How Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew’s Global Environmental Leadership Is Changing the Conversation About Faith and Climate Action in America

A soft-spoken man in black robes had been calling climate change a sin for almost forty years, while the majority of the world was still debating its existence. His name is unfamiliar to the majority of Americans. That says something on its own.

Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch, does not easily fit into the American consciousness. He doesn’t deliver sermons in crowded megachurches. He’s not popular on social media. His office is located inside the Phanar, a small Istanbul compound that you might pass by without noticing. However, this quiet Orthodox leader has been treating the devastation of the planet as a spiritual issue rather than merely a policy one for decades, something that American religious life is only now beginning to consider.

When Western journalists began to notice how frequently he was discussing rivers, forests, and the moral cost of pollution in 1996, the moniker “Green Patriarch” stuck with him. Al Gore formally announced it at the White House a year later. Time named him one of the most influential people alive by 2008, praising his efforts for “defining environmentalism as a spiritual responsibility.” It’s a thought-provoking phrase. Environmentalism has historically been associated with scientists, activists, and the political left in American discourse. Silently, Bartholomew insisted that believers also owned it.

The remarkable thing is how early he began. The origins of the Orthodox environmental discourse can be traced to a meeting in Chambésy, Switzerland, in 1986, where representatives publicly expressed concern over Western consumption patterns. His predecessor established September 1st as a day of prayer for creation by issuing the first environmental encyclical letter in 1989. A year later, a monk on Mount Athos was asked to compose a hymn that asked God to protect the earth from humanity rather than protect humans from natural disasters, as such prayers had done for centuries. This theologically radical reversal took place decades before the majority of American denominations even brought up the subject of climate change.

His influence spreads in less obvious ways throughout the United States. He has arrived at Brookings. He has organized symposiums about the Amazon, the Arctic, and the Mississippi River. Creation Day services, which were nonexistent a generation ago, are now held by Greek Orthodox parishes from Boston to Los Angeles. Once dubious, evangelical organizations have begun using terminology he helped popularize, such as the notion that protecting the environment is an act of stewardship rather than politics. Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ may have been influenced by his ideas more than the credits indicate. The moral framing of the two men is strikingly similar, and they are friends.

Observing all of this from a distance gives the impression that American religious communities are gradually catching up to what Bartholomew has been stating since the early 1990s. There are those who disagree with him. Some Orthodox bishops have been reluctant to take action because they are afraid of upsetting governments that are still dependent on coal, especially in the Balkans. The task is not finished. The weather continues to deteriorate. Furthermore, it is still genuinely unclear whether religious moral authority can influence behavior in pipelines, pews, or policy.

It’s difficult to ignore the change, though. Speaking in a language that predates the industrial revolution, a patriarch from a 1,700-year-old church has inexplicably found himself at the forefront of a discussion that Americans believed belonged to senators and scientists. He didn’t yell to get there. He simply continued to appear.