John Clark A wolf in llama's clothing? Oochoo draws the crowd, but Illyn has to keep his biblical bona fides on display. "Environmental people are scared to death of religious people." —Gary Phillips

IF ANTIENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATIVES are inclined to underestimate the potential clout of the new wave of religious greens, they would do well to recall what happened during the last attempt to demolish America's conservation ethic.

In 1995, as Newt Gingrich's Contract with America troops, many of them freshly recruited in the 1994 midterm elections, flexed their power in Washington, a small cadre of foot soldiers in the so-called Republican Revolution declared the Endangered Species Act one of the nation's "Top Ten Worst-Case Regulations" and vowed to gut it like a 12-point buck. Alaska's oil-friendly congressman Don Young was made chairman of the House Committee on Resources; his chief committee allies were California's property-rights cowboy Richard Pombo and Idaho's Christian conservative wild-card Helen Chenoweth. After a task force chaired by Pombo conducted six months of hearings on the Endangered Species Act, Young introduced a bill in September 1995 to reauthorize a weakened version in which destruction of endangered species' habitats would be excluded from the definition of "taking" a species—meaning you could do just about anything to harm an endangered species except shoot it, stuff it, and serve it for dinner.

That autumn, as Young prepared to perform radical surgery on the Endangered Species Act, about 70 evangelical Christian clergy and lay leaders gathered at Bear Trap Ranch, a Christian retreat nestled in a subalpine valley in Colorado's Pike National Forest. This was one of the first gatherings of the Christian Environmental Council, an offshoot of the Evangelical Environmental Network. The EEN had been formed in 1993 by Evangelicals for Social Action, a national organization of progressive evangelicals that focuses on poverty and family issues. The EEN had dabbled in green issues but hadn't exactly set the world on fire over those two years. The group issued an underpublicized "Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation" and sent out "environmental starter kits" to 1,200 churches. (Each kit contained a suggested Bible-study curriculum, a music cassette, an energy-audit workbook, and a package of peas to start a church garden.) But at Bear Trap Ranch, after three days of discussion, prayer, and long walks amid the flame-yellow aspens, the emboldened Christians decided to mobilize: If God's species were imperiled, they were duty-bound to mount a rescue. "It was a no-brainer," recalls Stan LeQuire, a Baptist minister and former director of the EEN. "This was something that resonated wonderfully with our biblical faith."

LeQuire's political neophytes—a band of small-town preachers, Sunday-school teachers, and Christian college professors—took a crash course in playing the modern media game. With the help of financial grants from mainstream environmental foundations, they produced slick 30-second public-service spots for TV and took out full-page ads in Roll Call, the twice-weekly newsmagazine that covers Congress. EEN cofounder Calvin DeWitt, a University of Wisconsin professor of environmental studies and the dean of modern Christian environmentalism, proved himself a master of the sound bite by framing the Endangered Species Act as "the Noah's ark of our day," and charging that "Congress and special interests are trying to sink it." At a Washington press conference on January 31, 1996, DeWitt showed up with a live endangered Florida panther in tow. The press ate it up, and Republicans went ballistic.

The day after the panther press conference, Young and Pombo wrote a scathing letter to LeQuire, claiming that the EEN had "mischaracterized" their bill and demanding that "as religious people, you have a high obligation to seek the truth, even in the political arena." When EEN lobbyists went to House Speaker Newt Gingrich's office, a Gingrich staff member heaped scorn on their efforts. "We were told we didn't know what we were talking about," says LeQuire, who stepped down from the EEN in 1999 and now teaches at Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. "The Christian Coalition had just helped some Republicans get elected, and they thought they had everything sewed up. We said, 'Hold on, some Christians are not of this ilk.'"

Outside the Beltway, the assault on the Endangered Species Act moved faith-based environmentalists to enter the political fray, just as their fundamentalist brethren had on behalf of other social issues. Peter Illyn began writing to local newspapers in Washington, proclaiming himself a conservative Christian who thought wiping out God's species wasn't such a bang-up idea. "My Christian peers smugly assumed the environmentalists were wrong," recalls Illyn. "I went in there and said, 'Hey! Quit thumping your Bible and start reading it! Look at Psalms 104:24: "How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures."'" He confronted Washington's notoriously antienvironmental Congresswoman Linda Smith at public meetings and formed his own small but vocal organization, Christians for Environmental Stewardship. "We blew the religious right away," he says. "We could talk all day about caring for God's domain. They had no verses to quote."

In truth, the religious right did not come out in force against the Endangered Species Act. "It's been a second-tier issue for most evangelicals," says Michael Cromartie, an expert on evangelical politics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a neoconservative think tank in Washington, D.C. "It's not that they don't like their surroundings. It's just that there are so many more pressing issues: abortion, sexuality, the breakdown of the family."

When pressed, though, conservative politicians proved they did have a few verses to quote. At a Resources Committee hearing in late 1995, Helen Chenoweth went chapter-and-verse with Rev. John Paarlberg, a minister of the Reformed Church in America and a member of both the EEN and the NRPE. Paarlberg quoted Psalm 104; Chenoweth countered with Psalm 8. God, she said, "made man to have dominion and to care for all the works of the earth, including all the sheep and the ox and the beasts and the fowl and the fish and everything."

Still, the evangelical campaign got its point across loud and clear. Young's Endangered Species Act reauthorization never made it to the floor of the House, mainly because Republican moderates declined to sign on to a bill that had suddenly become a political loser. "The EEN came in and showed that people who wanted to protect endangered species weren't a bunch of total left-wing wacko hippies out there hugging trees," recalls Karen Steuer, who worked on endangered-species issues for California Congressman George Miller, the left-wing Democratic environmental leader. "This was mainstream America."

Of course, religious environmentalists didn't single-handedly save the Endangered Species Act (which still awaits formal reauthorization). But their activism reinvigorated an argument that eco-activists had let fall into disuse: the moral right. "The religious community could swing the argument back to the notion of intrinsic value," says Rabbi Daniel Swartz, former associate director of the NRPE, who spent a good part of 1995 and 1996 lobbying Capitol Hill on behalf of protections for endangered species. "They could tell a congressman, 'Look, this is part of the grand scheme of creation, it has value, and we must care for it.'"