Here’s Joel Hunter, “senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed, in Longwood, Florida, and author of A NEW KIND OF CONSERVATIVE, talks to PBS’ Religion & Ethics program about religion’s role in the 2008 presidential election and the political and religious interests of a new generation of young evangelicals.”

According to the Associated Baptist Press,

The presidential candidates have agreed to participate in a “compassion forum” at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. on August 16. Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, extended the invitation. Warren will moderate the forum, which will focus on moral-values issues — such as poverty, the environment and global AIDS relief — in which many centrist and younger evangelicals have taken an increasing interest.

Dr. Lowell “Rusty” Pritchard, a resource economist, is the National Director of Outreach for the Evangelical Environmental Network and the editor of Creation Care magazine, a Christian environmental quarterly.

Andrea Cohen-Kiener: Does your mandate for climate change come from Genesis?

Rusty Pritchard: Yes, but as an Evangelical Christian, I often go to John 3:16 which starts off, “for God so loved the world.” Most Evangelicals hear that word “world” and think it means all the people in the world. But the word is cosmos. And it fits with the story of creation in Genesis that God loves his whole creation.

Cohen-Kiener: We need to acknowledge our grandeur and our smallness simultaneously. I’ve experienced a resistance in the Jewish community to environmental efforts; I’ve heard often over the past ten years, “we have more important issues to address.” Have you experienced similar speed bumps?

Pritchard: The biggest speed bump is a limited conception of God, and a comfortable conservatism that is scared of change. I ask people, “what is it that conservatives should be conserving?” Of course we need to conserve natural resources, families and the ability of families to make a living. We need also to conserve beautiful places, including small towns and farms, all that makes human civilization good and beautiful and diverse. We can respect diversity because it’s a blessing from God. That takes us past the shallow conservatism of fearing new ideas and deeper to a conservatism that says we ought to do our best to take care of the natural world.

Cohen-Kiener: In my community, there are primarily two speed bumps. First, my people are a minority and there’s a natural tendency toward particularism — taking care first of oneself, one’s people, one’s family. The universalism of environmental makes some Jews feel it’s not an essentially Jewish issue.

Pritchard: Even though it’s not demographically true, Evangelicals also feel like an embattled minority culture. Our dominant myth is that we’re a faithful remnant that acknowledges the truth even though the world has gone another direction. Until recently, our community viewed environmentalism as a liberal issue, or as a popular fad. But because our theology says that God’s character can be seen in the created world, many conservative Christians are beginning to be concerned about creation care. In that view, destroying creation and permitting ecological degradation are like ripping pages out of scripture.

Cohen-Kiener: Let’s talk about the pervasive value of consumerism in our culture, our deep hungers of the spirit and flesh. Our culture is so illiterate about the hungers of the spirit that we try to fill up that hunger with a new car or fancy vacation. And we’re polluting the planet in that effort. We need a counterbalance to consumerism.

Pritchard: I agree. We have such a fundamental addiction to consuming. The Jewish Sabbath is an antidote to that hunger. It helps us test what we can give up from material culture. The Sabbath idea jumps out of every part of Scripture — the rhythms of rest and satisfaction and enjoyment of the created order are meant to pervade all of our lives. There are weekly rhythms and cycles of seven years and the jubilee cycle of 49 years, all celebrating the sufficiency and the providence of God, where we rest and enjoy and encounter with delight the works of God. The Fourth Commandment requires not only your rest, but the rest of all of your household, including everyone who works for you and all of your animals. And the land itself. It demands we not push to the limits our ecological systems or the people who work for us.

I’ve just returned from a pastors’ conference in New York City where some of the urban churches are trying to reclaim the idea of cities as good places. Evangelicals generally hold an anti-urban bias that comes from a vision of our faith as a remnant existing outside of the mainstream of culture. There’s an inability to see cities as places that need investment and work, as places to build meaningful community. In a highly urbanized culture we have to rethink our environmental work — conserving not only wilderness or endangered species but also building sustainable communities. I wonder whether there’s something to learn there from Jewish tradition, which thrives in cities.

