By Lawrence MacDonald, TA Virginia Co-facilitator and TA Faith member
In my previous article I described how faith-based climate advocacy can be a path to power. In this article, I offer a guide to the responses of six U.S. religious groups. Both articles draw on “What’s Faith Got to Do With It?,” a chapter in my book Am I Too Old to Save the Planet? A Boomer’s Guide to Climate Action. Each of the following groups has one or more networks that offer training, resources, and encouragement for faith-based advocacy within their tradition.
Catholics
Laudato si’ (“Praise Be to You”), Pope Francis’s second encyclical, is arguably the most important statement on climate change issued by a major religious leader. Widely discussed when it was released in 2015, it continues to inspire Catholic climate action today.
Unlike most encyclicals, Laudato si’ found an audience well beyond the Catholic Church. “On a sprawling, multicultural, fractious planet, no person can be heard by everyone. But Pope Francis comes closer than anyone else,” wrote Bill McKibben, who identifies as a Protestant.
For Dan Misleh, founder of the Catholic Climate Covenant, a lay-led organization that helps U.S. Catholics respond to the Church’s call to care for creation and care for the poor, Laudato si’ was a dream come true. “I used to literally dream that a pope would write an encyclical on the environment,” Misleh told me.
Boomers who have ties to the Catholic Church have a critical role in helping the church up its game on climate, said Misleh. “Boomers have gone through their careers, they have wisdom, money, and a certain level of clout within their Catholic community,” he said. In every parish, “they are the age group that is most active in the Church.”
Evangelicals
Evangelicals who understand that humanity faces a planetary emergency are uniquely positioned to discuss it with friends, family, and fellow church members who are unsure about the science, or may even think that climate change is a hoax.
Sound like a tall order? Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian and a climate scientist, has won a national following by explaining how. Author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, a national best-seller, Hayhoe sees no contradiction between her evangelical Christian faith and her commitment to climate science.
“There is one thing all of us can do that we are not doing: talk about it,” Hayhoe says. She believes that nearly everybody has the values needed to care about climate. “We just need to connect the dots between the values they already have.”
And there’s a network for that. Founded in 1993, the Evangelical Environmental Network (ENN) works to “inspire, equip, educate, and mobilize evangelical Christians to love God and others by rediscovering and reclaiming the Biblical mandate to care for creation and working toward a stable climate and a healthy, pollution-free world.”
Mainline Protestants
Once dominant in U.S. culture, the Mainline Protestants lost power and influence during the second half of the twentieth century. By 2020, only about 16% of Americans belonged to these historic denominations, which include Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and others.
Historian David Hollinger calls these groups “Ecumenical Protestants” because of their “willingness to cooperate in ecclesiastical, civic, and global affairs” with Christian and non-Christian groups. These groups coordinate their climate advocacy work through the National Council of Churches’ Creation Justice Ministries, which has expanded beyond predominantly white churches to embrace historically Black denominations.
Lay Third Actors whose faith roots lie in these historic protestant denominations can seek out local congregations engaged in faith-based climate advocacy or search online for calls to climate action by leaders and members of their denomination.
Black Churches
For more than 300 years, Black churches in America have provided a haven for people forced to struggle daily against systemic racism. Besides being places of worship, Black churches have served as places of solidarity and civic activity, playing a key role in the Civil Rights movement.
Today the term “Black church” is usually understood to encompass seven Black Protestant denominations including the National Baptist Convention, the National Baptist Convention of America, the Progressive National Convention, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Taken together, African American denominations account for about 7% of Americans who identify with a faith group.
People of color, especially African Americans, are exposed to industrial pollution from fossil fuels more than others and are more likely to suffer from cancer, lung and heart diseases, and premature death as a result. Black churches have long struggled to overcome these injustices.
In recent years, the climate movement has belatedly taken note, occasionally providing funding and other support to Black-led organizations fighting for environmental justice.
