Originally Published in Focus on the Family Citizen, July, 2007
Richard Cizik is no stranger to controversy. As vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Cizik has generated plenty of headlines — and cries of protest from fellow believers — for his increasingly caustic comments on what he sees as human-caused global warming.
But Cizik staked out new territory on the topic in early April, when he spoke at a daylong global-warming conference sponsored by Newsweek magazine.
Not content to merely repeat his mantra about global warming being “a moral and spiritual issue,” he dropped a major political bombshell.
“The [National Association of] Evangelicals,” he declared, “has every intention of making [global-warming legislation] a litmus test for evangelical support.”
[Editor’s note: The Heartland Institute’s James Taylor, managing editor of Environment and Climate News, was present when Cizik made the remarks and says, “Richard Cizik made it very clear that he believes he has the support of the NAE leadership in making global warming a central focus of evangelical Christianity and a litmus test of NAE support for government officials and political candidates.”–ECB]
His remarks shocked fellow evangelicals.
“That is an outrage,” said Bill Saunders, senior fellow for bioethics at the Family Research Council (FRC). “The litmus test should be the destruction of human beings and the undermining of marriage. Nothing else reaches that level.”
The NAE claims to speak for more than 50 denominations and 30 million individuals nationwide, but it has become increasingly out of step with that membership. An August 2006 poll strongly suggested global warming is not as high a priority for evangelicals as it is for Cizik.
According to the poll results, released by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, only 29 percent of white evangelicals said global warming is “a very serious problem.”
But that data haven’t stopped Cizik. In a June 2006 interview with Fast Company magazine, Cizik called those who resist his message “the old guard” that is “reaching up to grasp its authority back, like a horror movie where a hand comes out of the grave” — the “old guard,” in this case, being evangelical ministries such as FRC, Focus on the Family and the American Family Association.
The “old guard” did not remain silent. Focus on the Family joined 22 other evangelical organizations in signing a March 1 letter to the NAE board to ask it to rein in Cizik.
The long-term effects of Cizik’s comments have been for some evangelicals to ask what the NAE is becoming, and what that means for the future.
NAE board member Jerald Walz, who is also vice president for the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) and shares the concerns outlined in the letter, said the NAE is “at a crossroads.”
“They need to decide whether they are going to follow the Gospel of Jesus or the gospel for political activism,” Walz said. “There is some concern that we’re pursuing an agenda we haven’t pursued before — and who is driving it, and why, is a big question.”
Losing Balance
To understand how far to the left the NAE may be turning, one first needs to know its history.
In 1942, the year the NAE was founded, “fundamentalist” Christians dominated the church landscape, but many believed that political activism was not biblically mandated. The left-leaning National Council of Churches (NCC) had no such qualms.
“There’s always been a streak of left-wing politics [in the NCC] — a hint of Communist sympathy at that time,” explained Jay Richards, director of media at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.
To counter the NCC’s influence, the NAE established its Washington office in the 1970s, and in the 1980s expanded its lobbying role. Cizik became vice president for government affairs in 1997. Groups belonging to the NCC were barred from joining the NAE.
The NCC has not changed much over the last 60 years. Asked by Citizen where the organization stands on two issues important to most evangelical Christians—abortion and same-sex marriage—spokesman Daniel Webster said, “Our churches do not have a consensus on that. Some are one side of that issue, others on the other, and others are noncommittal, so we don’t have an official stand.” Judicial activism, he said, is “too political” for the NCC to speak about. Asked about the group’s level of concern about the threat posed by radical Islam, he emphatically replied, “None. In fact, our director of interfaith relations recently returned from Iran, where he met with several of the ayatollahs and [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad as part of the first official delegation in 28 years to visit Tehran.”
The NCC seems to be clear about one thing, however, and that is global warming. In early April, the main headline on its home page blared, “Global Warming demands immediate action.” The NCC maintains an activist arm, called Eco-Justice Programs, as part of its Justice and Advocacy Commission. The Eco-Justice Programs site says, “Climate change is a threat to all people and all of creation.”
The similarities between the NCC’s statements on global warming and Cizik’s are not lost on observers.
“For years, the NAE focused on salvation issues. Not any longer,” said Jan Markell, founder of Olive Tree Ministry, a watchdog group of the religious left. “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the NAE and the NCC anymore.”
Alan Wisdom, vice president of research and programs for IRD, agreed. In an April 19 essay titled “Uncertain Future: The National Association of Evangelicals After Ted Haggard,” Wisdom analyzed the topics mentioned in a Google search about the NAE, excluding former President Ted Haggard’s scandal with a male prostitute last November. Of the 471 non-Haggard mentions, 337 were about politics, and 37 percent of those were about the environment and global warming. The other political topics were immigration (5 percent), Sudan/Darfur (3 percent), upholding free exercise of religion in the U.S. military and elsewhere (3 percent) and in the Mideast (3 percent).
