Moving Heaven and Earth

Not surprisingly, the ECI rebels have been dismissed by their fellow conservatives as enviro-hippies, Birkenstocked believers, and rogue evangelicals. Everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, has taken a shot at Cizik. "What would we solve if we weren't breaking down barriers?" he asks. "That's not being a leader."

Cizik, Ball, and their 86 supporters are spearheading a "great awakening of religious life," says Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. "In terms of importance, it's comparable to the Enlightenment, the Reformation. This is about humankind realizing the consequences of its impact on the planet."

The chief architects of the Evangelical Climate Initiative are an unlikely duo: the consummate insider and the impassioned outsider. Cizik has been vice president of governmental affairs for the NAE for 26 years. His Washington office reflects his inside-the-Beltway status. There's a photo with former President Bill Clinton and a letter from President Bush. Cizik, 54, is tall and lean, with piercing blue eyes and a folksy charm. He's as apt to tell a joke about lobbyists as he is to quote Scripture. He says that every morning begins with the same prayer: "God, help me to meet the right people, say the right thing, and do the right thing." Access is rarely a problem. He has the ear of reporters, White House staffers, and congressional staffers , not to mention pastors. Until four years ago, however, environmentalists weren't on his radar.

In 2002, Jim Ball, the man behind the "what would jesus drive?" anti-suv campaign, set out to recruit someone in the mainstream. He found Cizik.

Just one block away, at Riverside Baptist Church, Jim Ball, 44, works on the fringes. He's shorter than Cizik, with wavy graying hair and a calm, earnest aspect. He still preaches on occasion, but as the only full-time employee of the Evangelical Environmental Network, Ball is considered an outsider--a "liberal evangelical," as more-conservative conservatives have branded him. No presidential pictures here. A wall-sized world map, stacks of environmental reports, and a what would jesus drive? bumper sticker. Ball generated widespread media attention with that campaign.

In 2002, Ball and other environmental evangelicals set out to recruit someone in the mainstream. Cizik was perfect. They invited him to a climate-change conference in Oxford, England. "I went thinking, I'll listen to what they have to say, but it won't change my views," Cizik recalls. However, the evidence he heard from evangelical scientists (on higher global temperatures, the melting of polar ice caps, escalating pollution), combined with his sense of obligation to all of creation, especially the poorest, most vulnerable people, won him over. "I had a conversion," he says.

Back home, Cizik traded in his RV and two cars for a pair of Toyota Priuses, and continued researching climate change. He and Ball pursued other evangelical leaders just as Ball had targeted Cizik. They told their conversion stories. They invoked the Scripture. "We want them to see that reducing pollution is loving your neighbor," says Ball. "When people think of the environment, they usually think of only trees, water, and animals." To deflect the liberal associations of the term "environmentalism," Cizik and Ball used a more recent one: "creation care."

In the summer of 2004, Ball and Cizik helped organize their own climate-change conference at a Christian retreat on the Chesapeake Bay. About 30 leaders signed a covenant, committing themselves to learn more and to recruit others. "We're able to convince people on climate change because they can trust the information," says Ball. "It's coming from evangelicals." Still, Cizik says, "We couldn't do much arm-twisting. All we could do was say, 'Join us and be on the right side of history.' "

Stuart Shepard isn't buying it. He's an online editor at Focus on the Family and a spokesman there. Dr. Dobson, the group's founder, signed the letter urging the NAE not to embrace global warming. "There are certain issues that define what it means to be an evangelical," says Shepard. "Global warming doesn't fit into that. And we don't think it should divide us." Besides, says Shepard, a former TV meteorologist, "there's not a consensus in the scientific community about the severity of the problem and what to do about it."