Under the category of strange bedfellows, could the alliance of evangelicals and environmentalists change the world?
In the world of politics, odd couples are no strange phenomenon. When Congress discussed a national I.D. card, the ACLU and NRA found themselves on the same side of privacy concerns. The death penalty, an issue that appears to be en vogue, hardly goes down party lines, as many social conservatives are willing to stand next to liberals against the death penalty. And anytime a Republican agrees with something Ted Kennedy has to say, you get a photo-op that never seems quite right.
But these individual circumstances are usually situational. They revolve around a particular issue, and once each party fires-up the troops and overcomes the immediate evil, temporarily-united enemies go their separate ways.
That may not be the case with this most recent union. That's because, unlike most other issues, the fight to preserve the environment is here to stay. Saving the planet does not lend itself to short-term handholding. It's a movement that will require many battles, it will be fought over a long time span, and it must rage on both foreign and domestic fronts.
Although environmentalists have been around for years, their popularity and political portrayal has changed with the times. The recent public relations boost compliments of Al Gore seems to have single-handedly moved environmentalism from the fringe (where, arguably, it has sat for the past forty years) to the mainstream. It would appear that the movement has found its poster boy (although credit must be give to folks like David Brower who have been fighting the good fight from the time little Al was in pampers).
The counterpart that one wouldn't expect to find aligned with tree-huggers and lovers of all things post-consumable are evangelicals. And the growing evangelical movement that supports saving the earth appears to have coalesced around non-profit organizations like the Evangelical Environmental Network and their website CreationCare.org, although a more comprehensive list is here. EEN's position is simple: worship God and the earth. One of their mantras is, "Because we worship and honor the Creator, we seek to cherish and care for the creation."
At last month's Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. organized by the very conservative Family Research Council, the environment was one of the hot topics for debate (with the Huffington Post's Jim Wallis in the middle of the fray). Evangelicals are now more likely than ever to support caring for the environment, and you can read a host of articles on their reasoning here. This may be due to the fact that there's a new and younger guard of religious leaders, the likes of Rick Warren, who appear more concerned than their predecessors with simultaneously embracing both spiritual and earthy issues head-on.
What will come of this unlikely duo?
Take a walk down the yellow brick road and imagine a broadly-based coalition that forms around the environment and then shifts focus to other matters; one that puts aside its differences on divisive issues like gay-marriage and abortion but concentrates on topics of mutual interest like world poverty and children's health care?
Could that create a new world order?