The Sunday Forum at Washington National Cathedral:
“Faith and Environmentalism: A Natural Partnership”
with Richard Cizik

November 18, 2007
The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith
Washington National Cathedral
Host: Cathedral Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III
Guest: Richard Cizik


Lloyd: Welcome, everyone. It’s wonderful to have you here as we, week by week, explore the major issues where faith and public life come together. We look forward to having these conversations week by week with the liveliest minds from Washington and beyond. And today we have with us one of the liveliest minds in Washington and one of the most important voices in Washington these days, the Rev. Richard Cizik, who is the vice president for governmental affairs for the thirty-million member National Association of Evangelicals. The New York Times has dubbed him “the green evangelist.” He’s here to talk to us about his work broadly, but most specifically and most urgently, to talk to us about the challenges we face in global warming and climate change. Since 2002 Richard Cizik has been involved in something called “creation care,” becoming the voice, and often the lightning rod, representing evangelical Christians and talking about faith and the environment. He’s one of the co-authors of a very important document in 2004 entitled “For the Health of the Nations: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.” Richard, we are so glad to have you here today, delighted you’ve come to join the conversation.


Cizik: Thank you Dean Lloyd. It’s a delight to be here. You recall I was with you here before you know? Once before. On Earth Day.


Lloyd: Yes, we like to bring you in as often as we can. Say something about this notion of being a “green evangelist” and “creation care.” This is something that has become a major emphasis for you really in the last few years. Is that right?


Cizik: That’s right. I have a lot to atone for. A lot of sin. But I’m making up for it now. Well, anyway, what I mean by that is for near, say, eighteen to twenty years here in the Washington office of the National Association of Evangelicals, for many many years, I was willing to say about this and other issues, “Well, I don’t have a dog in this fight.” In other words, scientists are divided on this; evangelicals don’t need to engage it. And that’s the position I led the NAE to. And I think it was wrong. And I confess as a mistake. Not just as a mistake, because I believe the degrading of the environment is an offense against God!


Lloyd: You’ve used the language of conversation about this. You’ve experienced a conversation on this issue. Could you say something about how that conversation happened and what that means?


Cizik: Well, in an irony of twist of reality, I was actually converted to this issue by scientists. Namely the likes of Sir John Houghton, who was one of the original science advisors to the inter-governmental panel on climate change at an Oxford conference in 2002. Now, I heard this science in a way for the first time, along with the theology from the best in the world’s New Testament scholars, such as N. T. Wright. So for the first time I put it together in a way that, well, I just hit myself on the forehead and said, “My gosh, I can’t believe that this has escaped me.” Yet I believe that’s exactly what has happened to millions upon millions of American Christians. And particularly those in my community. And they’ve done that for a lot of reasons. But that’s changing, and I believe, Sam, a moral awakening is occurring that will literally reshape the 21st century in a positive way, and it has implications across foreign policy lines, across domestic politics, you name it. Those are the widespread implications. When people get a sense of what the Bible teaches about creation care, and yes, we have reframed the issue a bit for people to understand it in new ways. Because I’m saying, as are others in this broad-based movement, it’s not just a matter of seeing a new heaven and a new earth. It’s about seeing this earth differently with eyes to see it as God sees it.


Lloyd: That hasn’t been at the center of the evangelical agenda. And you’re trying to put it there. Are you getting much resistance to that? (laughter)