Green the Church is in the forefront of efforts to link the Black Church and the environmental and sustainability movement. Founded in 2010 by Rev. Ambrose Carroll Sr., a pastor in Oakland, California, Green the Church aims to expand the role of Black churches as “centers for environmental and economic resilience.”
Muslims
Unlike other U.S. religious groups, most U.S. Muslim adults (58%) are immigrants. Muslims in America tend to be younger than other U.S. religious groups, with a median age of 33, compared to 47 for other faiths. Boomers account for just 15% of American Muslims, about half the percentage for other religious groups. Muslim advocacy for climate action reflects these unusual demographics: a mostly young population that shares the concerns of other American youth about climate change.
The highest-level call for Muslim climate action is the 2015 Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, which asserts that humans are God’s khalifah or “stewards” on Earth and must care for God’s creation. The declaration informs the environmental advocacy of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), whose “Green Initiative” works to raise awareness about the “catastrophic effects of climate change,” reduce waste, and promote the use of solar energy.
Green Muslims, a volunteer-driven non-profit in the suburbs of Washington, DC, engages locally and works to connect Muslims across the country to nature and to environmental activism. The group hosts educational and outdoor events and serves as a bridge between the Muslim community and local climate action organizations. Founder and executive director Sevim Kalyoncu is eager to welcome older Muslims to their group.
Jews
For most of its history, the U.S. Jewish environmental movement focused on outdoor education, nature-based spirituality, and localized greening—reducing a community’s environmental footprint. While these remain important, today there is a growing recognition that responding to the climate emergency requires more pointed advocacy.
Jewish climate advocacy gained fresh momentum in 2020 with the launch of Dayenu. “Dayenu is focused on mobilizing the Jewish community around levers of change,” founder Rabbi Jennie Rosenn explains. “It’s not just about putting solar panels on your roof but advocating for policies that ensure that the whole community can rapidly transition to clean energy and that those hardest hit and most marginalized benefit.”
Large Jewish organizations are moving in a similar direction. An April 2024 Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) resolution called on Reform Jewish organizations to exclude fossil fuel investments from their financial holdings. Adamah, the country’s largest Jewish environmental organization, has launched a Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition of more than 300 organizations committed to climate action.
Other Jewish organizations that support grassroots policy advocacy include the Jewish Earth Alliance, which organizes congregations to engage with Congress through action alerts and lobby days; and the Jewish Climate Action Network, active in New York City, Massachusetts, and the Washington DC metro area.
Interfaith Action
For Third Actors engaged in faith-based climate advocacy, organizing and participating in interfaith actions can be a great way to leverage your knowledge and networks. You needn’t be an ordained religious leader or hold an official position to do this.
In the summer of 2021, I traveled to northern Minnesota to participate in an interfaith delegation supporting Native Americans and others opposing the Line 3 pipeline. The morning of the march, members of half-a-dozen faiths shared prayers and explained why their faith led them to oppose Line 3 and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Only a few spoke in an official capacity; most were simply active members of their faith.
During the march, we carried signs identifying our various faith communities. Press reports noted the participation of religious groups, making clear the broad-based nature of the opposition to the project.
Fletcher Harper, an Episcopal priest and the executive director of GreenFaith, which helped to organize the Line 3 interfaith delegation, believes that boomers are key to tipping the balance towards ambitious action.
“The boomer generation cut its teeth at a transformative time in American history in the ’60s and ’70s,” he told me. Boomers and other experienced Americans are either already retired or far enough along in our working lives that we can afford to take some chances, he said. “We need that kind of unfiltered energy. We need people who have been around the block.”
About Lawrence MacDonald
Lawrence MacDonald is a co-facilitator of the Third Act Virginia Working Group and helps to lead the Dayenu Circle at Temple Rodef Shalom, Virginia’s largest Jewish congregation. He stepped down from his job as vice president of communications at the World Resources Institute to write Am I Too Old to Save the Planet? A Boomer’s Guide to Climate Action, and works full-time as a volunteer climate activist. Watch for Part 2 of this article this fall.