THE BURDEN OF CHANGE IS, in fact, entirely too heavy for one man to bear. The estrangement of faith and reason stretches back centuries, from the Vatican's censure of Galileo to evangelical Christianity's battles against Charles Darwin's "atheistic" theories and beyond. The details of the modern disagreement are specific to our age, but the grand themes remain the same: The worship of false gods versus a true God, the hubris of man, and man's relationship to nature (itself a reflection of divine glory or a fallen world defined by sin, depending on your point of view).

"During the 1980s," says the NRPE's Paul Gorman, "the environmental movement didn't show a lot of concern for issues of racism, economic justice, inadequate health care—stuff that our people [in the faith community] know about, because we run hospitals, we have people in poor neighborhoods. It was more about wetlands, wilderness, wildlife, and less about poor children and the distribution of resources. And information about the issue came from the scientific community, with which we hadn't been engaged."

Perhaps for good reason. Christianity and Judaism have had serious problems with the natural world. In his classic 1967 environmental work Wilderness and the American Mind, historian Roderick Nash points out how the Bible often depicts wilderness as an accursed, arid wasteland, an anguished place of banishment. The Judeo-Christian cosmology became the dominant worldview in the West by replacing pagan nature deities with a single He who dwelt above—not in—the things of the earth. "Do not love the world or anything in the world," commanded the apostle John. "For the love of the Father cannot be in any man who loves the world." As Christianity spread across the Western world, wild lands were cast as unholy lands. The forests of medieval Europe harbored the last strongholds of pagans, aka witches. "Christians judged their work to be successful when they cleared away the wild forests," writes Nash, "and cut down the sacred groves where the pagans held their rites."

Early environmentalists like John Muir, Bob Marshall, and Aldo Leopold found spiritual nourishment in wild places, but it wasn't until the 1960s that movement leaders openly questioned Judeo-Christian assumptions and began embracing a more pantheistic spirituality. In 1967, in the journal Science, historian Lynn White Jr. published "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," a brief (in length) and sweeping (in scope and condemnation) essay that gave voice to the private dissent some environmentalists had been murmuring among themselves. "By destroying pagan animism," he wrote, "Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects."The faith of our fathers, White argued, which set man above the beasts and the flowers of the field, also set in motion two millennia of environmental degradation. "Christianity," he concluded, "bears a huge burden of guilt."

A third of a century after White's seminal essay, Christian environmentalists are still dealing with the fallout. "In deep green environmental cultures, White's thesis has been widely accepted," says Bron Taylor, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin­Oshkosh and coeditor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. "It's only recently come under question, precisely because of the emergence of this new Christian-environmental activism." As radical groups like Earth First! emerged in the 1980s, they brought with them an exuberant quasi-pagan secularism that rejected the anthropocentrism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, embraced the biocentrism of Deep Ecology, and reveled in the "sacred nature" of the earth. At the time, the most outspoken Christian on the conservation scene happened to be James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's notoriously anti-green Interior Secretary. Watt, who served from 1981 to 1983, reinforced environmentalists' worst fears about Christians—namely, that they didn't give a damn about the earth because, when the rapture comes, they'll be in heaven looking down on a ball of burnt carbon. "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns," Watt told the House Interior Committee in 1981. "Whatever it is, we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations."

The green-Christian rift didn't begin to heal until January 1, 1990, when Pope John Paul II, who had seen firsthand the environmental ruination of Eastern Europe, broke the Roman Catholic church's long silence on environmentalism with a resounding call to heal the earth in his World Day of Peace message, "The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility."

"Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment," the pontiff declared, "people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past." Look at what happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he said: They destroyed the existing harmony by choosing to sin. Moreover, the pope didn't merely recognize the problem; he called for action. And he got it.

The next few years saw a flurry of activity among both Catholic and non-Catholic Christians. In the United States, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a call for reflection and action to the nation's 61 million Catholics. Evangelical Christians began to stir as well. Tony Campolo, a leading progressive evangelical who would later head Bill Clinton's post-Monica atonement team, chastened his fellow Christians in a controversial book whose title addressed evangelical enviro-phobia: How to Rescue the Earth Without Worshipping Nature. "We 'Bible-believing, born-again, Spirit-filled Christians' more than any others seem to have turned deaf ears to the pleas to save God's creation," he wrote.

Nobody better embodied the new enviro-friendly Christianity than Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians. Since ascending the Ecumenical Throne in 1992, Bartholomew has established so many environmental programs he's known as "the green patriarch." Three years ago, during the same conference at which Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope apologized for ignoring the religious world, Bartholomew made a public statement that might have been unimaginable a decade earlier. "To commit a crime against the natural world," he declared, "is a sin."