Josh Meltzer | The Roanoke Times

Moving the mountains

Stories

• Mine it or enshrine it?
• Stopping the miners
• Roanoke proudly plays a bit role in the battle
• Mine strife sounds familiar?
• The Battle of Blair Mountain
• The Battle over Blair Mountain
• Series home page

Interactive graphics

• See how a mountain is cut to retrieve the coal beneath
• See how coal powers cities and towns
• See a panoramic view of Kayford Mountain in West Virginia

Photo galleries

• Photos of the mining community
• Photos of the mining business
• How the community responds

Message board

• Talk about mountaintop removal and this series

FROST, W.Va. -- It doesn't look like the nerve center of a political, social and spiritual movement.

Hummingbirds hover at a feeder above Allen Johnson's head. Tootie, a sociable golden retriever, is tied near his feet. A purple finch perches on a porch rail lined with flower boxes. Chickens roam the yard. Turkeys are penned out back.

But in the pastoral scene, there is energy.

"For me," Johnson said, "it's my faith that drives my activism. It's not that I'm an environmentalist that happens to show up at church. Because I'm a Christian, I need to take responsibility for his creation."

Johnson is co-founder of Christians for the Mountains, an organization aiming to persuade other Christians to take on environmental causes.

The group has about 200 members. But Christians for the Mountains is intended to be a network, not a dues-paying, meeting-holding bureaucracy.

Its strength lies in its connections. In addition to working within churches, Christians for the Mountains has strong ties to regional environmental groups including Coal River Mountain Watch and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. They've also worked beside Mountain Justice Summer and had contacts with the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the Sierra Club.

Christians for the Mountains' main focus is making the faithful aware of mountaintop removal coal mining -- a form of strip mining that removes the tops of mountains to get at the coal beneath -- and its effect on the ecology, people and communities of Appalachia.

"Allen Johnson," public broadcasting journalist Bill Moyers said last week, "is a believer who decided, along with others down there, it's not enough just to pray or protest."

Moyers' film crew recently followed Johnston to Washington, D.C., to record his lobbying against mountaintop removal mining. But Johnson aims at parishioners more than politicians.

"We're wanting to engage this as a moral issue," Johnson said. "You figure out how this fits into your theology, into your biblical studies. Please wrestle with it. At least talk about it."

Johnson's call for such talk puts the Pocahontas County librarian on the front lines of two battles -- environmentalists' fight against mountaintop removal mining and evangelical Christians' fight over how they should deal with environmental issues.

At least since Jerry Falwell organized the Moral Majority in 1979, evangelical Christians have been political partners with conservatives, not conservationists. But a growing number of evangelicals seem to have discovered biblical passages that make mankind stewards of God's creation.

For Mary Dial, a 20-year-old Virginia Tech junior involved with Tech's Mountain Justice organization, Campus Crusade for Christ and Christians for the Mountains, faith and environmentalism are inextricable.

"You just can't separate the two, in my opinion," Dial said. "I feel like God made this world. He made this environment to live in and to use, but not to abuse."

Rich Cizik, the National Association of Evangelicals' vice president for governmental affairs, put it this way last week:

"All the way from Genesis through Revelation, the word of God is very clear.

"... I don't even call myself an environmentalist."

He prefers the term "creation care."

Cizik describes himself as a Reagan-movement conservative. But when it comes to the environment, Cizik finds himself on the same side of the argument as tree-hugging activists who consider "liberal" an insult because liberals are too far to the political right.

The popular stereotype of environmentalists has to change, said Roger Gottlieb, author of "A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future."

"They're not all old hippies," Gottlieb said. "Obviously, there is a general idea in the culture that environmentalists are all people like me -- Jews who live in Boston. Not true."

Some evangelicals -- including Falwell, James Dobson and Charles Colson -- have said the church shouldn't take a stand on global climate change. But Cizik helped round up some of the nearly 100 evangelical leaders who signed onto the Evangelical Climate Initiative, which says Christians should. The signers include Jim Ball, leader of the group that devised the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign; Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose Driven Life"; and Leith Anderson, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Cizik's name doesn't appear on the final version. He withdrew his name, he explained, after some evangelical leaders complained that he was speaking as if he were the voice of all evangelicals. And the NAE's executive board told him to keep within the bounds of the association's position paper, For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.

"I thought I had been speaking within the confines of the document," Cizik said, pointing out that the position paper says "government has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation."

Cizik took his name off the climate initiative, but he hasn't changed his position. And he hasn't stopped speaking out on the subject. He appears in "The Great Warming," a documentary about global warming that's narrated by Keanu Reeves and Alanis Morissette. "I don't think God is going to ask us how he created the Earth," Cizik said. "But he will ask us what we did with what he created."

Cizik said he wants to be a facilitator and a peacemaker, helping other evangelicals find their way to the environmental revelation he's experienced. He's talked to abortion opponents, for instance, about the effect mercury in the environment can have on the unborn.

Robert Benne, director of the Center for Religion and Society at Roanoke College, is skeptical of drawing a straight line from biblical teaching to public policy. Both ends of the political spectrum do that, he said, and he thinks it harms the church to align itself with any political ideology.

"Then the church begins to look like a political actor and loses some credibility," Benne said.

Benne thinks it's fine for churches to raise their members' consciousness so the members go off and get involved in causes. But discussions -- like the one Christians for the Mountains wants to start -- should present both sides of an issue, he said.

While this wave of religious environmentalism is attracting new attention, it's not a new movement.

"Religious environmentalism is roughly 30 years old," Gottlieb said. "It has been gathering steam and really exploded in the early 1990s."

Baldwin Lloyd, a retired Episcopal priest who lives in the Prices Fork community in Montgomery County, was among the early stokers of that fire. In 1971, he helped found the Appalachian Coalition Against Strip Mining.

"All life is interdependent. That is the bottom line," Lloyd said recently on the deck outside his home. "Everything is interdependent and we've got to love it and care for each other and for the Earth."

Some Christians emphasize a verse in the first chapter of Genesis that gives humans "dominion" over the planet and its resources. Lloyd, like Cizik, puts more emphasis on a verse in the second chapter: "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it."

"I think a much better understanding of how God placed us on this Earth is to understand ourselves as stewards and co-partners in the care and love for his creation," Lloyd said.

Johnson points to the 24th Psalm: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein."

"This is God's property," Johnson said. "It doesn't belong ultimately to us. We get to use it, but we have a responsibility to use it and take care of it. That's a privilege and a responsibility. That's kind of where we're at on this.

"To me it's not only a matter of doing an issue like mountaintop removal. It also deeply impacts the integrity of the church and Christian faith."

One challenge facing the Christian environmental movement is whether it partners with environmentalists whose belief systems don't include Christ.

Cizik thinks Christians should keep their distance from such groups.

"We want to keep our own voice," he said. "We're not coming from a secular point of view."

Johnson agrees it's important that Christian environmentalists avoid being seen as an appendage of the secular movement. But he said he's made peace with the idea of working with fellow environmentalists whose convictions aren't based on Scripture.

"I realize some of these people -- how they look, how they act, their lifestyles -- might upset some of our conservative base," Johnson said.

But that doesn't mean those people aren't doing God's work, he said.

"I'm thinking, if the church isn't going to step up ... and God raises up Mountain Justice Summer people with purple hair and tongue studs to do it, that's God. That's kind of what the God I believe does. He surprises us."