Cizik: Let’s put it this way. Some of it has abated, but it’s true. I don’t think people wanted me, even on my executive committee, to go to the conference in 2002. They told me that. And then when we came back, some of us came back, I had been led to this decision to go by Jim Ball, a clergyman associated with the Evangelical Environmental Network. Well, I came back, and I took what was the admonition of Sir John Houghton to speak out about it. Because in the middle of the conference we went to Blenheim Palace, which was a few miles from Oxford, and there we walked in the gardens. And Sir John said, “Richard, if you have decided in your mind that science is real, if you’ve decided that the Bible calls us to act, then you can’t remain silent.” And I said, “You know what you’re asking, my friend?” And he said, “Yes, but, I’m sure you’re up to it.” Well, most people know, or a lot of people who follow the movement know, that last spring, twenty-five evangelical leaders, many if not most from the religious right, called for me to be silenced, or fired. And yet in the wake of that, which is almost like a hostile takeover of the NAE. And for those of you who don’t know, the NAE is over sixty years old. It has fifty-four denominations, forty-five thousand churches. Here were these leaders who were essentially saying to the board of the hundreds of the NAE, “We don’t like Richard’s”—and they know me and had worked with me on many many issues over the years—“We don’t like what Richard is saying. And so we’re asking you to either get rid of him, or silence him.” And the board of the NAE said, “No we’re not only not going to consider that. But we’re going to reaffirm the document which says to be care stewards of this earth and that government has a responsibility, and if we don’t carry this out, this broader agenda that includes everything from religious freedom to creation care, compassion for the poor, human rights, yes, the sanctity of human life... if we don’t do all of these things, because everything is connected, then we will be failing our movement as leaders.” And so that’s why I’m still here. I’m still speaking out, and praise God.


Lloyd: Whey the intense opposition from the evangelical world? And I should emphasize we’re not picking on the evangelical world. The whole country has been very slow to come to this issue and recognize what’s going on. But because that’s such a focused Christian world that has resisted coming to this. Why do you think that is?


Cizik: Well, I say it’s a brew, a concoction of a lot of different ingredients. And the ingredients, Sam, begin with, well, it’s a disdain for environmentalists as leftists. Add mistrust of mainstream science those goes all the way back to the Scopes Monkey Trial of Darwin and evolution, mistrust of science, a sort of denial of stories. Well, we have stories from the media; we have stories from yesterday’s IPCC report, the intergovernmental report, saying things are far worse than we thought. When the media’s trumpeting something, these people say, “Well, I’m not going to listen,” and then you add to that free market economics and then sort of free-will religion that says, “Well, we’ve been given dominion over this earth; we can do anything we want with it; and after all we are the highest point of creation; everything else serves us; and therefore you who think otherwise, take a hike! Take a hike! Or silence or be fired, or whatever.” This is the mentality. And yet I would say that it’s fast changing. And the most interesting poll of self-described evangelicals almost a flip from four to five years ago, is that 80+% now think we now need to pass legislation. And I want to refer to legislation just in passing so that people, you all, understand there is a bill now. It’s been reported out of subcommittee called the Climate Security Act, the first time ever the United States Congress is in a position with leadership to do something. But see, those are the impediments. And they are such that I liken climate change, climate and the environment, to, it’s sort of the victim of the origins debate. Well, what does that mean? “Scientists believe in evolution,” according to evangelicals: “I don’t believe in evolution, so I’m going to dismiss what the scientists are saying.” And it’s an illogical syllogism. That’s what has occurred. And that has made the environment—this thing that God has told us, creation, to care for—the victim, the victim of our mistrust, our distrust, our denial and all those things. And that has to change.


Lloyd: Let’s pick up on this. You mention this report that came out yesterday on the front page of the New York Times, a report from the United Nations intergovernmental panel that’s been studying climate change. It is a pretty scary report, saying things like it is entirely possibly that by the end of this century the sea level could rise by 23 feet, which would mean a deluge for the entire world. They don’t say that’s going to happen, but it could happen, and that things are getting, every year’s numbers are worse than the numbers they predicted as worst-case scenario. Would you take a step backward for a minute and say something to us about how serious do you think this is? And how incumbent is it on us? Most of us are not evangelical Christians, some are here but most of us are not. How incumbent is it on all Christians that we address this? What is the level of gravity, and what is the call from God, we might say, in this?


