Washington – Richard Cizik, who resigned in December under pressure from the National Association of Evangelicals, has long been criticized by fellow evangelicals for being a little too green.
Emerging from a self-imposed media blackout, Cizik is back, and he’s wearing the label of converted conservationist even more comfortably now.
“I have become a conservative who, by some people’s definition, has become a liberal,” Cizik said here during a recent meeting on climate change. “I am not a liberal. I am a conservative who, of all things, believes that some people should become conservationists.”
These days, Cizik says, he has more speaking engagements than when he worked as the NAE’s point man in Washington, and he’s making plans for a new evangelical organization that will address issues as “broad as God’s concerns are broad.”
“I’m just going to create an entity that will enable young evangelicals to be more effective as advocates for change,” said Cizik, who was hired earlier this year as a senior fellow by the Washington-based United Nations Foundation, which was founded by media mogul Ted Turner.
Cizik, 57, abruptly left the NAE, an evangelical umbrella group, after an interview with National Public Radio in which he signaled support for same-sex civil unions and admitted voting for President Obama in the Virginia primary despite Obama’s support of abortion rights.
At the time, NAE President Leith Anderson said his organization decided that Cizik, who had been with the group for more than a quarter century, “cannot continue as a spokesperson for NAE.”
Although he declined to discuss his relationship with NAE, Cizik seems ready to move on and to resume his high-profile role in the nation’s capital. He’s building on his long-term interest in getting evangelicals of all ages involved in issues ranging from the environment to religious persecution.
Anderson, who hopes to announce a successor to Cizik within weeks, says he’s not surprised that his colleague of 30 years plans to pursue a wider range of evangelical causes.
“These are his interests and these are his issues,” he said. “The difference is that when he was with NAE, he was connected to a broader constituency and he’ll speak now as an individual rather than for an organization.”
E. Calvin Beisner, national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and a frequent Cizik critic, said he welcomes the transition because he believes Cizik went beyond the statements that NAE member organizations adopted in a “For the Health of the Nation” document.
That document “said essentially nothing about global warming and yet he continued to make public statements hundreds of times, failing to explicitly express that this was his personal opinion and not representative of NAE,” said Beisner.
Though Cizik is prepared to address issues beyond climate in a future organization, the man who was once photographed appearing to walk on water in the pages of Vanity Fair says “creation care” appears to be what people want him to talk about.
“That is my perceived expertise but that’s a bit of a misnomer,” he said. “I’m no less concerned about the broader array of issues.”
In recent weeks, he’s lectured on “Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth” at an interfaith gathering and appeared alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at an Earth Day news conference to push clean energy legislation.
As Cizik has discovered, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and there’s always a second act in Washington.
“I have more (speaking engagements) now than I had before, maybe in part due to some of the controversy associated with my name,” Cizik said. “It’s also true that some people have told me `You’re too controversial and we’ll invite you next year.”‘
In his speeches, Cizik often cites passages from the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, which depicts God “destroying those who destroy the Earth.”
Eventually, he says, mankind’s mistreatment of the planet will be questioned as much as silence about the rise of Nazism and toleration of slavery. Climate change, he says, “is the civil-rights issue of the 21st century.”
Citing a report from the relief agency Christian Aid of Britain that 1 billion people could be negatively impacted by climate change by mid-century, Cizik said: “If the `civil rights’ campaigns of the late 20th century were aimed at restoring the voting rights of African-Americans, a new kind of `civil rights’ campaign is needed to protect the lives of a billion of our fellow human beings.”
Even so, he acknowledged that he still has an uphill battle in winning over skeptical fellow believers. A new LifeWay Research poll shows that Protestant pastors are evenly split, at 47 percent each, on whether global warming is “real and man-made” or just a myth.
“It just reveals that there’s a lot of work yet to be done to …
convince the unpersuaded,” Cizik responded. “Nobody ever said it was going to be easy.”
But as he continues his work on going green for God, Cizik tells audiences that evangelicals will need to build bridges with other faiths, just as they have on other issues. He recalls working with Tibetan Buddhists on religious freedom legislation, with Jews on Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, and with Muslims on climate change.
“They’re not giving up their values, their commitment to Scripture or the rest,” he said of “new evangelicals” like himself. “But they do know that they do have to partner with others who don’t share their views in order to save the planet.”
By Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service
Copyright 2009 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.
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posted May 7, 2009 at 6:38 pm
I wish him a lot of luck! Evangelicals still have a lot of influence which they are, by and large, using badly now and we really need them to get their heads on straighter. Problems like global warming are so serious we need everyone working toward solving them, not ignoring them.
posted May 7, 2009 at 10:41 pm
One, luck has nothing to do with it. Also,man-made global-warming uses junk science being disproved now by LOTS of scientists. When Algore and the scare-mongers stop jetting around the country warning us to stop using fossil fuels, I’ll believe they believe in this cause.
