Last Friday, Sept. 21, nearly 50 people filed into St. John’s Episcopal Church in Portsmouth. The cavernous hall echoed with greetings and introductions as guests settled into their seats to hear Bert Cohen’s presentation on sustainability. The church might seem like an unlikely place to discuss global warming, pollution and sustainability, but Friday night’s event kicked off an entire weekend of interfaith gatherings focused on what individuals and the religious community can do to address climate change and become more sustainable.

When the lights at St. John’s finally died down, Cohen introduced a framework for understanding and working toward sustainability called The Natural Step. Cohen, who recently received the 2007 Sarah Farmer Peace Award, has been teaching students about sustainability at UNH for several years, but he started his career as an elementary school teacher. His experience teaching different age groups has helped him develop a simple presentation for a complicated issue. By speaking at the church, Cohen spread his message to a new audience.

Another event that took place this weekend was the “Better Together: Fostering Interfaith Collaboration for Sustainability,” held at the Green Acre Bahá’í School in Eliot, Maine. The Bahá’Í School held a similar conference last year, focusing on what was happening within the Bahá’í faith to address global warming. “At the end of that weekend, it was thought that it would be good to see what other faiths are doing,” said Diane Brandon, a member of the Bahá’í assembly who lives in Eliot. The idea was to establish a “good networking and learning exchange” among religious organizations on the Seacoast, she said. “We’ll try to think together how to reach out, to widen, to ripple out some of the work that is being done.”

Peter Adriance, of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’í Faith, was the keynote speaker at “Better Together.” Adriance is co-chair of the Faith Sector Team for the U.S. Partnership for the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, an international effort to improve education regarding sustainable development.

Issues like climate change and sustainability have gained momentum in schools, politics and the media, making it much easier to access information. Churches are becoming increasingly active in environmental movements. For many people, the church offers a trusted voice on an issue that’s often mired in controversy. But others wonder if church efforts to impact policy cross the dividing line between religion and government.

Rebecca Gould is an associate professor of Religion at Middlebury College who specializes in the intermixing of religion and the environment. According to Gould, Earth Day inspired some faith-based work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but churches only recently became reactivated on environmental issues.

“It’s a pretty recent development, over the last 10 years or so,” Gould said. “Religious groups have come late to environmental issues because they thought, ‘Oh, that’s not our business.’ Now it’s swaying into another direction and it’s really exciting to see. Things are happening all over the country.”

National Religious Partnership for the Environment formed in 1993. “That was really the beginning,” Gould said. The NRPE was founded as a consortium of four organizations representing Protestantism, Evangelical Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism. Although the partnership looks at a number of environmental issues, climate change quickly became its central focus.

In the Bahá’í’ Faith, members have been working on environmental issues for the last 20 years. “There are individual Bahá’ís that have done a lot for a long time,” said Diane Brandon. The Bahá’í faith was founded in the 19th century by a Persian religious leader named Baha’u’llah. His teachings state that all of humanity is one family, and that every religious faith has something to offer. He claimed that religious figures like Jesus Christ, Mohammed and Buddha all taught variations of the same core truths. According to Brandon, “all scriptures have spoken about taking care of the Earth, and climate change transcends whatever differences we have.”

A number of national organizations have been created to help churches and religious organizations address environmental issues. They offer information packets, tips on giving sermons, adult education programs and other materials.

“Any church or synagogue that wanted to go green has tremendous resources, but they really have to have someone that wants to do this. If they want it to happen, there’s now a lot of resources,” Gould said.

Climate change has been a galvanizing issue for many churches. Starting in the 1980s with health problems related to air pollution, many people began to recognize that environmental issues have an important social justice component. If climate change continues unmitigated, it will most likely be those living in poverty who suffer the most.

“With things like global warming, there is now a sense of a catastrophic event that could affect all of humanity. There is a sense that this is not just an environmental crisis, but it’s a social justice issue, because the poor always tend to pay a higher price,” said Kurk Dorsey, associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, who specializes in environmental history.

