“The Bible’s greatest message is compassion,” said PETA campaign coordinator Ashley Byrne, who said she hoped to convince Southern Baptists to adopt a diet that was compassionate to animals by not eating them.

The SBC, like the broader U.S. evangelical movement, is divided about what action to take on “creation care” or environmental issues such as climate change.

But the culturally and politically conservative SBC, better known for its fondness of “guns and God,” probably does not have a lot of vegetarians in its ranks.

An informal Reuters survey of a few attending the meeting turned up none.

One major nationwide survey in 2006 found that 50 percent of licensed U.S. hunters and anglers were evangelical Christians — hardly rich fishing grounds for coverts to the PETA cause.

This is serious stuff indeed for a group that places much emphasis on the conversion experience, the acceptance of Jesus as a person’s savior and the rite of passage that goes with this acceptance: a public immersion in water or baptism.

In April the SBC released its latest baptism numbers — figures it tracks closely, underscoring the importance attatched to them.

In 2007, baptisms decreased by 5 percent to 345,941 from 364,826 in 2006. It was the third straight year that the number of baptisms fell and the lowest total since 1987.

I have blogged on this topic in the past, before the latest figures, which one Southern Baptist official told me “hit everyone in the guts.”

Of course some people attend Southern Baptist churches without taking the dunk, including — at least according to many reports — presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

But this decrease in baptisms could also point to a broader slowdown in the swelling ranks of America’s evangelical movement, which now includes one in four adults in the United States.

The U.S. evangelical movement is experiencing “growth pains” with divisions emerging over its direction and a push to broaden its Biblical agenda from its recent political focus on family and cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage, to embrace others such as climate change.

These divisions are also emerging within the SBC, a bedrock of cultural and theological conservatism.

These trends could soften some of the evangelical movement’s partisan — read Republican — edge, which is perhaps not good news for McCain, who is regarded as a liberal compromiser by some of the more conservative evangelical leaders. More on this angle here and here and here.

But some of McCain’s policies such as his call for action on climate change are also in line with more centrist evangelical thinking.

Outgoing SBC President Frank Page is fond of quipping that Southern Baptists are well known for what they are against but need to talk more about what they are for. He told me that a broader agenda had resonance especially with younger evangelicals.

“Younger evaneglicals want to see this … environmental stewardship and other areas such as poverty, homelessness and hunger,” Page said, noting the SBC’s little reported work in area such as diasaster relief and food banks.

Six candidates are running for the rotating two-year term to replace Page. Interviews with them by Baptist Press can be seen here.

So stay tuned and watch this space.

In a letter to the U.S. Senate on Monday, Schori urged the body to “take up climate change legislation at the earliest possible moment.”

“Climate change is a threat not only to God’s creation but to all of humanity,” Schori said, noting that her concerns were formed by both her faith and her training as a scientist. She has a background in oceanography, making her perhaps better qualified than most spiritual leaders to comment on the issue.

Schori said that climate change caused by carbon fuel emissions exacerbated poverty, creating a vicious cycle as poverty itself contributed to global warming as the poor felled forests and sought other sources of energy.

U.S. evangelicals have made similar points when calling for action on the issue. While America’s roughly 75 million evangelicals far outnumber the 2.4 million member Episcopal Church, the former are deeply divided on the issue.

The evangelical left and center have embraced it under the banner of “creation care” while the evangelical right remains suspicious of calls to reduce U.S. carbon emissions, partly because of their close ties to the business wing of the Republican Party, partly because some see humanity having “dominion” over nature.

But even the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest evangelical denomination, said recently that it had neglected the issue in the past but would take stronger though unspecified stances in the future.

The mainline Episcopal Church may not have such a sharp divide on the issue, which will be a welcome relief to many in its fragmenting fold.

The two have come together to chart a future course for conservative Christian political activism in a just published book entitled “Personal Faith, Public Policy”. The issues they discuss include the value of life, poverty and justice and rebuilding the traditional family unit.

They argue that conservative Christians need to speak out more on issues like poverty and racial reconciliation while maintaining their opposition to abortion and gay rights. They say no one political party - i.e., the Republican Party - should assume to command evangelical support unless it delivers the goods and that born-again Christians should also woo Democrats.

They also say that an evangelically inspired third party is a “powerful possibility”.
The book is sure to raise some eye-brows. The authors say that “what Jesus warned would occur in the last days are almost identical to what some global warming theorists say is going to happen”, pointing to what they see is the parallel between scientific and Biblical predictions of famines and extreme weather events.

But they adopt the view of secular sceptics of climate change who say economic resources spent on capping carbon emissions would be better spent in areas like poverty alleviation. The authors spoke with Reuters about their book and the future of the Religious Right, whose obituary they say is being prematurely written - and not for the first time.

Q: You say the Religious Right is not dead. How will it change in the next few years?

PERKINS: “It’s growing more diverse and it’s maturing. And it’s becoming more focused on the issues as opposed to the more political or partisan side … ”

Q: How is it losing its partisan edge?

PERKINS: “In 2004 evangelicals were clearly very in line with the Republican Party but that’s because of what they were saying. George Bush campaigned very hard on the marriage issue … There was promise of a (federal) marriage amendment (to ban gay marriage) and of course after the election all of that fell by the way side. The Republicans did not advance the values agenda that they had committed to … The Republican Party has drifted away from those issues and to the degree that they drift away from those issues they will lose support …”

JACKSON: “I think you’ll find that if in fact the GOP moves away from a lot of the values that it has stood for you will find that (evangelicals) will have no problem moving into an independent kind of status.”

PERKINS: “That is actually happening. The polling data shows more and more evangelicals are not identifying with the Republican Party, they are identifying as independents. The way that this has been misconstrued is that somehow the Republican loss is a Democratic gain. That’s just not true…It’s not as if evangelicals have suddenly become liberal.”

Q: Bishop Jackson, you have called abortion a “black genocide”. Do you see an intrinsic racism on this issue from some on the liberal/left?

JACKSON: “I do believe that it is a strategic plan. We only need to look at Margaret Sanger’s (founder of the American Birth Control League which became Planned Parenthood) philosophical orientation. From the beginning she thought that she should exterminate inferior races … There is this openness to receive money to abort all babies but black babies in particular.”

Q: On global warming, you say there is a possibility that what some people say is climate change may be the pre-signals of the End of Times. Can you elaborate on this?

PERKINS: “We need to be careful about surrendering national sovereignty or grinding our economy to a halt thinking we can stop all of this … There is very clear evidence in the scripture that some of these things will occur in the End Times.”

JACKSON: “I would add that as a return on investment there is no provable model yet that shows that X-amount of dollars into CO2 reduction yields so many degrees cooler…”