How Authentically Religious is Our Being Green?
November 4, 2009
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November 3, 2009
I had the opportunity (and pleasure), recently, to give a talk and attend a two and a half day workshop, in upstate New York, at a seminar sponsored by the board of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE). NRPE's mission statement reads: "The Partnership is integrating care for God's creation throughout religious life: theology, worship, social teaching, education, congregational life and public policy initiative. We seek to provide inspiration, moral vision, commitment to social justice for all efforts to protect the natural world and human well being within it." NRPE brings together an inter-faith group (most of them officers or staff on national boards more than local parishioners) from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; the National Council of Churches; The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life; The Evangelical Environmental Network. From this last group, Jim Ball was present. He is the evangelical who coined that catchy question (with its dig at SUV's): " What would Jesus drive?"
NRPE is entering a new phase in its life, so the seminar was, in part, about stock-taking for the future. A key question being pressed was: "How authentically religious is our being green?". NRPE wants to avoid just being some veneer, " the Sierra Club or the World Wildlife Fund at prayer." It is also aware that it can be used by more secular environmental groups, intent, at times, to "rent or co-opt a constituency." Especially when religious people engage in public policy campaigns ( e.g., for climate change) in the secular arena there is a potent temptation, often, to sound just like the secular NGOs.
One typical move of NRPE is to insist on closely joining care for creation with care for the poor--not something always characteristic in more secular movements. NRPE also wants (against some new age spirituality people or so-called ' deep ecologists') to insist that we worship the creator not creation. John Carr, from the United States Catholic Conference, asked about NRPE's mission: Are we distinctively and comprehensively religious ? The evangelical leader Richard Cizek even wondered, if the organization might usefully change its name to recognize its distinctively religious thrust. Instead of the more neutral name, environment, might it not call itself a Partnership for Creation Care?
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