Only 3 percent of the Google results concerned the NAE’s opposition to same-sex marriage, and fewer than 1 percent involved opposing abortion, Wisdom found. Similarly, only 1 percent involved dialog with non-Christian religions — and fewer than 1 percent involved inviting non-believers to trust in Jesus Christ.
“It’s a pattern that’s very familiar from the mainline churches — leaders who feel very strongly about an issue and want to take a prophetic role of speaking a word for peace and justice as they see it,” Wisdom said, “despite the fact that there’s no clear biblical mandate for the policy positions they’re mandating, and no consensus among the constituency they’re supposed to represent, and that there hasn’t been an open debate with various positions considered before they reached this conclusion.”
Accountability
People who know him say Cizik appears to be speaking primarily for himself. The NAE board of directors has no official position on global warming; moreover, the executive committee has told the eight staff members to “stand by and not exceed in any fashion our approved and adopted statements concerning the environment.”
Neither Cizik nor NAE Executive Director Todd Bassett responded to Citizen’s interview requests, and interim President Leith Anderson declined to comment. Walz said no action has been taken to muzzle Cizik that he knows of — partly because of a perceived slight concerning the letter of complaint Focus and others sent in March.
[Focus on the Family released the letter on CitizenLink, its daily e-mail to grassroots activists, before the NAE board received it. When Focus learned of the error, it sent a letter of apology. The NAE board had not responded to the original letter at press time.]
“There was a lot of concern with how the letter was delivered, and the fact that the chairman received it six days after it was released on a Web site,” Walz said. “Where I sit, if my good friend offends me, I’ll tell him or her, ‘This was not a good thing,’ between us. But there seem to be few willing to do that in this case — or if there are, it’s so private that it has little effect.”
So whom does the NAE listen to, if not other major evangelical organizations? Who decides what bills in Congress the NAE will support or oppose?
The NAE does not ask its dues-paying members for their opinions before lobbying on Capitol Hill. Instead, the organization relies on a document, “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility,” to guide staff members in making immediate policy decisions.
In addition to general guidelines — remembering to treat opponents with “humility and civility,” for instance — the document makes a few points: Opposing the expansion of “rights talk” to include same-sex marriage or the right to die, and reminding environmentally minded Christians that while we are called to be good stewards, “we worship only the Creator and not the creation.” Beyond that, Walz said, any board member can propose resolutions, which become the official positions of the NAE.
The Assemblies of God — one of the largest NAE denominations — told Citizen it pays $2,000 a year for its membership, but has no position on global warming.
Dividing the Base
The biggest question — what’s driving this push to the left? — remains the subject of speculation.
“There’s something going on here,” Wisdom said. “An overwhelming majority [of evangelicals] did vote for Bush in 2004 — about 75 percent. There certainly seems to be an element in evangelical leadership, as Bush has become unpopular, that wants to separate itself.”
The Acton Institute’s Richards agreed.
“My opinion is that the NAE is swerving to the left because they think they need to be relevant and hip and distinguish themselves from groups like the FRC,” he said. “Some groups think they can make common cause with the left on this so the left won’t hate them as much.”
There are several problems with that approach, however — chiefly, that it doesn’t work.
“Making friends with your enemies and alienating your friends is always a losing strategy,” Richards said. “The left will rightly perceive this as a softening of evangelical Christians — not ‘They’re not as bad as we thought they were,’ but ‘Oh, great, we can peel off some of the evangelical constituents for our causes.’ Since the 1980s, evangelicals have been a pretty consistent voting bloc, and after 2000, there’s been a lot more effort on the left to appeal to the religious constituents. But just because someone quotes the Bible doesn’t mean you don’t have to look at the policy.”
Finding Solutions
The FRC’s Saunders called the situation “a recipe for political disaster,” which likely will have ripple effects on Capitol Hill.
“I don’t see how it can help but confuse legislators, because if you have confused constituents, then you’ll have confused legislators,” he said. “It creates this idea that some issues are fungible, so if you’re ‘right’ on global warming, you’re wrong about things like abortion.”
While the coalition of pro-family groups that wrote to the NAE board in March did not ask for Cizik’s resignation, several people have suggested it privately.
“I think he sincerely believes global warming is the great issue of our time, and evangelicals should be on the right side of it as he sees it. He is totally convinced of that. He’s even talked about it as a conversion experience,” Wisdom said. “What I said to him is, if that’s how he feels, he really should be with an organization that takes that position publicly. Then he could fight with all his heart for that agenda. The problem is the NAE board has not taken that position, and he’s supposed to be serving them.”
If the NAE board won’t hold Cizik accountable, said Dr. E. Cal Beisner, founder of the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, then NAE members may ultimately have to hold the board accountable.
“I think members of the various member denominations and organizations should be making their thoughts on this issue known to board members of the NAE,” Beisner said. “If the board does not respond satisfactorily, then they should complain also to the leaders of their own denominations or organizations. If the NAE does not ensure that it really speaks for me, I should leave it.”
Featured Image Courtesy of Julie A. Wenskoski/freedigitalphotos.net