Cizik: Dean, to correct this mistrust, the evangelicals have collaborated with the Harvard Center on Health in the Global Environment, led by a Nobel laureate, and a wonderful friend, by the name of Eric Chivian, who introduced me a few years ago to E. O. Wilson through a wonderful woman who was the very first person in the entire environmental movement, and she runs Rachel’s Network, and her name is Winsome McIntosh, and she was the very first person that had ever said to me, “Would you like to have a cup of coffee and talk about the environment?” Maybe it takes women to do this. Maybe we should turn over more authority to them! How could this be? Here, I confronted Al Gore and John Kerry at a conference a couple years ago and said, “None of you ever called me up and said, ‘would you like to have a cup of coffee?’.” Yet Winsome did. And things began to change. She introduced me to people, including James Hanson. To answer your question, Hanson says that we are on a time frame that’s less than ten years. In fact the report yesterday says that if we don’t begin to take action within seven years, we’re going to see these eventualities. But I would say you don’t have to wait because, having gone with Eric Chivian and Jim McCarthy, who’s the new head of the AAAS, and other scientists to Shishmarif, 50 miles from Russia in the Arctic Circle, this summer, to see the impacts with my own eyes. You don’t have to wait.


Lloyd: What did you see?


Cizik: Well, I saw for example Inupiaq Indians at Shishmarif who virtually after 400-plus years of carving out a life in a rugged world up there at the Arctic, but loving it, are essentially being forced by rising sea levels to leave. When you think about it, 2-plus million acres of spruce trees in Alaska on the Kenai Peninsula virtually what are called, they are called ghosts, standing ghosts, because the temperature rises have contributed to the burrowing of the spruce bark beetle into the trees, kills them, and they left standing. And I’m told by others there are as many as 20 million acres of dead spruce in Canada. So you can see the sea level rise, the impacts of rising temperatures, not just on our flora and fauna, but on the animal life. Polar bears, but even on people. So I’m not a tree hugger, though there’s nothing wrong with being a tree hugger, I think we ought to be people-huggers and see with our eyes and feel with our hearts what are the consequences.


Lloyd: What are the consequences? What’s going to happen if we don’t respond in the next ten years?


Cizik: Weren’t there typhoons in Asia this weekend? I have to confess I was out at a parish on the northern neck and haven’t seen all the newspapers, doing this with the Chesapeake Foundation. Look at the bay. You don’t even have to go and imagine millions upon millions of climate refugees in Bangladesh, you can look at the bay right now, where nitrogen that comes from fertilizer and from waste elimination in our own region that contributed—nitrogen did—to the death of 400,000 fish off Colonial Beach, which produces, you see, the algae, you see, the algae that kills the oxygen that kills the crabs, that destroys the human lives, that destroys so much of what we love and take for granted. So, if we, especially my community as evangelicals, were to really understand that natural resources are finite. And two, that everything is connected, I think we’d begin to change the way we live, which is fundamentally what we all have to do. But we also have to change policy.


Lloyd: You’ve called it, the challenge of global climate, a sanctity of life issue, and you’ve called it a civil rights issue. Could you say something about both of those?


Cizik: An interesting story. I won’t mention names, but I met at the Willard Hotel. I basically am a lobbyist. It’s not a bad term. Anyway, I was in the Willard Hotel where the term actually came from during the Lincoln administration with a man who at the time was head of Focus on the Family. And I said, “My friend, can you understand that when 600,000 children annually are born with disabilities associated with mercury poisoning—mercury poisoning that comes from coal burning utility plants that’s admitted into the air that goes into the rivers and lakes, absorbed by fish that are eaten by pregnant women and contributed to 600,000 annually, in this country, with those disabilities, that that is a sanctity of life issue, it’s also an environment issue?” And this person said to me, “No, that’s an environmental issue. It’s not a sanctity of life issue.” I don’t get this. Why will you not admit that the one is the other? And couldn’t answer it for me. Or he wouldn’t answer it for me. And that’s because some people are so beholden to a worldview, they won’t change, no matter what. It’s like the man who thought he was dead, and his doctor says, “You aren’t dead.” He gives him an MRI and gives him a heart monitor and all the rest, and the man still thinks he’s dead. So the doctor in final exasperation pulls out a needle and sticks him in the finger. The man turns ashen white, and he says, “See, dead men bleed after all!” Well, there are some people who are so committed to their worldviews, they are not willing to change. And I say, “Look, if you’re my age or even younger and you’ve not changed your mind about something you’ll pinch yourself. You may be dead.”


