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This fall, Director of Annual Giving and Alumni, Parent & Church Relations Tad Wisenor, '89, interviewed Homecoming speaker and Alumni Award-winner Richard Cizik, '73, on the growing creation-care movement. Cizik is vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals.
Which Whitworth faculty members and classes were important to you?
I came to Whitworth in the fall of 1969, and I immediately realized that the professors took enough interest in the students to make it possible for me to make it, even if I was having trouble. I took to Whitworth, and Whitworth sort of took to me.
The Core curriculum was clearly a framing kind of coursework. While I had grown up in a Christian home, I didn't have a vital Christian faith, nor had I been exposed to Christian church history. So Core was instrumental for building a worldview that has survived until this day. And what is a worldview, if not a map of the world as you understand it by the pieces of information and the input that you've received? It's that worldview that shapes our beliefs and behavior. Understanding God's world is critical to all of our subsequent actions, good and bad. What I received at Whitworth was a worldview that was consistent with scripture and with the best of the intellectual tradition of Western civilization. Putting the two together gave me a framework for everything else that has followed – more of a framework than graduate school or even seminary provided.
Critics say that Whitworth fails its Christian mission by exposing students to a wide range of voices on controversial topics. How would you respond to that?
That is exactly the opposite of my experience. I think that students should be exposed to all of the great teachers and thinkers of Western civilization and … of other religions, more today than ever before, without depriving the students of asking what is essential of our own Christian faith. I think the broadest education is the best education you can get.
I applaud the kind of education a student gets at Whitworth. What good does it do to restrict that education unless you think that student is never going to be exposed to those ideas or the implications of those values? We know that's not true. So why not face the critics and your own weaknesses while you have the opportunity in college to learn and grow and test yourself and your thinking against the thoughts of others who are wiser and older? Whitworth was a place where somebody could test his ideals and values against "Truth with a capital T" without being told what all that means in terms of the individual choices we must make in how we vote, or dress, or drive, or whatever. Students do need a certain amount of freedom to learn these things, and if Whitworth had been rigid and doctrinaire or dogmatic I would probably not have stayed.
Whitworth did what I needed at the time, because I was really critical of the failure of the evangelical church to speak up on the major social issues of that day, namely the cultural revolution, the women's revolution, the war in Vietnam, and even the rise of the college movement in the '70s. I was turned off by the failure of the evangelicals to see any of these moral issues, and, in retrospect, we, the leaders of the evangelicals, look back and say that we failed by not speaking out.
For example, the evangelicals of that day sat on their hands on civil rights. I will not sit on my hands while the greatest civil-rights issue of the 21st century, namely climate change, now poses threats of much greater impact, and not just to the tens of millions of African Americans and others of minority backgrounds in the United States but, in this case, to people of color by the hundreds of millions worldwide. As an evangelical Christian, I will not sit on my hands like my father's generation did and I won't have anybody else make the same mistake, either.
James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, has called for you to be fired from your job as vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals for diverting attention from what he calls "core evangelical issues." How are you seeking to re-frame the way evangelicals think about the intersection of faith and politics?
Well, you're asking the right question, because there is a certain re-framing going on here and I suppose some people, like Jim and others, are threatened by this. But they needn't be, because all we're saying is that amongst the priorities that we have today – protecting the traditional family and the rights of the unborn – there are also the rights of those whose lives will be affected by the impact of climate change around the world. They number in the hundreds of millions already, and they deserve the same protection that the unborn deserve. So what we are saying in re-framing this picture is that these issues of concern for God's creation – we call it creation care – are just as important as the other concerns.
My critics are afraid that by elevating these concerns we devalue the others, and I don't regard that to be the case for the simple reason that this is not an either/or proposition. I'm simply saying all these issues are important, and we are able, as an evangelical movement, in terms of our resources, our intellect, our organizational skills and the rest, to be able to do all of them all the time. It's called the whole gospel for the whole world all the time – the whole gospel, which includes scriptural teaching to protect the earth and care for it, because we are stewards and we will be held accountable for it. I would say to the Jim Dobsons of the world, "What are you going to say to God when he asks, 'What did you do with what I created?' – if, in fact, while you zealously protected the unborn you apparently overlooked other clear admonitions, such as to care for the earth?" Revelation 11:18 says, "He will destroy those who destroy the earth." If that isn't sufficient warning to those who would say this isn't our duty, I would say, "Look again."
What do you see as your next steps in furthering the creation-care movement?
I believe that what we are doing is building a bridge between faith and science that is going to influence the movement in ways we can't even currently imagine. We dare to dream of a world in which religion and science collaborate to protect the earth that God has given us. Scientists enable us to understand what creation is saying about itself and its maker. That is why an alliance between the two may begin to change the whole shape of humanity in the 21st century.
Scientists are people with great imaginations, and so are people of faith, so we dare to dream of a world in which scientists and Christians collaborate for the protection of creation, period. That is our next step. I've just come back from spending a week near the Arctic Circle with scientists, and that is the first of many collaborations that will help us build this bridge between faith and science. What we believe is necessary is that the voices of religion and science would join forces in an atmosphere of mutual respect, as that may be the only way to protect life on earth, including, in the end, our own.
To read more about Cizik's work, visit the following:
- www.nae.net
- www.grist.org: Cizik Matters
- www.npr.org: Green Evangelist Richard Cizik
- www.washingtonpost.com: Evangelical Angers Peers With Call for Action on Global Warming
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