Are right-wing Christians becoming born-again environmentalists? Yes, naturally.

This week in Washington, Catholics, Jews and mainline Protestants turned up at the White House and on Capitol Hill to beseech President Bush and lawmakers to do something about global warming. But guess whom these usual suspects brought with them? Conservative evangelicals, Mr. Bush's most ardent supporters.

Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals tells us that believers of his stripe are waking up to the moral responsibility Christians have for the environment. He says that the political left should not be the only side speaking out for protecting the natural world.

Christians believe that the creator expects mankind to be good stewards of his work. "The land in mine and you are but aliens and my tenants," says the Book of Leviticus. "Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land."

One finds a deep conservationist streak among modern Christian thinkers and writers, traditionalists as disparate as Russell Kirk, J.R.R. Tolkien, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Wendell Berry, who wrote, "You cannot know that life is holy if you are content to live from economic practices that daily destroy life and diminish its possibility."

Mr. Berry's observation helps explain why many contemporary conservatives have not been on the environmental front lines: an ethic of stewardship of the natural world is not wholly compatible with the libertarian gospel of individual freedom and free-market economics preached by the Republican Party.

Yet right-leaning evangelicals are social conservatives for whom serving God, not the unfettered desires of fallen mankind, is the highest goal. To social conservatives, the free market and individual liberty are means to an end -- the good of the community, under God -- not an end in itself. This is the philosophical underpinning that guides evangelicals' activism within the GOP on abortion and other social issues. That they've now turning their attention and considerable influence to the environment is a welcome development.

In June, a coalition of conservative evangelicals will meet in Maryland and issue a statement of principles encouraging their congregations to take stewardship of the environment more seriously. We hope the administration will make common cause with the Christian faithful who recognize that conservatives and conservationists are natural allies.

[COMMENT: One hopes that Judy Lee read this editorial last week. R.]