I N V O L V E M E N T

Preaching from the green pulpit

by Daniel Langenkamp

AS CHURCHES STRUGGLE TO REDEFINE THEIR ROLE in society, they find thenselves reaching out to issues concerned with the environment.


We don't often think of religious groups as true non-governmental organizations, but in terms of effectiveness and influence, who can beat them? When it comes to persuading people to change lifestyles, whose voice is more persuasive than God's? Increasingly, the world's first, and perhaps best organized NGOs are becoming big players in the environmental movement.

Churches have been advocating the use of environmentally friendly values and sustainable consumption patterns in Western Europe for years, and their voices are beginning to carry into Central and Eastern Europe. Not only Roman Catholics, but Anglicans, Methodists and Lutherans, and almost every other major Christian denomination you care to mention, have devoted significant resources to environmental programs.

And they are not just preaching. Since the movement began in Western Europe in the 1970s, they have hired environmental experts, funded clean-up and tree planting projects, conducted environmental research and held conferences. It is all based on the idea that the world has been given to human beings by God to take care of.

"Religion is life centered," says Reverend Rudiger Noll, secretary for the Church in Society of the Conference of European Churches. "That includes [caring for] human beings and for the whole of the environment. We must observe that many economic models exploit the environment for human kind's sake."

Crippled by the burden of history

But while Western church groups see the environment as an important cause, church organizations in Central and Eastern Europe have been slow to catch on. At least that was the finding at a recent conference held in Crete, Greece where 58 environmental representatives from churches all over Europe, including 18 countries from CEE and the former Soviet Union, gathered to discuss the religious aspects of sustainable development.

In a pre-conference discussion devoted to development and sustainability in CEE, representatives determined that environmental issues should be taken up by CEE churches, but only in relation to the issues of economic development which have higher priority in the Region.

"This is of special importance for Central and Eastern Europeans because their economies are in transition. The combination [of development and environmental issues] makes them more open to alternative issues [like the environment] that they should pay attention from the beginning," says Noll.

Those churches that are already active in the green movement face a problem. They get little of the coordination and support from church hierarchies that their counterparts in Western Europe receive. The main reason, say church environmentalists, is the special historical circumstances that have blanketed Central and Eastern Europe for the last 50 years. The repressive nature of communism kept many churches from acting, and is the main reason they don't get involved now.

"The church didn't deal with any real questions," says Gyula Simonyi, a Hungarian researcher of environmental ethics in economics who attended the conference. Official religious organizations in most countries were weakened under communist regimes, he says. For instance, the Catholic Church's reaction to the Danube Circle, an environmental movement which became a rallying point for dissidents in Hungary during communism, demonstrates the official Church's lack of activism and conservatism. "Danube Circle meant a real political opposition, but the religious leaders were far from any opposition. Perhaps this is why religious leaders are not involved in environmental questions now," he says.

"Grassroots organizing from the bottom up had a tradition, but was eliminated during the years of communism," says Judit Hatfaludi, of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group involved in a number of human rights and other social issues in Hungary. "That's the connection that has to be made, the one that churches will have to reinvent."

CEE churches are now making up for lost time

There is evidence of this reinvention already. As CEE churches make up for lost time, they are increasingly taking on the social, economic and human rights issues that characterize Western European churches. While not yet organized on a national level, the sustainable development conference in Crete found that religious groups in most CEE countries deal with environmental issues in some way, shape or form.

According to Noll, this involvement stems from a new necessity. "In the transition period after the break up, [the people of CEE] felt a vacuum of values. That affected churches as well. Now, [churches] have to redefine their position in society. Today they are challenged to be a part of a civil society and to define their role within it." One way of establishing themselves within the new order, he says, is by taking up important social problems like the environment.

The Ecumenical Association for Churches in Romania, known colloquially as AIDRom, is taking a pro-active aproach to environmentalism: It has alloted a 1995 budget of $100,000 for environmental issues. Most of this money comes from organizations abroad, and AIDRom has strong links to ecumenical associations in the West. This is a good example of East-West cooperation, by which funds from Western churches finance projects in CEE.

"Religion is life centered.
It includes caring for human beings
and for the whole of the environment."

In Hungary, which is predominantly Catholic, the official church is conservative and does little in regard to environmentalism. But the formerly underground Bush group has been an active participant in Hungary's environmental movement since the 1970's. They publish an environmental education newsletter sent to more than 4000 Hungarian teachers, run an environmental database used by almost 300 schools, conduct nationwide battery and paper collection programs, and sponsor tree plantings and environmental camps for students.

Poland also has a Christian environmental group, the St. Francis of Assisi environmental movement, that has been active for decades. St. Francis is officially known as the Roman Catholic Church's environmental saint.

The Regional Environmental Center's government and public affairs manager Janos Zlinszky was a keynote speaker at the Crete conference. He sees a real advantage for churches working on environmental issues.

"I think it's just the right thing to do, just like evangelizing by NGOs but with more impact upon people," he says. "It can really only be compared to education in primary schools where you have a good teacher who is capturing the imaginations of the children. In such a situation you aren't just teaching children, you are raising them. So churches have a unique opportunity to say, 'Look, there is a behavioral standard here,' to raise grownups, as well as children."

THE BULLETIN * SUMMER 1995