Cohen-Kiener: A city is a manmade place as opposed to the wild. It raises questions about how to create sustainable structures.

Pritchard: The pastor of Church of the Redeemer in New York City, Tim Keller, is trying to redefine a city to include small towns throughout the agricultural landscape. He envisions multiuse, walkable, human settlements that have density and diversity. Those settlements can be megacities or smaller places where people live in community, and where culture is created. God either wants us in the country or in the city, but I’m not sure we should try to mix the two, as in a suburb.

Cohen-Kiener: That brings us to another, related, issue, environmental justice, and questions about air quality, transfer stations, garbage dumps, what’s called source point pollution, which is almost always located around the world in nonwhite population centers.

Pritchard: The worst stuff gets dumped on the poorest communities and on ethnic minorities. Within blocks of our church there’s a toxic waste facility, a trash transfer station, chemical plant, an impoundment lot for towed vehicles.

Cohen-Kiener: When we talk about environmental justice we need to do so in partnership with the poor and with the “other.” If there was a garbage transfer station in the western suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut where I’m sitting right now people would be much more avid in their support of reduce, reuse, recycle and pre-cycle. The technology and the market forces would come into play more quickly if the consequences were borne evenly and appropriately.

Pritchard: Maybe we need a public policy that puts toxic waste treatment facilities and landfills only in the zip codes with the highest per capita income.

Systems and institutions can be sinful in ways different than individuals, who are filled with flaws like jealously, pride, and rage. Environmental issues open a window onto the economic and social systems that are unjust and often racist. As an economist, I think our public policies and the ways businesses operate will change once they face the costs of the pollution that they now get to dispose of largely for free. Climate policy may involve getting the right price on carbon dioxide so that it becomes a part of the price of all of the goods that we buy and sell and therefore we implicitly take it into account even if we aren’t explicitly looking for the greenest option. It must hit us in our pocketbook. We need to think explicitly about challenging businesses to be not just responsive to price signals and creating value for their shareholders but to think about ethics in a much broader sense and to allow their business models to be contaminated by their sense of morality and not pretend that there is this huge divide that businesses are sort of amoral institutions.

Cohen-Kiener: Influencing minds and hearts is going to open a very powerful, passionate, articulate, empowered wellspring as we reexamine what we really need, what we really want, what really makes us feel wealthy and safe. It’s going to look like spending less and having less. It’s going to feel like more wealth. The root of this sin is disconnection. And the cure is connection.

Republished with permission from Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility (www.shma.com) June 2008.

Reacting to recent visits by Sens. McCain and Obama to the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy community in the U.S., Kety Esquivel of The Sanctuary and CrossLeft, talks about the spectrum of concerns among Christian Latin@s, including health care, immigration, and education.

View The Sanctuary’s Candidate Questionnaire.

Addressed:

• How many votes can Obama’s religious rhetoric gain him? (06:40)
• Did McCain shoot himself in the foot with Catholics? (03:46)
• The Obama-Dobson smackdown (03:23)
• Is abortion still a big deal to Catholics? (07:24)
• Mark tells Obama to find an anti-feminist Souljah moment (05:13)
• Which VP picks could sway religious voters? (06:44)

In today’s Wall Street Journal piece, “Global Warming as Mass Neurosis,” editorial board member Bret Stephens rips into the faithful:

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” That’s Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on.

So radical, that idea to consume less and walk more. I guess that would baffle the car service elite.

If he wants to attack folks who care for creation as being “awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society,” I can think of tens of million Americans who would accept that critique.

Furthermore, this op-ed shows that the men who wield the most control on the market are more than happy to pay lip service to our religious values, except when, as during the fights over abolition or now over climate change, the results would mean a few less million in their pockets.

The heads of the Wall Street Journal call Americans “Biblical” and “radical” if they drive less, buy less, and walk more. Talk about sophistry. The deniers are not only content to dismiss science, now they attack Americans for their religious values and private decisions over consumption. That’s not even good faith in markets, that’s panjandrum presumption.