Evangelicals are now lured into the black hole the Lutherans, the Methodists and the Presbyterians have spun into. We think we are smarter than everyone since the beginning of time. Just because one knows how to use an ipod or a cell phone or the internet doesn’t make one smarter than the bible. Man-made things are temporal. Sin is sin forever.
posted May 7, 2009 at 11:55 pm
>>man-made global-warming uses junk science being disproved now by LOTS of scientists.
I watched a recent analysis of ice cores from Greenland. They could look back thousands of years and see carbon dioxide levels go up and down. There is a normal cycle. However, as you approach the current time, the carbon dioxide levels went up off the chart. No way we are in a normal cycle now.
posted May 8, 2009 at 6:00 am
“Also,man-made global-warming uses junk science being disproved now by LOTS of scientists.”
No, though there are some paid by oil companies who keep getting mentioned by conservative commentators a LOT.
“Man-made things are temporal. Sin is sin forever.”
I want my grandchildren to have a decent world they can live in. I want to have great-grandchildren. That’s a forever we can all believe in.
Watch the ice caps; they are melting and the oceans are coming up and the coast lines will move inland. I wouldn’t buy land in a lot of Florida, just for instance, unless I planned to sell it soon. And watch forest fires. They are an indicator of global warming since warmer drier conditions promote them and they are a feedback mechanism for it since they release a lot of the carbon those trees were storing. And watch the mountain glaciers (while you can; Glacier National Park’s glaciers are going away for instance) because mountain glaciers store water from the snowfall so it can melt slowly during the summer when it’s needed but as they go away that water will come rushing down in spring and be gone in summer.
And pray the tundra doesn’t melt enough to release the methane under it because methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2 and human life would probably pass from the scene.
So here’s where Evangelicals need to get beyond what hopes they have for a glorious apocalyptical end to the world in order to work to stave off an awful dying-of-heat end of the human world. Please.
posted May 8, 2009 at 10:06 am
In the 70′s the scare was global cooling (I remember this!) now, it’s global warming … except we have been in a cooling trend for almost 10 years! With all of the science that shows that man-made global warming is a hoax they had to re-define global warming to “climate change”. Of course the climate changes, who’s going to argue with that?! Real science shows that the climate changes are cyclical, getting warmer and getting cooler.
I think that global warming has become a religion and Algore is the high priest. The sin is driving your SUV and not believing. The punishment is that you will burn, but the reward, if you believe, is a Garden of Eden.
The the “nnmn” that was afraid to buy land in Florida – thank you! I laughed and laughed at that! Ice caps are melting in some places, but they are growing in other places (I know, it was left out of the Algore movie). I encourage you to go to youtube.com and type in “climate of fear” and look for Glenn Beck’s report. There are 4 or 5 sections. Get informed for real.
posted May 8, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Not me: “In the 70′s the scare was global cooling”
That’s thrown out a lot by the confused or those who would confuse us. Here’s the Wikipedia article on Global Cooling. It begins:
And from the introduction:
So in fact the scientific community was, even then, worried about warming not cooling by and large. It just wasn’t frantic. Now almost all knowledgeable climate scientists are very worried.
posted May 8, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Not me: “we have been in a cooling trend for almost 10 years”
That’s a remarkably strange way to express that 2008 was the coolest year since 2000, especially given that 2008 is the ninth warmest year since continuous instrumental records were started in 1880. So 2008 was only cool compared to the warmest years since at least 1880.
Here’s an article about global temperature trends summarizing in 2008. It indicates various effects on earth’s temperature including the fact the sun has been in a cool part of its cycle since around 2003. That should start to end any time now and the warmer sun together with all those greenhouse gasses will probably lead to some mighty warm years soon. Probably even warmer than all those record warm years we’ve been having.
There are people who will sell their science pedigrees for big oil and coal money. There are a very few climate scientists who don’t think the human-caused global warming case has been clinched yet. But most climate scientists are very worried. We should be too.
If we act with force against global warming we get a cleaner environment and the world doesn’t get baked. If we fail to act the worst case is that our grandchildren die, less bad cases are that low-lying areas are covered in water, including a lot of urban areas, and a lot of people and species die off but humanity survives. Given the preponderance of evidence and the downsides there’s really only one choice to make. If your hatred for liberals or your religious beliefs won’t allow you to believe we are in process of cooking our home please allow the rest of us to try to save it for all of us.
posted May 8, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I can;t believe the easiest cheesiest possible line here…
Cizik singing a duet with Kermit – “It ain’t easy bein’ green!”
Just cuz there have been naturally occurring green cycles in geological history does not mean our current warming is not also alarming. This greening is happening artificially and incredibly fast (in geological terms). The consequences for the flora and fauna will be completely unpredictable – and that is rarely a good thing biologically speaking. Ignorance due to blinder does not cure or ease the problem, in fact they don’t even mask it. They only make people who are short sighted also narrow visioned.
posted May 8, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Cizik made a positive move leaving the NAE, and seem to be doing more good than his former group did or does, for that matter.