“It is a moral and spiritual issue,” Gould said. “The reasons why we have climate change have to do with greed and sloth. We’ve lived out of proportion to how we should live as humans.” For more conservative and evangelical churches, social justice is at the heart of the climate change issue. “Churches are saying, ‘Yes, we still stand by our traditional concerns, but we also see climate change as a social justice issue.’ They are saying, ‘We have concern about creation and concern about one’s neighbors.’ And, certainly, global warming affects both,” Gould said.

Paying more attention to the environment signifies an interesting shift for many Christian denominations. Historically, Christian churches have mostly focused on the afterlife.

“Now, with the greening of churches, there is this real understanding that this world is important,” Gould said. “The current Christian activity on ecological issues is a recovery of the energy they had in the civil rights movement and at other times in history. It helps the Christians as much as it helps the environment,” she added.

In many faiths, a careful study of scripture or sacred doctrine can reveal passages that deal specifically with the responsibility of humans to be good stewards of the Earth.

Many Christians point out that, in Genesis, God gave dominion of the Earth to man. But, according to Gould, a closer reading shows that God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to care for it. The original Hebrew text states that Adam was put there “to serve the garden.”

The Feast of St. Francis has evolved into a celebration of nature in some Catholic churches. Animals are often invited into the church to be blessed.

“It’s used as a major ecological holiday of sorts,” Gould said. Pope Benedict, who is theologically conservative, has also started talking about ecological issues and climate change, causing many people to refer to him as the Green Pope, Gould said. 

The Unitarian Universalist church offers seven principles of faith,  and the seventh is “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” Five years ago, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations formed a national committee called the Ministry of Earth. In June 2006, the Association of Congregations made a statement of conscience regarding global warming. “We declare by this Statement of Conscience that we will not acquiesce to the ongoing degradation and destruction of life that human actions are leaving to our children and grandchildren. We as Unitarian Universalists are called to join with others to halt practices that fuel global warming/climate change, to instigate sustainable alternatives, and to mitigate the impending effects of global warming/climate change with just and ethical responses. As a people of faith, we commit to a renewed reverence for life and respect for the interdependent web of all existence,” the statement reads.

Even if theology doesn’t persuade some people, hard science is indisputable. Temperatures are rising at a faster rate than ever before, and most scientists believe humans have something to do with it. So, while fewer people are questioning the science behind global warming, more people have started to ask what they can do to make a difference. Several churches are offering tips and programs to help their parishioners reduce carbon output and environmental impact.

South Church, the Unitarian Univeralist congregation on State Street in Portsmouth, offers the 1-2-3 Pledge. It first challenges participants to turn their thermostat down one degree during the winter and up one degree during the summer. Next, it requires people to reduce their driving speed by two miles per hour. Finally, the pledge asks people to change three household light bulbs to compact florescent bulbs. If people complete the first three steps, they can move on to the 4-5-6 Pledge, which includes completing a comprehensive energy audit worksheet, contributing ideas of how to cut carbon emissions and talking to six people outside of their congregation about climate change.

South Church measures the number of people who’ve taken the pledge by giving them a paper leaf and asking them to put it on a paper tree in the church lobby. People who complete the 4-5-6 Pledge get an apple, which is also placed on the tree.

According to Judy Miller, co-chair of the South Church Ministry for Earth Committee, there are about 80 leaves on the tree and 15 to 20 apples. Membership at the South Church numbers 190 households.

St. John’s Episcopal Church in Portsmouth has also adopted the 1-2-3 Pledge to reduce carbon emissions. Members of St. John’s formed a Stewardship of the Earth Committee to address the issue of global warming as a congregation. Although the committee was formed before the premiere of Al Gore’s 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the movie was instrumental in forming the committee’s mission, according to Sarah Brown, who co-founded the stewardship committee. One of the committee’s first organized events was a screening of “An Inconvenient Truth.” According to Brown, over 300 people attended.

