Faith-based environmental groups take on fossil fuels as 'a sacred duty'

(RNS) — In mid-September, Val Smith, chief sustainability officer at Citigroup, one of the United States’ Big Four of banking, met with four religious environmental activists to discuss the company’s record on fossil fuel investment.

In 2021, Citi had pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but according to reports by independent financial researchers and environmental watchdog groups, the bank has become the second-largest funder of oil, coal and gas projects in the world.

“(We) asked Citi what its justification was for continued fossil fuel expansion, and they didn’t have an answer,” said Rabbi Jacob Siegel, climate adviser for Dayenu, a 4-year-old Jewish organization focused on addressing the climate crisis, and one of the four clergy at the Sept. 18 meeting.

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The religious activists had booked the meeting with Smith thanks to the Summer of Heat, a campaign that organized more than 40 protests at the bank’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

In one demonstration, an interfaith group of clergy had come dressed in white linen and clerical collars to the front entrance of Citigroup’s glass and stone tower carrying signs adorned with crosses, Stars of David, Islamic symbols and peace signs.

The protesters sang, rather than chanted, and carried candles in order to call down what activists described as a sacred energy to the demonstrations. But their solemnity shouldn’t be mistaken for meekness: At other protests, the faith leaders arrived early in the morning to lock arms and block Citibank employees from entering the buildings, causing hundreds of employees to stand in line to start their workday.

“The tone totally changes when people of faith come in,” said Rev. Chelsea MacMillan, an interspiritual minister and the organizer for GreenFaith, a key player in advocating for fossil fuel divestment in the New York City area for more than a decade. “You can tell that when we come in, this is a sacred duty and a sacred act for us. It freaks people out a little bit.”

The Summer of Heat is representative of a growing, and increasingly vocal, faith-based environmental movement from a range of traditions and denominations, and their tactics go beyond marches. “We want to move toward identifying faith groups that bank with Citi who are considering ending their banking relationship because of their moral concerns,” said Fletcher Harper, director of GreenFaith.

Siegel, of Dayenu — the word for “enough” in Hebrew — refers synagogues, yeshivas and Jewish community centers to agencies such as Banking on Climate Chaos, TOPO Finance’s Calculator and Green America’s Get a Better Bank for help in moving their finances to more ethically responsible institutions in an effort to align their financial practices with their religious values.

“It’s a business issue, but it’s also a moral issue,” said Harper. “How does Citi explain not just the inconvenience but the devastation that people suffer because of what they’re doing to measurably destroy people’s communities?”

(A Citibank spokesperson said about the September meeting with the faith leaders: “Citi welcomes constructive engagement with stakeholder groups such as GreenFaith. Our position on our work to address climate change through our financing is clear. Our approach reflects the need to transition while also continuing to meet global energy needs — these activities are not mutually exclusive.”)

GreenFaith began in New Jersey in 1992 as a local volunteer organization called Partners for Environmental Quality, then advocating for interfaith communities to purchase their electricity from renewable energy providers. At the time, Harper was an Episcopal parish priest. The group changed its name to GreenFaith in 2002 when Harper left his parish to become its director.

“What drew me to religious leadership was the example of people like Gandhi and Dr. King, who used religion and spirituality as a force for social change,” Harper said. “I felt that religious groups needed to address the fact that the planet was being destroyed, and that this was something we needed to do with diverse faith groups.”

The organization’s early actions included energy audits, solar panel installations and “toxic tours,” in which GreenFaith members took religious leaders on visits to environmentally contaminated sites in Newark, where they heard from local activists about the challenges their communities were facing.

News of these actions spread, and soon the group was presenting its work at meetings with interfaith religious gatherings across the country. “We did workshops on what the Bible, the Quran or the Vedas teach about this,” Harper said.

The organization began to home in on financial markets in the 2010s.

In 2014, GreenFaith organized hundreds of religious communities to travel to New York to participate in the People’s Climate March. “The Paris Agreement was forged on the streets of New York at the People’s Climate March,” Harper said, referring to the global treaty on climate change signed in 2016. “Because that showed politicians that there was political demand for them to take action on this.”

After the march, the Unitarian Universalist Association, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church, among other Christian denominations, have committed to divestment from the fossil fuel industry.

GreenFaith has also made common cause with local groups fighting environmental threats. In August, members of GreenFaith joined Rise St. James, a Christian environmental activist organization based in St. James Parish, Louisiana, to protest Formosa Plastics, the Taiwanese petrochemical company headquartered in Livingston, New Jersey.

Funded in part by Citigroup, Formosa Plastics has plans to construct a massive petrochemical plant complex in St. James Parish, a low-income Black community located in “Cancer Alley,” a region where pollution from the town’s numerous industrial plants is thought to be the cause of high rates of cancer among locals.

Several activists from Louisiana traveled north to Livingston, where GreenFaith’s MacMillan was arrested during a protest and charged with trespassing. “Like as Rabbi Heschel says, I’m praying with my feet,” MacMillan told RNS. “I feel that in these actions, we’re praying with our hands and we’re praying with our bodies.”

Sharon Lavigne founded Rise St. James after researching the devastating health problems afflicting her town, where cancer rates are high. “I couldn’t understand why we were having so many funerals,” Lavigne said.

In 2016, Lavigne was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis, and since 2018 has been working to bring awareness to the dangers of pollution to the residents of her hometown.

Lavigne was not arrested during the protest in Livingston. She and others attended a prayer service at a nearby church after the demonstration.

“Sometimes I feel angry because not one of the politicians is helping us,” Lavigne said. “So we’re trying to go through God.”