The Resurrection of Richard Cizik

On April 22, four years ago, I spent the day with Richard Cizik for this story. A lot has happened since then. In 2005, Cizik was the vice president for government affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), an influential group consisting of 45,000 churches and some 30 million members. He had been NAE's political point man in D.C. since Reagan. By Earth Day 2005, when I caught up with Cizik for my story on unlikely environmental bedfellows, he was already taking heavy hits from his supposed friends on the Right, who abhorred his increasingly outspoken calls for action on global warming. In 2007, prominent christian conservatives, such as James Dobson and Tony Perkins, had tried to oust Cizic from the NAE, citing, among other things, his advocacy of the green-friendly Creation Care movement, and his "relentless campaign against global warming." Last December, Dobson and Perkins got an early ...