Believers preach gospel of green

IN Hollywood, the white knight in the fight against global warming is Al Gore, whose film, "An Inconvenient Truth," was received with great media hoopla when it arrived in theaters earlier this year. But in much of the rest of America, the man spearheading the battle against catastrophic climate change is someone you'd never see at the Ivy, hobnobbing with the Bush-hating, abortion-allowing, carbon footprint calculating nabobs of Hollywood elitism.

In fact, when it comes to broadening the reach of the environmental movement to red state America, the real savior turns out to be the Rev. Richard Cizik of the National Assn. of Evangelicals, America's most influential Christian lobbying group, representing 45,000 churches and roughly 30 million believers across the country. According to two new documentaries, it is evangelicals like Cizik who may do more to make global warming a front-and-center issue than hundreds of white-wine fundraisers in Bel-Air and Manhattan's Upper West Side.

For all its admirable sentiment, and sound science, "An Inconvenient Truth" ended up basically preaching to the converted. It grossed $23.6 million, an impressive number for an issue-oriented documentary. But the vast majority of its audience was in urban areas -- even at its peak, it didn't play in more than 587 theaters.

To hear the people behind these new documentaries, there is a much larger group of Americans eager to join the fight against global warming. "Is God Green?" airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on KCET as part of "Moyers on America," a three-part series of documentaries by Bill Moyers, a born-again Christian and environmentalist himself.

The other documentary, "The Great Warming," which arrives in theaters Nov. 3, focuses on environmental activism among evangelicals as well as ecologists, physicists, emergency room doctors and organic farmers. It interviews former CIA Director James Woolsey, who offers the blunt assessment, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Adapted from a series of Canadian TV specials, the film is being exhibited nationwide by Regal Cinema, the mega-movie theater chain owned by conservative family values activist Philip Anschutz.

Even more telling, according to Karen Coshof, the film's producer, is how Regal became interested in the film. "They called us after they'd been inundated by calls and letters about the movie, which people had seen after we sent DVDs out to about 200 churches around the U.S. If we've learned anything, its that social change in America begins at the grass-roots level, in churches and synagogues where people listen to their pastors and rabbis and are moved to action."