Required qualifications include, among others, personal faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, agreement to and affirmation of the NAE Statement of Faith, and participation in an NAE affiliated congregation.

Lobbyists aren’t normally expected to believe in the causes they represent. In this industry, salvation comes by works alone.

Deep-seated moral beliefs can be a liability for a lobbyist, as the NAE found out last month. Former top NAE lobbyist Richard Cizik was forced to resign, after 28 years on the job, when his personal beliefs conflicted with NAE doctrine.

Cizick’s downfall was a Dec. 2 interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross. The lobbyist just couldn’t bring himself to repeat the party line on gay families:

In a short portion of the program, Gross asked him, “A couple of years ago when you were on our show, I asked you if you were changing your mind on that. And two years ago, you said you were still opposed to gay marriage. But now as you identify more with younger voters, would you say you have changed on gay marriage?”

Cizik responded, “I’m shifting, I have to admit. In other words, I would willingly say that I believe in civil unions. I don’t officially support redefining marriage from its traditional definition, I don’t think.”

James Dobson, the leader of Focus on the Family, also tried to get Cizik fired in 2006 for being an environmentalist.

Maybe the NAE should rethink that job description. When it comes to lobbying, true believers can be trouble.

“I’m shifting, I have to admit,” the Rev. Richard Cizik told NPR. “In other words, I would willingly say that I believe in civil unions. I don’t officially support redefining marriage from its traditional definition, I don’t think.”

Last year a roster of conservative evangelical leaders tried to oust Cizik, the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals for 28 years, for what they termed a “relentless campaign” against global warming. Their preference was to keep the focus on social issues, like abortion, same-sex marriage and abstinence before marriage.

“For better or for worse, Rich became a great, polarizing figure,” said Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship. “He was gradually, over a period of time, separating himself from the mainstream of evangelical belief and conviction. So I’m not surprised. I’m sorry for him, but I’m not disappointed for the evangelical movement.”

Just this week Cizik, along with Colson, signed off on a full-page ad in the New York Times claiming that gays and lesbians have engaged in a pattern of mob violence against Mormons after the passage of Proposition 8 in California. The ad has sparked backlash from gays.

In a September interview with the Colorado Independent, Cizik weighed in with his thoughts about the presidential race, including a marked critique of the Republican candidate.

“I thought John McCain was a principled person,” Cizik said. “But John McCain has backed off, not just on climate change but on torture and a sensible tax policy — in other words, he’s not the John McCain of 2000. … He seems to be waffling on issue after issue.”

Richard Cizik, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, was named one of TIME's 100 most influential people.

Richard Cizik is one of the country’s most powerful and outspoken Christian evangelical leaders. He happens to be a Republican, and he has known the GOP’s presidential nominee for many years. “I thought John McCain was a principled person,” Cizik says. “But John McCain has backed off, not just on climate change but on torture and a sensible tax policy — in other words, he’s not the John McCain of 2000. … He seems to be waffling on issue after issue.

“It’s not illogical for someone to conclude that John McCain is going to be more like George Bush than John McCain is going to be like John McCain in 2000.”

Characterizing the GOP’s presidential nominee as an unprincipled waffler is strong stuff from the man who oversees governmental affairs and is the chief lobbyist of the 30-million-member Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Evangelicals. But Cizik — named this year by TIME magazine one of the world’s 100 most influential people — is no stranger to controversies that come from strong convictions.

Over the past several years, Cizik, whose organization represents 45,000 churches from 59 denominations, has emerged as a passionate leader in the Creation Care movement — efforts by Christian evangelicals to respond to the perils of global change.

Focus on the Family founder and president James Dobson has long been critical of Richard Cizik's 'Creation Care' approach to global warming. (Photo/Focus on the Family)

Suffice to say, Cizik’s efforts have rocked much of his world — including the minds of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and a phalanx of other old-guard evangelicals like Tony Perkins, Paul Weyrich and Gary Bauer who tried last year, unsuccessfully, to get Cizik fired from his job of 26 years for sounding the global warming alarm.

Dobson and the others, you see, would prefer to keep the evangelical focus on what they call “the great moral issues of our time,” specifically abortion, man-woman-only marriage and “the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.”

They have disparaged Cizik for having a “preoccupation” with global warming and other related issues, including poverty and overpopulation. In 2006 Dobson even head-butted Cizik in the press for supporting international regulations of emissions, calling his views “anti-capitalistic and [having] an underlying hatred for America.”

Cizik, who takes the long view of winning converts to the global warming battle though biblical truths and employing what he describes as a “winsome, non-argumentative spirit,” was in Colorado Springs last week for a two day speaking tour with an unlikely partner in crime, the populist commentator Jim Hightower (who has detailed Cizik’s work in his latest book, “Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go Against the Flow”).

The first night the two addressed a crowd of 500 congregants of the Vanguard Christian Church and the next spoke to a crowd of hundreds of Colorado College students and environmental activists. And yes, during his speech Cizik made a joking reference to “people” who say he should be fired. He also expressed hope that Colorado Springs — headquarters to Dobson’s ministry and media empire Focus on the Family — would become ground zero for a renewed “focus on the Earth.”

