John Clark The padre of wild places: Peter Illyn barnstorms the Northwest, taking his Christian eco-message to the kids. "We've defaulted to New Age pagans and industrials." —Peter Illyn

PETER ILLYN'S CRUSADE IS BUT one sign of the greening of religious communities across the nation. After a long silence, many of America's 155 million church and synagogue members are hearing a biblical call to action. As Illyn wages his one-man crusade to bring environmental awareness to America's evangelical youth, national eco-faith leaders are helping to frame the larger debate, swing votes, and broker agreements on national environmental issues.

It's hard to find a big environmental issue that the "faith community" hasn't begun to affect in the past two years. The National Council of Churches, the nation's largest coalition of Protestant and Orthodox Christian denominations, is in the midst of a campaign to push for national and international action on global warming. In the Bible Belt, rapacious chip mills are destroying the last of the great Southern forests, and local preachers are leading the grassroots fight to save what's left. In southern California, a group called Christians Caring for Creation has taken the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to court to protect the endangered Alameda whipsnake and arroyo toad. In northern California, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the nation's leading organization of Reform Judaism, teamed up with a local group known as the Redwood Rabbis to bring pressure on corporate raider Charles Hurwitz, a prominent member of Houston's Jewish community and CEO of Maxxam Corporation, the conglomerate that organized a hostile takeover of the Pacific Lumber Company and initiated a massive clear-cutting operation, to find a way to preserve a portion of the redwood Headwaters Forest. Letters signed by hundreds of religious leaders helped give the Clinton administration the political cover necessary to push ahead with its policy on roadless areas in national forests, safeguarding nearly 60 million acres of wildlands. And perhaps most startling, after a three-year study, eight Roman Catholic bishops in the Pacific Northwest have just published a pastoral letter addressing the Columbia River's salmon crisis, an extraordinary document that could become the moral cornerstone for a regional recovery plan.

Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), the nation's largest interdenominational coalition—member groups include mainline and African-American Protestants, Jews, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox and evangelical Christians—believes the current eco-faith activism reflects a profound shift in religious belief. "This isn't just another issue for us," he says. "We're not interested in being the shock troops for the Green Party. Care for creation has become a central element of religious life. It goes to the heart of what it means to be a faithful Jew, Christian, or Muslim."

The influence of faith-based environmentalists has become so great, in fact, that it's inspired something of a counterreformation— and some preemptive defensiveness on behalf of the new Bush administration. Last year, a group of conservative Christian and Jewish clergy and scholars announced the formation of the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship (ICES). Its chief spokesman, Father Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest and president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan, avows that it is a politically centrist effort, but the ICES roster reads like a who's who of the religious right: Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Campus Crusade for Christ founder William Bright, conservative radio host Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Watergate felon and Prison Fellowship Ministries founder Charles Colson. What's more, ICES's positions tilt unerringly to the right. Global warming? Overblown, says ICES. Population crisis? What population crisis? asks ICES. Rampant species loss? Not our problem. These are fashionable causes, the council asserts, which sap attention and resources from more pressing environmental issues, such as Third World sanitation and primitive industrial practices.

While Gorman's NRPE preachers were busy polishing up their Creation Sunday sermons for the 30th anniversary of Earth Day in April 2000, Father Sirico fired off a mass mailing to religious leaders around the country charging the NRPE with waging an "audacious, mind-numbing" campaign to promote theologically unorthodox views. "The NRPE does not represent us—or you," wrote Sirico. "Its religious and social doctrines—however well intentioned they may be—are at odds with our traditions. Its agenda will have devastating, unintended consequences for humanity and our world." Not only was the NRPE wrong on issues like global warming, the letter intimated, but with all of its "Mother Earth" talk, certain religious groups within the coalition were flirting with heresy.

With George W. Bush settling in at the White House, the conservative religious group finds itself poised to help steer and spin the new administration's environmental policies. Sirico's market-friendly eco-theology dovetails nicely with Bush's belief that private enterprise can take the environmental reins. "The free economy," Sirico wrote in an Acton Institute commentary last year, "helps ensure that good environmental stewards are rewarded for their efforts, without imposing higher taxes on our least fortunate citizens and depriving our weakest neighbors of their most basic needs." In December, Sirico had the ear of the incoming president at a sit-down in Austin, Texas, with about 20 other religious leaders, including ICES member Daniel Lapin, who also heads Toward Tradition, a conservative Jewish-Christian organization that promotes "traditional, faith-based, American principles." According to Lapin, faith and environmentalism were addressed "indirectly." "I said to [President Bush], 'The epidemic of secularism unleashed on America by the Clinton administration is over. That doesn't mean a theocracy; it means the same hospitality to faith that the Founding Fathers intended,'" Lapin recalled. "If you are hostile to faith, then people are simply evolved animals, nothing more, nothing less. But with a faith view, human beings occupy a position of responsibility at the apex of the pyramid. I think we'll see more of that [way of thinking]."

What Sirico and his colleagues provide is ammunition—the theological and intellectual underpinnings to counter religious-left arguments in favor of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming or against opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. And, as Sirico brings more religious leaders into ICES, he may provide exactly the sort of political cover to conservative policymakers that progressive eco-religious groups have been giving green politicians for the last few years.

For now, the religious factions are facing off in a fairly rarefied and generally peaceable manner. But with a host of issues coming front and center in the first year of George W. Bush's presidency— federal land-use policies in the West, opening up ANWR, genetically engineered foods, global warming—faith-based environmentalists and their newly empowered right-wing counterparts may be forced to wage a holy war on the battlefields of Capitol Hill. After a presidential campaign in which groups like the Sierra Club were among the leading Bush-bashers, leaders of the religious environmental movement are hoping that their message might appeal to Republicans predisposed to deflecting the arguments of secular enviros. "I think Bush might be more open to what religious groups, as opposed to environmental groups, have to say," says Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). "It's important that he see the connection between the environment and his faith."

At least one leader of former President George Herbert Walker Bush's own Episcopal faith is girding to oppose any new Bush administration move to authorize drilling in ANWR. Last December, Mark MacDonald, the bishop of Alaska's 48 Episcopal churches, issued a statement supporting continued protection of ANWR. MacDonald's comments riled Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the powerful Republican who has long supported oil interests in Congress. "The senator is—or maybe was—Episcopalian, and it really pissed him off," says MacDonald. "But we're deeply concerned about human rights issues related to the Gwich'in people and the refuge."

It remains to be seen how much weight the religious-green message will carry with the new president. Bush has described himself as an evangelical Methodist who underwent a reconnection to his faith in the mid-1980s. "I am not all that comfortable describing my faith, because in the political world, there are a lot of people who say, 'Vote for me, I'm more religious than my opponent,'" Bush said during the campaign last fall. "And those kind of folks make me a little nervous."