Lloyd: Civil rights issue.


Cizik: It is. It is. And African American leadership should be at the forefront of this. We evangelicals, we sat on our hands, to our everlasting shame, my father’s generation, on civil rights in this country and the South. The evangelicals did. Let’s face it. They sat on their hands. And now we, of my generation, we will not do that. And we will not be intimidated by those who say not to speak out on this issue. Because it is that when hundreds of millions… Well, the Christian Aid of the UK says that by 2050, one billion people on this celestial globe will be negatively impacted by climate change. And these people want us to shut up? See, I think that God—who said, I put it in my word from Genesis to Revelation, care and protected from Genesis 15 all the way to Revelation 18, which is saying “I will destroy those who destroy the earth”—he put it all the way in there. And to Job he says, “Do you think—where do you think you were when I created the universe?” In other words, he is saying, it’s not all about you. And when we deface the revelation, general revelation, I personally think that has to sadden and even anger, God, and he has given us a lot of slack as a people wherein we, 4.5% of the world’s population produce over 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. And moreover, we have leaders. We virtually have leaders inside the Beltway, here in this town, who for years have been saying, turning a blind eye, saying, well, it may or may not be real. Well, now they say it’s real, but they don’t want to do anything that isn’t voluntary. Well, it’s time for business as usual to be over. It’s really got to change. And I happen to think that my community that is 40-50% of those red states that heretofore have done nothing to press their politicians, are key to changing this reality. And let’s face it, just a week ago the vote in the subcommittee on the Climate Security Act was along party lines almost! But fortunately, Senator Warner, who I think is Episcopalian—


Lloyd: He is.


Cizik: —is in charge, co-sponsor of the bill, with Joe Lieberman. And I think Senator Warner is inclined to push this forward. So I applaud him. So the evangelicals may be saved by the Episcopalians.


Lloyd: It’s high time on both sides that we figured out how to do that. You can assume you probably have a fairly sympathetic audience here this morning, a group that cares about this, wants to understand it, but also wants to do what they can to help. What can the committed, caring person sitting in the pews on Sunday mornings across the country, whatever their worshipping tradition, what can they do to help?


Cizik: Sam, I came back from Oxford and I said to my wife and family, “We’ve got to change.” We virtually sold our RV, our recreational vehicle. We couldn’t afford it anyway. We evangelicals, you know, we’re just poor, uneducated, and easy to command. All of which is… No, we sold it. I bought a Prius. Our home is 19 years old, and we’ve upgraded with Energy Star. In fact, this week out of Minnesota, the NAE partnered with the Energy Star Program of EPA to attempt to green all of our churches. So we’ve greened our house. We’ve tried to green our lifestyle. And we’ve taken our message down the street and now four or five have traded in their SUVs for Priuses. In other words we’re a bit evangelistic about this, both for our personal lifestyles, which is what I think we have to do first and examine ourselves seriously. But look, yes, the politics has to change, but we have to be converted ourselves. And judgment begins in the household of God. And I can’t help but believe that if we don’t set an example as Christians, how do we expect the rest of the world? And if the United States won’t set an example, how can we speak to China and India and other countries, unless we’re willing to speak, and speak authoritatively that we are willing to be a can-do, solve-this-problem country, and we’re going to change the way we live ourselves. And so that’s my answer. And it’s not just one thing. It takes all of these things. But it can be done.


Lloyd: What do you make of the arguments that come out quite a bit that say it’s great to buy a hybrid car and to green your house, but the problem is so vast and has so much to do with growing, developing nations who are going through their industrial revolution the way we did a hundred years ago, that we’re playing around the edges of something that’s so big it really can’t make a difference. So we simple need to, I think what they’re really saying is “hope and pray some technology will turn up to save us from it all.” Why should we do the small things that seem to make only a marginal difference? And then, why should we…


