Unlikely Alliances: Notes On A Green Culture of Life

One wintry morning last January while driving to campus, I turned on the radio to discover an interview-in-progress on NPR's All Things Considered a segment of their series 'Crossing the Divide,' intriguingly titled 'Evangelists and Environmentalists Join Forces.' Eric Chivian, a biochemist at Harvard, and Richard Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, were describing how they had formed a political alliance to grapple with 'so-called life issues.' Their first order of business, they agreed, was to combat global warming. As Cizik's qualifier 'so-called' suggests, not everyone agrees on what a 'life issue' is, or should be. Since I had been thinking quite a bit about the idea of a 'culture of life' and the possibilities for 'greening' this popular rhetoric, I was fascinated by the common ground these groups were finding. Of course, there are some seemingly fundamental differences between the worldviews of 'evangelists' and 'environmentalists.' In the words of the biochemist Chivian, Cizik might have assumed he and other secular scientists were 'latte-sipping, Prius-driving, endive-munching, New York Times-reading snobs. And we [scientists] might have seen them as Hummer-driving, bible-thumping, fire-breathing . . . snake-handling fundamentalists.' That these sorts of stereotypes circulate, and that they are troubling, is certainly true. But are they insurmountable obstacles in the way of a shared political vision? Not necessarily. Adapted from the source document.