c. 2007 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ They sat together on Wednesday (Jan. 17) at a long table, a dozen representatives of the scientific and evangelical communities, to declare their joint concern over global climate change.

But even more surprising, both groups said at the National Press Club, is that they actually like each other.

In announcing their “Urgent Call to Action,” 28 signatories from both sides said they have begun “a major shared effort among scientists and evangelicals to protect life on Earth and the fragile life support systems that sustain it.”

But it turned into a literal time of testimony about how their meeting late last year on a Georgia plantation softened their mutual stereotypes _ “Bible-thumping, fire-breathing” evangelicals on the one hand, “latte-sipping, New York Times-reading” elites on the other _ and led to a passionate determination to work together.

Dr. Eric Chivian, director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, said those stereotypes fell away as they discussed the urgency of addressing human effects on the planet.

“We discovered that we were both speaking from our hearts and our minds, that we really liked each other,” said Chivian, a Nobel laureate who worked with the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, to organize the meeting and statement.

Their “call to action” statement _ the latest in the tug of war among evangelicals about where they stand on the environment _ underscored that unexpected “concordance” and “shared sense of moral purpose.”

“Important initiatives were already under way on both sides, and when compared they were found to be broadly overlapping. We clearly share a moral passion and sense of vocation to save the imperiled living world before our damages to it remake it as another kind of planet,” the statement said.

Other signatories include James E. Hansen, director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Calvin DeWitt, president of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists; Edward O. Wilson, university research professor emeritus at Harvard University; and the Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network.

Their statement was sent to President Bush and other political officials as well as leaders of the scientific and religious communities. They received statements of support from Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Barack Obama, D-Ill. They also intend to hold a summit later this year.

The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, which refutes the theory that climate change is caused by humans, offered a cool assessment of the new statement.

“I see it as another attempt to create the appearance of a major growing consensus among evangelicals embracing, particularly, global warming alarmism when such a consensus does not exist,” said E. Calvin Beisner, spokesman for the alliance, which has been supported by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson.

Some evangelicals who support the new statement said they think opponents could be left on the fringe of the environmental debate if they persist in downplaying the threat of global warming.

David P. Gushee, a Union University professor of moral philosophy and a drafter of the call to action, said he hopes the “scientific firepower” of the Georgia meeting will reduce those who think human-induced global warming is some kind of a hoax.

“There are still some people who believe that we never went to the moon, that it was all a fake,” said Gushee, who teaches in Jackson, Tenn. “I don’t think it will be very long before that will be the best parallel to the level of skeptism that we’re talking about.”

Some of the evangelical leaders involved in the latest efforts hope to produce a “pastor’s packet” with input from the scientists that will help clergy who are “interested but not convinced,” said the Rev. Joel Hunter, a Florida megachurch pastor who recently dropped plans to head the Christian Coalition of America, in part because the group’s board members were not comfortable with his environmental stance.

The scientists on board this new cooperation seemed more concerned about matters on which people could agree.

“I can’t tell you how many scientists came away from that meeting saying that it was the most important and the most impressive and most moving meeting that they’d ever attended,” said Jim McCarthy, an oceanography professor at Harvard, of the Georgia gathering.

“As we left … we all realized that we have a mission together and that we’re going to work on this and we fully expect to be sitting with these same people again and again and again and enlarging that group.”

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