Cizik: It’s called faithfulness. I think we have to re-vision how we see the world. I said that. And that re-visioning begins with our own eyesight. And we have to see all of this in a new way. And look, Abraham was told by God to leave Ur of the Chaldees on a journey which would include becoming the head of a family that would include, well, children greater than the stars in the sky. And yet it was a blessing that included a sort of condition. And the condition was that you will not continue to be blessed if you don’t bless others! And so faithfulness is being a blessing to the rest of the world. That’s how we have to re-vision ourselves. And hold those who have authority accountable. You know, Jesus said to Pilate—I remind people in this most powerful city in the world, Jesus, and this is the right place to say this—Jesus said to Pilate, who had said “I could release you or crucify you.” Jesus said, “You have no power except it be given you from above.” And what he meant was that he, Pilate, would be accountable to a higher authority. And so to the politicians I say, “You will be held accountable.” By the way, I’m very straightforward. I tell people what comes into my mind; sometimes I shouldn’t. But Sam Brownback, I was in his cubbyhole in the Capitol one day about a year ago, and he said, “Well, what if what we do doesn’t reduce overall warming? What if we take actions here and China still continues to do what’s it’s going to do. And India does what it’s going to do. And all the rest.” And I said, “Well, Sam, God isn’t going to ask you whether China or India did their part. Sam, he’s going to ask you, ‘Did you do your part?’ And he’s going to hold you to a higher standard than even me.” And frankly, I would wish that the White House, even the president of the United States, would get that picture, that he will be held accountable. (Applause)


Lloyd: So, especially for Christians, you’re saying, the efficacy argument isn’t the main one. It’s a faithfulness argument. That our job is first of all, all of us in the most mundane ways we live our days, to live with the truth that God is showing us, and do what we can to be efficacious as well. But first job is to witness out of our own lives.


Cizik: And I remember—this is a political town—so Darius in the 6th or 7th century has a great story. He was the leader, and he had an empire he was putting together. It’s in Daniel 6. And Daniel was the fall guy for a coup against King Darius. They all signed a decree, King, that no one prays to anyone save you. He does that. And of course Daniel continues being faithful. Frank. Well, what’s really going on there is. Well, I was told this story by the late Paul Henry. He was the son of the evangelical theologian, the greatest evangelical theologian of the 20th century, Carl F. H. Henry, who I knew as a younger man. Paul lost his life to a brain tumor. But the late Paul Henry out of Grand Rapids used to say, “Richard, politicians are not unlike King Darius. And they have to make choices. And Darius’s choice was to save his friend Daniel and sacrifice the empire, or save the empire and sacrifice his friend Daniel.” He said, we all make those choices. Weapons designed to save people, hurt others. Even environmental programs designed to help sometimes don’t help. In other words, there are negative externalities. It’s difficult, but choices have to be made. And see, I would say, tragically, until we see some grudging admission here by our own governmental leaders, that we have a lot of Dariuses in this town who want to save their friends. And who are some of their friends? And some of their friends are in the big utilities, oil, gas industries and the rest. And in saving their friends, they’re sacrificing not just the empire, but the entire planet. And so here you have religious people coming on board. You have business leaders like Jim Rogers at Duke Energy who was a wonderful leader as well as a Christian man. And then you have major corporations all coming on board to realize this: the irony is that we have Dariuses who are worried about making choices. And say it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.


Lloyd: We’ll be accountable?


Cizik: Absolutely. All of us. And we shouldn’t take that lightly just because, well, we’re just a citizen. We shouldn’t take it lightly, because it’s about faithfulness. And, look, my best illustration of sustainability. By the way Jesus called Hell Gehennah, which was the garbage dump outside Jerusalem. Gehennah, Jesus called “a garbage dump.” Anyway, the sustainable verse, the best one in the Bible is Matthew 6:20, in which Jesus himself says, “Store up your treasures not on earth, for moths and rust destroy and thieves steal, but in heaven, where neither of those things occur. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” And a wonderful man, the Bishop of Liverpool, whose name is James Jones—you probably know him—James Jones says that that verse is about the earthing of heaven, bringing the heavenly values. What is “the heavenly values”? Well, those are the values where things don’t go extinct. Where moths and rust destruct and thieves steal. So our challenge in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done on earth, on earth, as it is in heaven,” is to bring that earthing of heaven to here. That value of sustainability. And when you live that way, a sustainable life, which is what he God always intended—if you live that way and begin to live that way, then the face of the globe in the 21st century will not be the face of typhoons, hurricanes, and droughts and all the rest. It will be a different future. And we can do it.


