois accepted a special fellowship to conduct a research project in Philadelphia's seventh ward slums. He plunged eagerly into his research, certain that problems of race in the United States were based on ignorance of social conditions and that a scholarly treatment of the issues and the publication of his research in journals read by the educated white population would cause people to be moved to work for change in race relations. “I believed then,” DuBois later said, “that knowledge could cure racial prejudice.” To his surprise and discouragement, his articles didn’t erase bigotry and he came to realize that prejudice is more a matter of the heart than of the mind. DuBois discovered that we human beings are quite able to ignore the truth of facts when our hearts are already made up.

And so it is that social movements trying to bring change to human society have often begun with a similarly flawed assumption – “All we need to do,” they say, “is get the facts out there and people will change.” And so too environmentalists began by bombarding us with dire and discouraging facts – facts about the number of disappearing species, facts about chemicals leaching into our well water, facts about deforestation and desertification and depletion of resources, facts about holes in the ozone and mining scars on our mountains and disappearing fossil fuel. Those facts woke people up to the problem and launched the environmental movement, sweeping in a host of important laws during the seventies and creating powerful organizations that could give voice to environmental concerns, but the initial gains of those heady early days in the 70s slowed to a trickle and began to stall. There are a host of explanations for why the movement began to lost adherents in the 80s and 90s, but certainly one of the important reasons is that the initial shock caused by learning the “facts” of environmental decay began to wear off. People had heard it all before. They began to tire of the guilt and the tone of apocalyptic fear. There were too many facts to keep in our heads – was it the blue footed booby that was being endangered if we eat bananas or was it that eating bananas causes oil spills in Alaskan bays? The environmentalist movement discovered what DuBois discovered in the early 1900s – facts have a very short shelf life. Facts are distant cold things which that reside in our heads only until something else more important to us crowds them out. While facts might launch a change, facts alone will not bring long-term change because lasting change doesn’t come from the head; it comes from the heart.

And so the environmental movement has come a-knocking at the door of the faithful because that is, after all, what we do. We change hearts for the long haul. In fact, while the environmental movement is less than 40 years old , Christianity has had two thousand years of experience of trying to change hearts, and with two thousand years of experience under our belt, I think we have learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to trying to bring about change.

And so this is what we as Christians have to teach the environmental movement:

We’ve learned that inquisitions may make believers out of people in the short term but they don’t wear well over the long haul.

We have learned that any gains made by violent crusades will be outweighed by the feelings of resentment and dreams of vengeance they create. (Eco-warriors beware.)

We have learned that puritanical codes preaching self-sacrifice and moral purity breed self-righteousness and fingerpointing.

In other words, we have learned that fear and guilt and moral righteousness have about as long a shelf-life as cold hard facts. You might get people to recycle that Coke bottle by scaring them with images of depleted oil reserves or scorning them as profligate environmental sinners, but the minute your back is turned, they will chuck their aluminum Sprite can along the road because they are just too tired and resentful to care anymore.

What we who have 2000 years of trying to change hearts have to teach the environmental movement is that the only thing that works consistently to effect change is the commandment that we received from Jesus – “teach them to love.”

Jesus tried to break down the barriers between people and teach them to love one another because he knew that if we love someone, then we will naturally work for their well being. We will not need to be browbeaten into caring for them because our love for them will drive us into doing whatever we can to make their lives better even if it necessitates a sacrifice on our part.

I do not put chemicals on my garden or lawn not because it violates some environmental ten commandments that I have posted on my refrigerator but because I love the songbirds that brighten the spring mornings with song.

I have replaced the lightbulbs in my house because I love the cold of a western NY winter and the mild summer breezes of a temperate climate and I would frankly miss it if global warming steals it away from me.

I drive a gas-efficient car and live in a small house and heat with wood because if this earth that I so love could ever speak to me, I would want it to say, “Thank you for your gentleness.”

None of these things are sacrifices for me any more than I considered it a dutiful sacrifice to pay for my son’s food and shelter. When you love something, you want to take care of it.

And so the environmental movement has come knocking at the door of the faithful because they hope that we will embrace our ancient roots as stewards of God’s creation and teach people to look upon the land and the animals and the trees and the water and the skies and see it instilled with the beauty of God’s hand – and fall in love with it once again.

The scientists and the secular environmentalists need to keep doing their research and their policy making and agitate for new laws because we will not be able to change every heart in the world – there will always be people who will only recycle because they will get in trouble if they don’t – but the heart of the change for our world will come from those of us who are in the business of changing hearts. We, the people of faith, will teach others to live in love – love of neighbor, love of stranger, and love of the earth. We will teach our children to remember this testimony: “For God saw everything that God had made, and behold, it was very good.”