“We live in the same world, but some people see through different glasses,” Cizik said of critics. “We have to move them.”

In an extensive Colorado Independent interview shortly after his Colorado stop, Cizik spoke more specifically about his views of the presidential election,including his thoughts on McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin — who rejects the science of human induced climate change — as his running mate.

Cizik tells of an encounter he had with McCain a year ago, after the candidate had been the target of loathing from evangelical leaders — most notably from the very same James Dobson who has gone after Cizik. In McCain’s case, Dobson let it be known in no uncertain terms: “I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances … he’s not in favor of traditional marriage and I pray that we don’t get stuck with him.”

McCain, says Cizik, wanted to know what to make of these declarations. Cizik’s response? Where else are people like Dobson really going to go? Ultimately, he says, the criticism may have given old-guard leaders like Dobson leverage over McCain’s vice presidential choice. And lo and behold, since Palin was picked, Dobson has been gushing over the ticket, indicating he will in all likelihood “pull the lever” for Palin, er, McCain.

“It is pretty obvious that the Palin nomination plays to identity politics and cultural war issues,” says Cizik. “Her selection is more than an acknowledgment that evangelicals are an important part of the Republican base, and everyone knows that John McCain is not that exciting to religious conservatives.”

Palin, Cizik says, has certainly excited the Republican base, and picking her was certainly a deft, if cynical, political move by McCain — at least in the short term. However, in the longer view, his running mate may do just as much to energize the opposition and prove a turn-off to independents.

“Not everyone in the evangelical movement is fawning over Sarah Palin,” Cizik says.

Let’s review the conflicting messages: Just as hurricanes like Katrina and Rita and Ike have laid devastating wakes, McCain has selected a doubter of human-caused global warming as a running mate. Palin’s record as a drill-baby-drill-for-oil advocate, including in Alaska’s National Wildlife Reserve; supporting shooting wolves from low-flying airplanes; and de-listing polar bears as an endangered species doesn’t exactly resonate among evangelical Christians who have embraced a commitment to caring for God’s creation.

And, sending perhaps the most important signal of all, McCain himself has chosen not to not to speak out on the issue of climate change, Cizik notes. His campaign instead has opted to play identity and culture-war politics.

“He’s playing that card, and many of us thought he didn’t need to do it — it just polarizes the country,” Cizik says. “The irony of it is that John McCain can’t speak with an evangelical voice of faith — let’s face it, it’s just not his thing — so I guess the substitute is this other [Palin]. I guess that’s pretty cynical, but maybe his actions are cynical.

“The consequences of going to identity and culture-war politics is that experience is denigrated, authority is questioned and ignorance is strength,” Cizik says.

That said, come Nov. 4 does Cizik plan to cast his vote for Barack Obama? He doesn’t know.

“Obama doesn’t have the experience all of us would like,” Cizik says. “I’m not in Washington to be an advocate for the Republican or the Democratic Party; that’s not my calling. I’m not an ideologue. I do wish Obama had 10 years experience in the Senate and Sarah Palin had [more experience].

“I am a Republican, but I’m not comfortable with giving the Republicans four more years. I don’t see John McCain differing enough from the incumbent, and yet Obama is a work in progress, pretty much, so we’d be taking some risk with him. It’s a conundrum.”

For more on evangelical Christian leaders on the intersection of politics, faith and the 2008 presidential campaigns, read Evangelical author rallies votes for Obama in Colorado Springs.

The 30-million member evangelical group’s action (or in this case non-action) comes after Dobson, of Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, and other hard-right Christian leaders demanded that the NAE stick to “traditional” issues, like abortion and same sex marriage. As Colorado Confidential reported last week, the rift has grown, in recent years, into a schism separating Christian activists.

The news, that the NAE has no plans to discipline Richard Cizik, its vice president of government affairs, for his outspoken stance on climate change, comes as the Associated Press is reporting that “the harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won’t have enough water.”The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change draft report, focusing on the effects of global change, was written by more than 1,000 scientists and is scheduled to be unveiled in Brussels next month.

Some influential conservative Christian leaders, like Dobson, along with  Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, Paul Weyrich of Coalitions for America and Gary L. Bauer of the group American Values, continue to maintain that global warming is “unproven.” Many others, including the signors of the 2004 evangelical Christian Health of the Nations position statement, have placed a high priority on the environment, poverty, overpopulation, and other social issues.

And, the group has made it clear that just because they have tagged global warming as a major threat, that does not make them “liberals.” In fact, they have posted an official statement answering that very question: 

Does addressing climate change mean we’re becoming liberals?

No. We believe that creating a better future for our children and grandchildren by fulfilling our biblical call to stewardship and love of neighbor through reducing pollution is simply being a good biblical Christian. Climate change is not a liberal issue. It is a profound problem for people Jesus loves, people Jesus died to save.

Cara DeGette is a longtime Colorado journalist and a senior fellow at Colorado Confidential. E-mail her at cdegette@coloradoconfidential.com.