Lloyd: One more question and then we’re going to go to our audience out here on line and here in the Cathedral. If you’ll prepare for questions, the people who have the microphones are going to come forward and Deryl will pick some people out. My question to you is, do you see coming along now the kinds of creative political work and creative legislation that can begin to get us on the right track? There’s been so much timidity among politicians about this. Is the right kind of discussion happening about the transformative steps that need to be taken now?


Cizik: Yes, I think the Climate Security Act may well make it through Congress in the next year or so. There is a challenge, I think, to make sure that the Cap and Trade Program, as it’s called in the Security Act, would include dollars not just for ameliorating the immediate impact on the poor here in this country but upon the poor overseas. And the precise figure from the sale, the auction of these caps, of these energy credits, would go in part for that purpose, here as well as abroad. I think it’s really important that we bear in mind that those who are the poorest of the poor overseas, who contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions, are the ones who are suffering through desertification and the rest, the most. So you can go to places like the Azawakh region of Niger where, by the way, a young Christian woman, Ariane Kirtley, is attempting, you see, to drill the wells for water for people who walk thirty miles for a cup of water because, you see, the water that was not only coming through the rains doesn’t come because of climate change. And we know for a fact that the origins of the Darfur conflict is in fact in natural resources and the fight for them. And the water fight in the 21st century is a national security issue that James Wolsey puts it of the highest nature. So this is very serious business that if we in this country don’t get right and get right quickly—legislation and all the rest—very soon, then we are going to reach the tipping point. I’m more worried about the tipping point spiritually than I am the tipping point climatically. You see what I’m saying?


Lloyd: Say some more about that.


Cizik: What happens to us as people if we don’t hear and can’t really, we can listen but we might not hear? I had a friend of mine who actually had signed a letter for my dismissal go with us as scientists and other clergy to Shishmarif. And I don’t mind mentioning his name because I want to hold him accountable. His name is Harry Jackson. And Harry had always said, “Well I’m worried about this, that and the other, and maybe you’re just making too much of this.” As an African American man, he stood on the edges of that island and looked at, well there was a big machine bringing huge boulders to try and shore up this little island village, just a hundred feet away the day we arrived one house fell into the Arctic, the Bering Sea, as it were. And this is an African American man who I think could feel these issues. And for the first time I think Harry was able to see it. And each of us will see it in a different way to come to this conversion point. For me it took the signs. For other people it will take the events. For example, of L.A. or Katrina or whatever. By the way, fire is a multivalent symbol in the Bible, and it’s either the symbol of destruction in the end times or the fire of the Holy Spirit that inspires people to take action. And I would say that this problem is in essence God’s invitation, a love letter to us to say, “See what you’ve done. Now fix it. I love you and you’ve got to love other people.” So I see in these tragic events, as do the people who are often involved in them, as tragic as they are, they become symbols for why we have to love in new ways. Instead of loving our neighbor, we’re drowning our neighbor.


Lloyd: I want to get to our questions, but obviously you want to affirm the power of what you are saying now is, and you’ve been saying this during this whole conversation, the question is not can we, sitting here, fix the world? The question is what is going to become of us? What kind of people are we going to be, we who can now see and know what’s going on? Is that going to affect the way we live, and do we really care what will happen to our children and to their children?


Cizik: You’re exactly right. All of those things, and then something else. This issue of climate and environment is a bridge issue as Robert Putnam says of reaching outward. But there’s something else here at stake, that you here from the mainline and myself from the evangelical, coming together over an issue that we can jointly say is part of our Biblical duty as Christians. Now, there is some healing that has to go on. And wouldn’t it be God’s way of doing things that this would be his way of bringing the church together?


Lloyd: Using the earth to bring us altogether again. Wouldn’t that be good? Wouldn’t that be right? Wouldn’t that be God’s way? That would be great. Questions?