With gas prices only going up and American bodies suffering for lack of exercise, once again it’s clear whose health and wealth the Wall Street hoodoos are willing to prey over to make a buck. As market-driven foreclosures escalate, oil speculators spin, and global temperatures rise, look out gas conserving, frugal shopping, radical walkers. To the Wall Street Journal Global Affairs editorial expert: we’re the real problem

Religion in 21st Century American Democracy, arguing for some fresh approaches on religion in American public life.

David Hollinger, the Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History at the University of California, Berkeley, argues in his essay for a strong civic sphere in which democratic national solidarity and civic patriotism trump all religious loyalties. He asserts that religious ideas are too often given a pass and argues that they be critically scrutinized.

Eboo Patel, a scholar and activist who founded the Interfaith Youth Core, calls in his essay for the vigorous participation of religion in public life, founded on principles of religious pluralism. He argues that religious voices, in all their particularity, have a legitimate and important role to play in public debate. And he spells out ways in which interfaith collaboration is strengthening civic and political institutions.

Melissa Rogers examines how the tradition of religious freedom can help define the role of religion in current civic debates. Melissa Rogers serves as visiting professor of religion and public policy at Wake Forest University Divinity School. She previously served as the executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in Washington, D.C. Previous to her leadership at the Pew Forum, Rogers served as general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty based in Washington, D.C. In 2004, Rogers was recognized by National Journal as one of the church-state experts “politicians will call on when they get serious about addressing an important public policy issue.”

The iconic public square where Americans of the past used to gather to debate the politics of the day is long gone from most cities and towns, but the spirited conversations that once defi ned these places–both in myth and fact–are alive and well today. The topics of our current political and cultural conversations range from the mundane to the profound, but a recurring theme has to do with religion and politics–in particular, whether religion should be a force shaping our public policies and our common civic life.

Of course, this is not a new conversation. Contrasting views about the role of religion in public life predate our nation’s birth–from the Massachusett s Bay Colony, where officials collected taxes to support the Puritan church and compelled att endance at its services, to the Founders who disestablished religion from the state and drafted the Constitution without mention of God.

In recent years, these conversations have been heating up. Invectives fly back and forth as opponents stake out mutually exclusive claims on behalf of truth, fairness, and the American way. Listening to each side, one is hard-pressed to tell whether we are a God-saturated, intolerant, anti-intellectual theocracy–or a severely secular nation that punishes the practice of religion and banishes God altogether from our laws, policies, and public life.

Debating the Divine: Religion in 21st Century American Democracy aims to turn down the heat and turn up the light. Because the issue of religion in public life is complex, encompassing theory, history, and practice, we purposely did not set up a narrowly-focused debate in which each side shot at the other, and the side with the fiercest arguments and most adherents won. Instead, we have chosen to examine the many facets of the issue in a thoughtful way, in hopes of finding new insights and, perhaps, common ground.

One of the biggest concerns about the news media covering religious news and issues of Evangelicals revolves around the central fact of who actually represents the point of view of this large diverse group.

The on-going controversy and questions as to whether the Religious Right is dead or is irrelevant to the issues of the 2008 Presidential election continues to generate more questions and interest in the mainstream news media.

This election year we have seen a resurgence of new voices raising concerns and wanting to be heard. Many members of the Evangelical sector of the Church have tired of being aligned with the voices of the Religious Right and in particular of Rev James Dobson.

In Colorado, a diverse and cross cultural interfaith group of religious leaders are tired of being misrepresented by Dobson and his cohorts at Focus in the Family and have formed “We Believe Colorado.” We Believe Colorado has committed to work together on issues of common interest and to represent faith groups not aligned with the dying breed of the Religious Right leadership.

A question continually bought up, “Is why does the cable and network news media think that Rev. James Dobson speaks for the majority of religious and value voters?” That is one question We Believe Colorado can answer. Dobson and company do not speak for the new voices of religious leaders fighting for justice and righteousness and who have no interest in taunting our faith as a wedge issue.

Read More Here.

The June 30 New Yorker has an article (not online) by Frances FitzGerald on “The New Evangelicals: A growing challenge to the religious right.”