"The Earth is not a hotel. It's our home."That's the message one of the world's leading Christian theologians sent to B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell and 125 members of diverse religions at a recent Vancouver gathering.
It was the latest effort by Canadian-American theologian Sallie McFague, author of A New Climate for Theology: God, the World and Global Warming, to counter centuries in which Christian leaders taught that humans should exploit the Earth for their own ends.
McFague was speaking at a conference organized by Langara College and the Multi-Faith Action Society, at which the B.C. premier spoke about joining Western provinces and states to reduce the carbon emissions that cause global warming.
For McFague, formerly of Vanderbilt University's divinity school and now of the Vancouver School of Theology, her talk was just the latest in a decades-long campaign by ecologically tuned-in religious thinkers to convince individuals, governments and businesses to cease devastating the planet.
Anglicans, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Pentecostals, Sikhs, aboriginal spiritual leaders and others at the Vancouver interfaith conference talked about how they were conducting "energy audits" on their sanctuaries, installing solar panels, providing more bike racks, double-glazing stained-glass windows, adding insulation and encouraging transit use to worship.
"We didn't want to continue the litany of doom. We wanted to outline things that have been done and can be done" to help spiritual communities show it's possible and necessary to make more environmentally sustainable choices, said organizer Robert Worcester, a Langara College psychology instructor and Anglican.
Vancouver's "Faith and the Environment" conference occurred the same week the 700,000-member United Church of Canada, the country's largest Protestant denomination, released a how-to guide on ways congregations could waste less energy; including by using LED lights, weather-stripping, reducing the use of lawn mowers, pesticides and exchanging old stoves and refrigerators for more efficient ones.
Inspired by Seattle's Earth Ministry, which mobilizes the city's congregations to act on environmental issues, Worcester said, the Multi-Faith Action Society thought it would be remarkably helpful if Metro Vancouver's roughly 2,000 religious congregations reduced their ecological footprint, including with government encouragement.
The B.C. premier, like many religious leaders, appears to have become a recent convert to the environmental cause, says David Hallman, a Canadian who headed the 550-million-member World Council of Churches' climate-change commission for 16 years, beginning in 1991.
However, Hallman says the late Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and most U.S. evangelical leaders have lagged far behind notable Christian and other religious ecological thinkers, some of whom have been raising environmental alarms since the 1970s.
Some of these far-sighted religious thinkers began urging repentance in response to a devastating 1967 essay by Lynn White published in Science Magazine, titled "The Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis."
In his famous essay, White, of Stanford University, said early Jewish-Christian leaders colluded with the Industrial Revolution and capitalism to "morally sanction" environmental destruction.
Many senior Christian and Jewish clergy, White argued, based their anti-nature worldview on a dubious reading of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, in which God is said to give humans "dominion" over nature.
In response to White's critique, pioneering Protestant theologians such as John Cobb, Jurgen Moltmann, Canada's Douglas John Hall and McFague began emphasizing that the Bible also teaches that humans are intimately interconnected with nature and need to be responsible stewards, or gardeners, of the Earth.
"These eco-theologians were beginning a revolution in religion," said Hallman.
But, in the early years, they were mostly voices crying in the wilderness.
Throughout most of the 1980s and '90s, most major Christian denominations and leaders resisted, or even denounced, eco-theology.
"There was real skepticism and theological antagonism. Many church leaders wondered what ecology had to do with the church. They thought the focus of piety should not be on this world, but on preparation for the next world," Hallman said.
Most of the opposition to the environmental movement came from major U.S. evangelical leaders, while the Vatican was non-committal or critical.
The Catholic hierarchy in Rome rebuffed Catholic then-radical eco-theologians such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, Matthew Fox and Leonardo Boff, who went on to become icons of the environmental movement.
However, even while Hallman says the Vatican was resisting efforts by Protestant and Orthodox leaders to support the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, out-of-the-limelight Catholic leaders were quietly doing what they could.
In 1997, for instance, Catholic bishops from Cascadia, which includes B.C., Washington, Idaho and Oregon, began an educational program to protect the Columbia River and its watershed from pollution, overfishing and dams.
One major religious figure who has long showed dedication to the environment has been Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who since 1991 has been the spiritual leader of the world's 300-million Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Based in Istanbul, Bartholomew has been tagged "the Green Pope" or "the Green Patriarch." Bartholomew has particularly emphasized cleaning up the Black Sea and Danube River, in regions inhabited by many Eastern Orthodox.
Another major religious leader who has taken strong stances on the environment is Welsh theologian Rowan Williams, who in 2003 became the Archbishop of Canterbury, making him titular head of the world's 700 million Anglicans.
Hallman, a prominent Canadian eco-theologian in his own right, said he's proud the denomination for which he has long worked on climate change, the United Church of Canada, formally changed its official creed in 1995, asking adherents to commit "to live with respect in Creation."
It has only been in the past few years, Hallman says, that the Vatican and senior North American evangelicals, such as Rick Cizik, have stood up for the planet -- including by challenging President George W. Bush's controversial ties with the oil industry -- leading to a clash between green evangelicals and the religious right.
In North America, Vancouver has become known for the way it is launching an interfaith response to the ecological challenge, says Hallman.
Even though key organizers of Langara College's "Faith and the Environment" conference are Christians, Worcester said the Multi-Faith Action Society event drew wide support from members of dozens of religious traditions, from Mennonites to Quakers, Baha'is to Mormons.
Jewish, Muslim, United, Anglican and Buddhist leaders in late May teamed up with the Sierra Club to urge the B.C. premier to do more to protect threatened animals, saying Victoria was safeguarding only five per cent of the province's more than 1,300 endangered species.
B.C. Unitarians, meanwhile, have created an interspiritual coalition to try to stop the B.C. government's Gateway program, which they say will harmfully expand the city's suburban highway network and endanger Burns Bog.
Another interspiritual network called "Be the Change Earth Alliance" has also taken root in Vancouver in recent months, working with Greenpeace to encourage tens of thousands to reduce energy consumption, auto use and meat consumption by 20 per cent.
"There is a lot of stuff happening," said Worcester. "It's clear some spiritual people are getting off their duffs and showing leadership."
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