Q: Thank you for your talk today. In the conversation around creation care and stewardship of the environment, I find that the missing piece is very often our responsibility to care for God’s other creatures, the animals. And likewise, there are conversations about climate change, I find that the missing piece is very often the huge impact that our diet has on the climate. We hear an awful lot about transportation and energy, but we do not hear about the horrific practices of factory farming and the fact factory farming adds as much greenhouse gas to the climate as the transportation industry. To me, that speaks volumes how when we mistreat others in the creation, we mistreat ourselves. When we’re mistreating the animals, the repercussions rebound on us. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about our responsibilities to animals and our responsibilities to make diet choices in connection with climate change.


Cizik: It’s real interesting. Saint Francis said, isn’t it ironic he said, he said, “People who would treat the animals will treat humans that way too.” That if you’re not willing to care for the creatures of the earth, you’ll treat man that way. I’ve made some changes. It wasn’t entirely connected with this conversation I had. But I had come to the same conclusion. So I don’t trumpet the fact that personally I don’t eat red meat. But that’s not for everyone necessarily. It’s just a dietary change I’ve made for these reasons, the reasons we’ve just been talking about, for reasons this lady mentioned, and other reasons. I think I’m healthier for it. I used lots of resources. Most of us don’t know that we consume a hundred gallons of water a day on ourselves, and that I’m told doesn’t include the water that it takes to grow the food that we eat. And then water is going to be this challenge of the 21st century. We really have to think about everything, including diet.


Q: I appreciate all that you have done in the past several years to bring the evangelical movement into an interest in creation and the environment. And I’d like to suggest another topic on which I would hope the voice of evangelicals would be heard, namely voting rights in the Congress for the District of Columbia. I think you are familiar with this bill. There’s a bill that would deal with this. It is now before the Senate. Most of the people who voted against cloture, that is, against allowing it to be debated in the Senate—debated and voted on—are people who didn’t probably themselves go to church and even evangelical churches or represent places where the evangelical movement is very strong. So could you tell me what you think about this, and about the evangelical role and perhaps your own personal view as well.


Cizik: Well, a year ago I was asked to sign a letter endorsing this legislation and I signed it. Why? Because I said to myself, “I can’t be speaking on these issues, these rights issues overseas and not see some right here in front of my face.” And so I agree with you. And so you’ll find my name among those who, I haven’t persuaded all my brothers about this, but it makes perfect sense. It’s a good bill, and it balances out with one other representative elsewhere. So I agree with you. And I think it’s a clear case in which we have to see the blinders that we have. And we all have blinders. I happen to think that the evangelical community has had a blind side on this issue of creation care, the whole environmental issue. I happen to think the mainline and other church people have their blind spots too, but I won’t talk about them. I have a duty to speak to my own community and we have some blind spots. I agree with you entirely. And these Republican legislators ought to see it similarly, in my opinion.


Q: The one thing I’ve noticed about religious people is they seem to try to draw all political issues within their church or religious organization. For example, I’m saying are there issues you would say “I’m going to be involved in this, not because I’m an evangelical or a Catholic, but because I’m a U.S. citizen, I’m a member of the world community. I don’t have to somehow try to make a theological issue or statement out of it in order to be involved in it. In other words, some issues do pertain to specifically you being an evangelical, but other issues do not, but you’re involved with them nevertheless because you’re a caring person, a member of the world community, and you’re a U.S. citizen?


