The Cornwall Alliance, the roots of which we saw in Part 1, almost got its start in 2000, though with different name, constituency, and mission.

That was when the short-lived Interfaith Council on Environmental Stewardship got its start. It grew out of a meeting of 25 Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish theologians, economists, environmental scientists, and policy specialists in October 1999, at a retreat center in West Cornwall, CT.

Sponsored by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and organized by Acton President Rev. Robert Sirico, SJ, the meeting consisted of three days of conversation aimed at fleshing out a Biblical, Judeo-Christian alternative to the mostly secularist or Eastern mystical worldviews that dominated the environmental movement of the 1960s through 1990s. As an adjunct scholar of the Acton Institute, I was invited to attend.

I remember the meeting as one in which old friendships solidified and new ones began, iron sharpened iron as bright thinkers compared and challenged each other’s ideas, and hopes rose high that we could launch a movement thousands, and then millions, could embrace—a movement that celebrated the principles of private property, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, and the rule of law that underlay the conquest of poverty in the Western world, while applying to them principles of personal responsibility, compassion for the poor, and care for creation that all too often were missing from the free-market movement of which we understood ourselves to be a part.

But we left that meeting with little to say, as a group, to the rest of the world. That wasn’t too surprising—we were a very individualistic bunch, and most of us thought, and still do, that good things get done mostly by individuals and small groups, not by governments or even large corporations. Yet we needed to say something.

Two close friends of mine, David Rothbard, a Jewish convert to Reformed evangelical Protestantism, and Craig Rucker, another evangelical, who in the 1980s had founded the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), realized I’d been taking lots of notes during the meeting. After the meeting ended, they urged me to draft a short, simple statement of principles that would reflect the consensus reached in that meeting while leaving room for different people to develop those principles in different ways. I took up the challenge, and soon we shared the draft with the other participants and invited revisions. Over several weeks, the document developed, and at last we were all satisfied with the results.

With encouragement and cooperation from the Acton Institute and other organizations represented, we began seeking endorsements from religious leaders around the United States and the world. We finally made the document public in March of 2000, calling it the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, reflecting the place where we’d met. Some 1,500 religious leaders—evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews, and even some non-Christians—endorsed it before we made it public. Soon thousands of laymen and leaders from all walks of life had done so.

Among the better-known evangelical signers were Campus Crusade for Christ founder and president Bill Bright; Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson; Focus on the Family President James Dobson; American Family Association President Donald Wildmon; and Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church Pastor and Evangelism Explosion founder D. James Kennedy.

Along with the declaration itself, we launched a small, informal network called the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship (ICES) with a website (now defunct). A tentative plan had been for me to lead the organization, but other things demanded too much of my time (raising seven children, teaching at a college, moving from Tennessee to Florida to teach at a seminary, and completing my Ph.D.). So aside from the Cornwall Declaration, ICES withered away before it achieved much more. But the Cornwall Declaration was a cornerstone, a foundational document, if someone could build on it—and five years later, it got a new lease on life. See Part 3 for the continuing story.

Go to Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

Photo by Dillon Austin on Unsplash.