“Climate change is the number one issue facing the country right now. All the other things are not going to matter if we destroy the Earth,” Brown said. “We’re looking at the bigger picture of how we can have a smaller footprint.” Education has been the stewardship committee’s main focus, but that’s starting to change. “Education is not as big of an issue. We’ve moved on to what people can do,” Brown said. People already know what global warming is, she said. What they need to know now is how they can help curb the problem. 

In addition to educating their members, some churches have begun taking steps to reduce their own carbon emissions. The national Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth sponsors a process in which its churches can become certified as Green Sanctuaries. Becoming a Green Sanctuary means living out a commitment to the Earth by creating a sustainable lifestyle for church members as individuals and as a faith community. In order to qualify, each congregation has to meet several benchmarks in terms of worship, education, environmental justice and sustainable living. An environmental audit is often performed on the church’s facility.  

South Church recently had an audit on its State Street building, which took into account the church’s energy use patterns, landscaping practices, investment policies, social action projects and education programs. Church officials also looked at recycling practices, what kinds of cleaning supplies were being used and ways to reduce impact on the environment. After the audit, the church developed an action plan to become a Green Sanctuary. “We are doing very well, and we came up with lots of ideas of things we could do better on or new things. The idea of a Green Sanctuary is, start where you’re at and rise to a higher level,” Miller said.

St. John’s has also looked at its environmental impact. Before the Stewardship of the Earth Committee was formed, the church did a heat and energy audit of all its facilities and found several places where improvements could be made. The steam boiler was replaced in 2001. Insulation was added and storm windows were installed in 2002. The audit recommended that additional radiators be installed on the second-floor balcony. It also suggested that the church use more compact fluorescent light bulbs and install programmable thermostats to keep the temperature at a constant level.

According to a statement released by Gerry Simpkins, junior warden at St. John’s, the annual gas bill dropped from $24,000 in 2000 to roughly $19,000 in 2006. That represents about a 20 percent reduction in the annual fuel bill. “Given that the price of gas has risen significantly since 2000, it is clear that the efforts made to save energy at St. John’s have been successful,” Simpkins wrote.

Although U.S. government demands a strict separation between church and state, many Americans believe religion should play a more active role in government. But religion has always been a substantial force in American politics, at least indirectly influencing how people vote.

The St. John’s Stewardship of the Earth Committee has put a lot of emphasis on how individuals can make a difference.
“If people feel like they have a stake in this issue, they are more likely to demand change from the politicians in power,” Brown said. “We’ve had no leadership in this country. There is more and more information available out there and people are becoming more aware of it, but our leaders aren’t doing anything about it,” she added.

Faith-based groups are in a unique position to influence politics. Supporting a specific candidate would jeopardize a church’s nonprofit status, but trumpeting the importance of a particular issue is acceptable.

“Different churches and synagogues have different ideas of how much they should push politics,” Gould said. “With that said, I think that the extent to which churches, synagogues, teachers and theologians are talking about climate change, it’s going to get people to think, ‘OK, what politician am I going to vote for?’ I think that it’s going to play a role.”

The fact that so many churches are stepping up their environmental initiatives bodes well for candidates with green credentials.

“If you strongly believe in a set of moral values, you can’t just practice them on Sunday mornings, and you need to be electing leaders that reflect those values,” Brown said.

One of the most surprising conversions to the eco-faith camp has been Richard Cizek, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals. Pro-Bush and conservative on virtually every social issue, Cizek has come out in support of “creation care.” Evangelical Christians have been a significant force in American politics, especially during the Bush administration. In the 2008 presidential elections, Gould believes, “You’re going to see a fair number of evangelicals that want to talk about climate change.”

But, with the 1-2-3 Pledge and other programs, churches are proving that climate change doesn’t have to be a political issue. Responsibility for caring for the environment begins at the individual level, and recognizing that climate change affects everyone should help people of all political and religious persuasions work together.