Cizik: You’re absolutely right. You don’t have to root it necessarily in religious beliefs. I happen to think we have to think not anthropocentrically, but, you know, cosmo-centrically. For God so loved the cosmos. By the way, you want a good test to give to somebody as to whether they think cosmo-centrically as opposed to the other end? It goes to Genesis 2:7, and I say, “Here are you’re two options. You’ve got question A, question B. Is it that man equals body plus soul? That’s option one. Two, soul equal dust plus breath. Which is it?” I give the question to college students. I’ve been everywhere from Harvard to Bible colleges, and invariably they don’t know quite how to answer the question. By the way, I also ask, you ever had a sermon on creation care? Never! Maybe a hand here or there, occasionally at a Christian college, a thousand kids in chapels around the country rarely have they ever admitted to having one sermon by their pastor. The pastors need to get the message! If you want a test? Well, the answer is two because God breathed into the dust of the earth a living soul. Now the soul is wrapped in a body. The soul, the dirt became a soul. And if you think we are simply a soul wrapped in a body that’s going to die and the soul lives forever. If that’s your mindset, then you have an anthropo-centric view, in my opinion. And you miss God’s teaching about how we even our humanness is related to the earth. Does that make any sense? Am I ok on this?


Lloyd: We’re getting close to the end. I want to make sure that we go out with your clearest counsel for what we can do. Your short list. If we here care about it. They want to live out their Christian faith in this way, or their citizenship in the world community this way. What would say are the key steps we could be involved in?


Cizik: I’m not a lobbyist so you have to forgive me.


Lloyd: So maybe we should be lobbyists too.


Cizik: Yes, that’s true. Citizen lobbyists. So that’s part of it. But I think this way: What is the vision? What is the strategy? What are the tactics? The vision is re-visioning your whole life and the life of your family and your community. The strategy is, yes, holding public official accountable, but holding ourselves in the churches and colleges and institutions that we’re a part of, accountable. That’s the strategy. And it ranges not just from recycling and reusing and using fluorescents, and that’s true. But it’s about a whole lot more. It’s a strategy that holds leaders accountable. And I say to people, I did so out at the retirement village out here at Riverside, one of the largest in the country, when asked the one thing to do, I said, “Well don’t let any politician come here without ever having someone ask the question, ‘What’s your position on climate change?’” And I watched a few weeks later on television when the president was revealing his prescription drug bill, and lo and behold, out of the middle of the audience comes this question, “Mr. President, what is your position on climate change?” So lastly, Sam I think the tactics are really important. I don’t throw rocks at my critics. Jesus said not to do that. And if there are those who don’t agree with you, love them. Love is a powerful thing. So tactics—how you respond, how you love—this is what Christians are known by. They’ll be known by their love.


Lloyd: One last question from the audience and then we’re finished.


Q: Rev. Cizik, I think there are a lot of people who are in the environmental community who are grateful that the political strength of the evangelical movement, which we’ve all witnessed since 2000, has come over to the environmental side. Do you think, though, that broadening the agenda of the National Association of Evangelicals to include issues that are associated more with the left, will somehow change the sub-cultural identity of evangelicals, perhaps weaken their political strength?


Cizik: Could be. But I put my faith before my politics. By the way, Eric Chivian and I jokingly say, “Look we can bring together the Prius-driving, New York Times-reading, latte-sipping, tree-huggers, liberals, east coast schools like Harvard with the Wall Street Journal, a.k.a. Bible-reading—no not that —Wall Street Journal-reading, Hummer-truck driving conservatives from the Midwest who would just as soon cut that tree down and turn it into an evangelistic tract. We can bring these people together and when we change, individually, yes, even our politics will change.” I think that’s why there’s criticism against me. This issue just isn’t about this issue. It’s a proxy issue for a bigger battle over power. And there are institutions, there are organizations, there are people who want to preserve the status quo politically. And yet the reality is that God is dynamic and real. He and his Spirit is what’s animating this movement. It’s not about politics. It’s about God. And Joe Scarborough, by the way, said on TV, the global climate change movement, he says, has a new helper. He said, “He’s called God.” Well anyway, he’s a good guy.


Lloyd: What a great note to end on. It’s been a great conversation. Join us next week when the Reverend James Forbes, former pastor of Riverside Church in New York, one of the great preachers of our generation, will be here to preach as our centennial preacher, but be here in this Forum to talk about how the religions can come together to address the crucial issues of our time. We hope you’ll stay for the 11:15 service today. From any worship tradition you come from, we would love to have you be part of it today. There’s coffee waiting you at the west end of the Cathedral. Just turn left and Richard Cizik will join us down there for some coffee afterwards. Please join me in thanking our guest.