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TechnoratiWASHINGTON – Not much has been heard about Richard Cizik since his forced resignation as vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals last year. But the evangelical leader re-emerged in Washington, D.C., on Sunday to give a lecture on interfaith creation care in observance of Earth Day.
(Photo: The Christian Post)Evangelical Christian leader Richard Cizik speaks at the 5th Richard W. Snowdon Lecture hosted by the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington on Sunday, April 19, 2009 in Washington, D.C.
Surrounded by Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, and Christians sitting in the pews of a United Methodist church, Cizik spoke about the need for new strategies and ideas to advance the environmental issue.
“The best strategy is to bring religious communities together with scientists,” Cizik declared as the keynote speaker of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington’s Fifth Richard W. Snowdon Lecture. “Yes, together the same we must do this. So the strategy has to be what you are about at the Interfaith Conference.”
People of diverse faiths and spiritualities, as well as people with no faith at all, Cizik said, can easily have dialogue and work together when it comes to protecting the Earth.
“The tinder is dry, the condition is right and all it takes is a heart here and a match there and the interfaith religious community is going to wake up,” he said during the “Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth” program.
Sunday’s event was an early observance of the official Earth Day which falls on Wednesday. Before the interfaith event, Cizik had spoken to the crowd of thousands gathered at the National Mall for the Earth Day Concert.
Cizik has been at the forefront of the green evangelical movement and an outspoken advocate for evangelicals to put creation care among their top priorities. He was named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world in 2008 for his work on climate change.
For years, Cizik traveled across the country to speak at churches, Christian colleges and secular universities about the need for environmental care through a change in personal lifestyle combined with government policies. With evangelicals, he argues that creation care is a more holistic understanding of the evangelical pro-life stance.
In 2007, Cizik partnered with Harvard scientist and Nobel laureate Eric Chivian to form a coalition of evangelicals and scientists to press the U.S. government to change its environmental policies while at the same time mobilizing members of the faith community to make personal lifestyle changes.
Later that same year, Cizik also teamed up with the U.S. government to host a luncheon where dozens of evangelical leaders learned how to make their church building more energy efficient. The event was the first religious-government partnership to tackle energy consumption in religious facilities.
But Cizik’s evangelical-environment push has not gone without obstacles. Several prominent evangelical leaders, including James C. Dobson, Gary L. Bauer, and Tony Perkins, were angry that Cizik seemingly spoke on behalf of all evangelicals on the issue of global warming. They argue that there is no consensus within the evangelical community that global warming is real and mainly man-made.
The conservative evangelical leaders also charged Cizik of diverting attention away from more important issues like homosexuality and abortion. Continue »
