MANY CONSIDER LOUISIANA ground zero for the country’s most pressing environmental problems. The risks of living in a state long nicknamed “Sportsman’s Paradise” continue to mount as worsening, climate change-fueled hurricanes threaten its degrading coastlines, which slip away with rising tides. Meanwhile, an ongoing industrial boom endangers the health of residents living along the fence line of some of the major fossil fuel plants that help drive global warming. But for two quite different church communities — one deep in Louisiana’s countryside and the other in the state’s most populous city — the risks present an opportunity to model what’s needed for a resilient and faithful future.

Tucked in the rural remains of Louisiana’s plantation country, just under 500 people, most of them Black, call the small town of Convent, La., home. The 300-year-old community, situated about 50 miles west of New Orleans on I-10, moves with the bend of the winding Mississippi River, which cuts through the entirety of St. James Parish. Convent serves as the parish seat, and many of the families date back generations, descending from people who were enslaved on sugarcane and indigo plantations.

But people aren’t the only ones who reside there. Some of the wide swaths of land once used for plantations began to be sold to chemical companies in the mid-to-late 1900s. On the eastern end of Convent, a trio of industrial plants neighbor each other, spewing pollution. The coal export facility, fertilizer manufacturer, and chlorine manufacturer each silently release their own toxic mix of hazards into the air — and Convent residents like Rev. Roderick Williams breathe that air every day.

Williams believes his neighbors have suffered as a result, as cancer has spread throughout his community and others in St. James while chemical plants proliferated. It’s challenging to attribute a single cancer case to environmental pollution, but Louisiana Tumor Registry data shows that at least one census tract in St. James has a significantly higher rate of cancer than much of the state.

Williams’ hometown of Convent and the rest of St. James Parish sit in the heart of Louisiana’s chemical corridor, an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River running from Baton Rouge through New Orleans. The heavily industrialized swath — forged through the most generous property tax exemption program in the nation — has garnered the infamous nickname of “Cancer Alley” due to concerns about the health impact of the more than 200 industrial plants scattered there. A 2021 ProPublica report found that “Cancer Alley” was one of the country’s largest hotspots for toxic air.

For more than 20 years, Williams has been among the growing number of residents willing to oppose multinational, billion-dollar corporations and to fight proposed new chemical plants in his community.

“You can’t stop what’s here already, but you can stop more plants from coming in. Now, it’s all about prevention,” the 48-year-old pastor told Sojourners. He recently joined a local environmental advocacy group called Rise St. James that is suing the parish to ban the development of new industrial plants drawn to the Mississippi River’s ease of transportation.

And an integral piece to his battle? Faith.

“Faith is imperative. Without faith, it’s impossible to please God,” Williams said.

Not only is faith important, but Williams is also part of a movement of religious leaders who say God tasked us from the start to care for God’s creation—a biblical responsibility to the health of the Earth. And as church leaders help address major environmental challenges, some in Louisiana find it also helps churches remain financially viable as consistent donations and membership continue to decline.

Prayers against environmental injustice

WILLIAMS NEVER DREAMED of becoming a pastor. But he was always an activist.

In 1996, Williams was in his early 20s when a Japanese chemical company wanted to build a $700 million polyvinyl chloride plant right next to Convent. At that time, the town had just seen the opening of the Convent Marine Terminal, the nearby coal export facility, after the Mosaic fertilizer company and Oxy Chemical opened their plants in the ’70s and ’80s, respectively.

The plant proposed by Shintech Inc., a subsidiary of the largest chemical company in Japan, would have released an additional 600,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into the already polluted air. By 1995, St. James Parish already had at least eight industrial plants that emitted 17 million pounds of air pollution.

Convent’s residents, including Williams, had begun to say, “We’re full.”

Despite promises of new jobs and economic development, Williams and a now-defunct community group called St. James Citizens for Jobs and the Environment roused enough opposition to delay the project’s permitting before the company ultimately decided to drop their plans in 1998.

Now, there are 11 major polluting plants in St. James Parish — most of them located in districts that are predominantly Black. Williams, who grew up in Convent, said the town looked different as a child. Greener, lusher. “We had a lot of fruit trees that would grow, and now you don’t see them anymore,” he said. “You have a garden now, [but] you don’t see the same bounty.” He attributed those changes to the long-term effects of pollution sinking into the soil in addition to degrading air and water quality. Even back then, before the thought of being a pastor entered his head, Williams was talking about the need to take care of the planet God made for us. “We’re supposed to take care of our creation and we’ve done a poor job,” he said.

While many people know the Ten Commandments, Williams said people skip past what came long before, when God placed people in the Garden of Eden “to work it and keep it.”

“We’re big on ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ people want to go by those laws, but ‘Tend to and watch over God’s creation’ — that’s the first thing [God] did,” Williams said. “And we’ve bypassed that.”

