A major recent development in that infiltration is the founding of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.Don’t let the name fool you. Though its public spokesman, Ben Lowe, is young, the prime movers behind him have been pushing environmental alarm, and before that wealth redistribution through the welfare state, for many years.YECA grew out of a meeting convened by the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) early this year, whose past President and present Executive Vice President for Policy and Climate Change is Rev. Jim Ball, author of the book Global Warming and the Risen Lord. Ball, who serves as YECA’s Senior Advisor, was a leader in creating the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI) and its manifesto, “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” in 2006, which garnered endorsements from 86 evangelical college presidents and mission leaders, though not from many evangelical climate scientists or environmental economists. The Cornwall Alliance refuted the ECI in A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor, endorsed by nearly 200 evangelical leaders, including many topic-qualified expert scientists and economists.

It doesn’t appear that YECA is a separately incorporated legal entity of its own. Instead, its website’s donations page asks for donations to be sent to EEN, which employs YECA spokesman Lowe as Director of Young Adult Ministires. Further, YECA’s website lists EEN, Sojourners, and climate-alarmist 350.org as “allies.”

In short, the impression that YECA is a grassroots movement among young evangelicals is false. YECA is an EEN front.

And what is EEN? It’s the professedly evangelical branch of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), whose co-founders in the early 1990s were liberal New Ager Rev. James Parks Morton, Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, who famously held baptismal ceremonies for pets, and atheist Marxist astronomer Carl Sagan of Cosmos fame, who began each episode saying, “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be”—clearly mocking the Bible’s description of Christ as the One who is and was and is to come. (NRPE also started Jewish, Catholic, and mainline Protestant branches.)

One of the first things NRPE did was to spend $4.5 million in 1994 distributing politically charged “Environmental Awareness Kits” to congregations around the country. Among other things in the kits was a liturgy in which the leader says, “We use more than our share of the Earth’s resources. We are responsible for massive pollution of earth, water and sky. … We thoughtlessly drop garbage around our homes, schools, churches, places of work, and places of play. … We squander resources on technologies of destruction. Bombs come before bread.” The congregation responds: “We are killing the earth…. We are killing the waters…. We are killing the skies.” Here eco-Leftism replaces Biblical moral law as the standard of sin and righteousness.

In 1999, NRPE launched a 10-year, $16-million initiative to “assure that the next generation of religious leaders in America advance care for God’s creation as a central priority for organized religion.“ Each of its branches—including EEN—received some of that money.

EEN received $400,000 from the liberal Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund (RBF) through NRPE in 2006, and another $200,000 in 2009 and $50,000 in 2011 directly from RBF to support its efforts to spread global warming fears and support for the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s strangling new regulations on electric power utilities. (When Family Research Council President Tony Perkins mistakenly said the latter two donations had come from the Rockefeller Foundation, EEN President Mitch Hescox denied it, saying EEN had received no money from Rockefeller Foundation during his tenure. He was technically correct, but disingenuous. RBF, not Rockefeller Foundation, made the grants—the first grant two months before Hescox became President, the other two during his tenure.) Rockefeller Brothers Fund was founded in the 1950s by David Rockefeller to promote family planning and population control, including by coerced or highly incentivized sterilization and abortion programs, around the world.

The ECI, launched in 2006, was funded by a $475,000 grant from the liberal Hewlett Foundation, another champion of population control and one of the world’s most prominent funders of abortion.

A major promoter of YECA is the Left-wing organization Sojourners, founded forty years ago by long-time advocate of socialism Rev. Jim Wallis, who was founding editor of the organization’s magazine originally named The Post American. Sojourners has received over $300,000 in grants from Left-wing billionaire George Soros—which Wallis at first denied when reported by World Editor Marvin Olasky but later admitted.

Another long-time promoter of Leftism among evangelicals, Rev. Ron Sider, author of Rich Christians in a World of Hunger, founder and president of Evangelicals for Social Action (in whose offices EEN got its start), and Vice Chairman of NRPE, joined Ball and YECA at the White House, where they met with leaders of three of the world’s most powerful environmental organizations—Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and National Wildlife Federation. (In the picture above, Sider is at the far left, Ball fifth from left.) Not surprisingly, given its Left-wing background, YECA leaders have already met with senior officials of the Obama administration, including his White House Council on Environmental Quality.

The Cornwall Alliance has faithfully provided the evangelical community with outstanding, scholarly research refuting climate alarmism and explaining how policies promoted by ECI and others to fight global warming will harm the world’s poor while achieving no measurable reduction in global temperature, and we are determined to continue countering the false and dangerous message and promoting a truly Biblical message in its place: that men and women, made in God’s image, are to fill the Earth and exercise a godly dominion over it, enhancing its fruitfulness, beauty, and safety to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors.

We also intend to keep warning the evangelical church about efforts to infiltrate it, compromise its message, and, as with YECA, capture its youth.

 

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