John Clark "It's difficult to resist the call for environmental stewardship when it's coming from within," says Illyn. "The epidemic of secularism unleashed by the Clinton administration is over." —Rabbi Daniel Lapin

IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, the forces that came together to thwart the Republican attack on the Endangered Species Act have continued the fight, albeit to less dramatic effect. The U.S. Catholic Conference focuses on issues of environmental justice, such as children's health issues and agricultural policy. The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life covers global warming, genetic engineering, and biodiversity issues. The EEN puts its energy into protecting endangered species and old-growth forests, and lobbying on behalf of clean-air issues. The environmental-policy arm of the National Council of Churches focuses on global warming. Of course, it's one thing to raise the voice of the nation's congregations to defend the law that saved the bald eagle; getting the faithful fired up about auto-emissions standards has proven to be a tougher sell.

After the battle over the Endangered Species Act, though, at least one major segment of the green faithful heard the word, and it was good. "My text this evening is an apology," Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope told the audience at the 1997 Symposium on Religion, Science, and the Environment, sponsored by the Greek Orthodox Church in Santa Barbara, California. "The environmental movement for the past quarter-century has made no more profound error than to misunderstand the mission of religion and the churches in preserving the creation."

Pope's extraordinary confession, delivered to a gathering packed with everyone from Bruce Babbitt to Bartholomew I, patriarch of the Orthodox church, enraged some Sierra Club members ("For the Sierra Club to go crawling on its knees to these forces of darkness is obscene," went one letter published in Sierra magazine), but it didn't come as a surprise to other environmental leaders. Frustrated by years of fighting piecemeal battles to save this or that watershed, they'd been searching for ways to energize not just laws, but the general public's deep yet largely somnolent convictions about the environment. What they discovered was the power of churches and synagogues.

"Unless we change the way people view their responsibility to the land and to others, we're never going to win these issues," says Wilderness Society president William Meadows. "We've got to find ways to integrate ethics and moral values into our behavior. I happen to have grown up in the Christian church"—Meadows's family attended a Methodist church in Memphis, Tennessee—"and I think there is a value system there that is powerful, persuasive, and understandable to many, many people."

The flourishing God-and-greens coalition may cloak itself in upbeat rhetoric, but few church or environmental leaders labor under the illusion that the reconciliation of nature and religion will happen over the course of a few weekend retreats. "I know a lot of environmentalists who don't see anything good in being a Christian," admits Peter Illyn. "And I know a lot of Christians who don't see much good in environmentalism."

It's a tough gap to bridge. "In the church, there's something we call the prophetic voice," Illyn tells me. "It's a principle of 'come in love, but don't compromise the truth.'" Within evangelical culture, he's a voice of righteous dissent, a loving critic. The Foursquare Gospel Church, a branch of Pentecostalism founded in Los Angeles by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in 1918, counts 238,000 members in the United States. In sheer numbers, it pales next to Protestant institutions like the United Methodist Church (8.5 million) and the Southern Baptist Convention (15.9 million). But the Foursquare Gospel Church is particularly strong on the West Coast (four of its seven largest congregations are in Oregon), and Foursquarers often define the cutting edge of evangelical culture.

Even so, as a lone-wolf eco-proselytizer, Illyn must keep his biblical bona fides on constant display, lest his listeners dismiss him as the devil in disguise. In evangelical circles, environmentalism still carries the taint of loose-moral liberalism. There's a suspicion that Illyn's message could be the thin end of the wedge: tree-hugging today, gay marriage tomorrow. Lions may one day lie down with lambs, but can the beef-eating, pro-life, Jesus-is-Lord soul savers lie down with the tofu-frying, pro-choice, proudly pagan flower children long enough to save the earth?