A heavenly thrust to saving Earth

Evangelical Christianity and ecological conservation ought to be natural allies. Shouldn’t people who believe that Earth is God’s greatest gift to humankind protect and preserve his creation? The problem is guilt by association, with environmentalists usually thought of as liberals. Many evangelicals wouldn’t believe Al Gore if he said it was raining, let alone that the planet faces imminent man-made catastrophe.

Hailing from the more neutral ground of Canada, “The Great Warming” will probably raise fewer hackles than Gore’s deliberately alarmist “An Inconvenient Truth,” to which it will inevitably be compared. Adapted from Lydia Dotto’s book “Storm Warning: Gambling With the Climate of Our Planet” and condensed from a three-hour miniseries originally broadcast on Canadian TV in 2003, Michael Taylor and Karen Coshof’s slickly made documentary serves as a tidy primer on climate change, making up in breadth what it lacks in exhortation.

Unlike Gore’s movie, which focused largely on what Americans had done to cause the problem and what they could do to fix it, “The Great Warming” treats global warming as a global issue. From a Chinese family shopping for its first car to a Mongolian goatherd who burns dirty fuel to generate electricity, the sources of greenhouse gases are depicted as widespread and constantly increasing. (One sobering statistic: Car ownership in China is rising at a rate of 20% a year.)

“The Great Warming’s” scope is breathtaking and more than a little daunting, especially because its solutions are rarely as compelling as its problems. One scientist describes his vision of skyscraper-high collectors that could remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the filmmakers obligingly fill a vast field with digital prototypes.

But there’s no talk of how to muster the political and economic capital necessary to realize such an enormous undertaking. The film’s awestruck tone recalls 1950s visions of a future filled with floating cars and robot kitchens, as if the best way to combat atmospheric pollution were with pie in the sky.

That’s where the evangelicals come in. With due respect to narrators Alanis Morissette and Keanu Reeves, the real star of “The Great Warming” is the Rev. Richard Cizik of the National Assn. of Evangelicals. Cizik introduces the notion of “creation care,” a biblical brand of eco-activism, saying, “To harm this world by environmental degradation is an offense against God.” Although he acknowledges that evangelicals tend to vote Republican en bloc, Cizik explicitly criticizes the Bush administration for its inaction and holds out the tantalizing prospect that 30 million American evangelicals could turn the Republican Party into a powerful force for change.

It won’t be easy. After Dr. J. Matthew Sleeth, the author of “Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action,” makes his case to a group of Christian teens, one asks, “Don’t the tree-huggers put nature above God?”

And the movie neglects to mention that earlier this year Cizik’s association passed up an opportunity to take an official position on global warming. (It could use some updating in other respects as well: The copious footage of pre-Katrina New Orleans is sketchily contextualized by a few lines of rewritten narration.)

But although Cizik and Sleeth occupy only a small chunk of the film, their presence is genuinely inspiring, as is the fact that the film has been embraced by the conservative culture warrior Philip Anschutz, who is distributing it via his Regal Entertainment theater chain. It won’t heal the red-state/blue-state schism, but “The Great Warming” implicitly makes the case that, from a God’s-eye perspective, there is nothing that unites us like the health of the planet we share.

*

‘The Great Warming’

MPAA rating: Unrated

A Regal Entertainment release. Writer-director Michael Taylor. Producer Karen Coshof. Director of photography Michael Ellis. Editor Scott Mason. Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes.

At selected Regal Cinemas.