---

Evangelical Leaders Warn Against Christian Involvement in “Climate Change” Hysteria

Urge separating legitimate environment concerns from extremists’ anti-human direction

By Hilary White

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A group of Evangelical Christian leaders in the US, including Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson, has published a letter urging Evangelicals not to commit themselves to a single interpretation of “climate change”, the term commonly used now in place of “global warming” during the cold, snowy winter.

“Global warming is not a consensus issue,” the letter says, “and our love for the Creator and respect for His creation does not require us to take a position. We are evangelicals and we care about God’s creation.”

The letter is from a group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA), and is in response to a recent imitative by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to unite the Evangelical churches to the environmental movement’s policies opposing “climate change”.

“Climate change” is the latest hot issue for the environmental movement that counts among its leadership some of the world’s leading population control activists who are also openly hostile to Christianity. Environmentalist doctrine presupposes that the answer to climate concerns is the elimination of huge portions of the human population through mass abortion, sterilization programs and numerous other means.

While many scientists have denounced much of the “global warming” doctrine as “junk science”, environmentalist rhetoric on “climate change” has reached a nearly hysterical pitch in the media.

Meanwhile, stewardship-minded Christians are more and more asking how to separate legitimate concern for the environment from the environmentalist movement’s anti-human direction.

The Evangelical Climate Initiative statement, a project of Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president of government relations for the NAE, accepts the environmental movement’s interpretation of the changes in global climate as stemming from man-made emissions.

The Evangelical Climate Initiative statement claims that “climate change” is “human-induced” by the burning of fossil fuels. The statement accepts the environmentalist doctrine that says the long-term effects of human-induced “climate change” will result in the deaths of “millions of people…most of them our poorest global neighbors,” through climatological disasters such as hurricane Katrina.

The ISA letter’s signatories urge the NAE not to adopt a policy on “climate change” saying, “We believe there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue.”

On March 1, the signatories of the ISA letter wrote to Dr. L. Roy Taylor, Chairman of the Board of the National Association of Evangelicals asking for the ousting of Rev. Cizik, who they say, has no business presenting his personal opinion as settled fact and as NAE policy.

Rev. Cizik’s “relentless” campaign on climate change is “dividing and demoralizing” the NAE, says the letter. 

“The existence of global warming and its implications for mankind is a subject of heated controversy throughout the world. It does appear that the earth is warming, but the disagreement focuses on why it might be happening and what should be done about it,” the letter states.

The letter’s writers say Rev. Cizik and others “are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.”

One of the ISA letter’s signatories, Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told National Public Radio that although the Bible calls upon human beings to care for the earth, that “human beings come first in God's created order.”

Read the letter from the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (Adobe Reader required):
http://www.interfaithstewardship.org/pdf/NAE-appeal%20letter.pdf

Visit the ISA website:
http://www.interfaithstewardship.org/pages/home.php

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Environmentalism to be New World Religion?
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2000/aug/00083002.html

LifeSiteNews.com Special Report:
The Inherent Racism of Population Control
http://www.lifesite.net/waronfamily/Population_Control/Inherentracism.pdf

 Back to Top

---

MORE NEWS: LifeSiteNews.com Home Page  Last 10 Days   Archives   Special Reports

Copyright © LifeSiteNews.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License. You may republish this article or portions of it without request provided the content is not altered and it is clearly attributed to "LifeSiteNews.com". Any website publishing of complete or large portions of original LifeSiteNews articles MUST additionally include a live link to www.LifeSiteNews.com. The link is not required for excerpts. Republishing of articles on LifeSiteNews.com from other sources as noted is subject to the conditions of those sources.