After years of activism and organizing support for the elderly and impoverished, Williams turned to ministry. In 2014, he traveled to New Orleans to feed the elderly and from then on, he was hooked. When the pastor position became available at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Convent, Williams took the helm. His church is one of six in town and dates back about 170 years. First owned by two slaveowners, Williams said it was handed down to two enslaved persons who built it up on the other side of the river before moving the building to Convent, looking for levee protection as the Mississippi River swelled and changed. “This church has been here forever,” said the pastor. “It has a lot of history and that’s why I want to keep it going. We’ve been a shelter for people who can’t afford to leave when
storms come in.”

Rather than bring activism into his sermons on Sundays, Williams said he brings God into environmental discussions during community meetings, Bible studies, and dialogues with neighbors. And he’s found it effective to tie issues of environmental injustice to the Word of God. “If you break it down to a person’s understanding of the Word, you can get their attention and speak to them. They’ll see what you’re saying,” he said.Williams draws connections between the local health issues and environmental disasters, such as a recent fire at an oil plant or climate change, to God’s orders to Adam in Genesis. “[Humanity] has destroyed or is destroying what God created. If we don’t learn to put into the Earth what we are taking, we’re going to be in dire trouble,” he said.

Cutting emissions, cutting costs

IN 2021, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana as one of the strongest Category 4 storms to hit the Gulf Coast. Two years later, recovery continues across southeast Louisiana, including in Convent where Pleasant Hill Baptist Church is still undergoing repairs.

Ida plunged much of the region into darkness for weeks — and for some areas, months. It was the sort of storm that punched you in the face, a vicious and deadly reminder of the consequences of our continued contribution to warming the planet and creating a climate that is more extreme. Not only because of the storm itself, but also the intense heatwave that followed while restored power remained a distant dream.

Fifty miles downriver from Convent, New Orleans spent at least a week without electricity following Ida. The historic streets of the French Quarter were vacant as the Crescent City, nestled in another river bend, began the all-too-familiar process of picking itself back up. Those who had evacuated the city watched from afar, waiting for the chance to return and help piece their home back together. Even evacuated, it can be impossible to remove oneself from the city — especially for someone like Rev. Gregory Manning. He leads Broadmoor Community Church, a nearly century-old congregation in one of New Orleans’ historic neighborhoods.

Manning isn’t new to environmental work either. He has worked with a coalition against new pollution out in St. James Parish for years. After Ida, Manning spent months with volunteers gutting and repairing as many homes as possible to kickstart storm recovery.

For Manning, Ida served as both a warning and an inspiration. Infrastructure failures showed clear faults and worsened the distrust of the state’s utilities. Manning and his church, along with a coalition of other churches and nonprofits known as Together New Orleans — part of the Industrial Areas Foundation community organizing network — decided to follow the adage “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”

Together New Orleans launched the Community Lighthouse Project, an ambitious plan to build out more than 100 solar-powered “lighthouses” across South Louisiana that will offer safe havens in the aftermath of hurricanes. “These storms are getting more and more intense. It is going to happen again. And when it happens again, this time we’re more ready than we were before,” Manning told Sojourners, sitting in his office at Broadmoor Community Church in the 14th Ward.

So far, Together New Orleans has equipped four buildings with solar panels. Most of them are churches like Manning’s. Each already has a relationship within their community as the coalition looks to build a hyperlocal network in Louisiana. To start, the goal is to ensure everyone in New Orleans lives within a 15-minute walk of a “lighthouse,” filling a gap left by city officials who may require several days to provide help in the aftermath of natural disasters. The community centers will offer neighbors an air-conditioned place to stay, have meals, and store medicine, as well as assist those without the resources to evacuate.

“There’s so many things that fall through the gap, that we don’t think about, that people can lose their life over,” Manning noted.

This work comes with a side benefit: Churches that have struggled to regain regular congregants and donations amid a global pandemic and growing secularism cut their operational costs. “Churches are not seeing the amount of money that traditionally people were giving. People aren’t showing up in the pews anymore. They’re not putting in when the plate is passed,” Manning said.

Churches, like tens of thousands of New Orleanians, are overburdened by energy costs. But since installing solar panels on the roof, Manning has seen a steep drop in the church’s utility bill, which offers some relief to the church’s budget while lowering its dependence on the fossil-fuel use driving climate change.

During the summer, the cost of air conditioning and lights can add up to $2,000 per month to the church’s energy bill. “And we’re a small church,” Manning said. “I’m excited about that because the more we are able to see that [energy bill] decrease, the more we are able to put into helping the people in this community.”

For both Manning and Williams, faith — in lockstep with action — is essential to building broad support for tackling environmental issues across the country, but especially in southern states such as Louisiana that hold the greatest concentration of religious people.

Williams attributed all of Rise St. James’ success to the power of its members’ faith. “Everything we overcome is by the power of God and the wisdom [God] put in us,” Williams said.

But Williams doesn’t expect change to come until they educate their neighbors and build awareness of how his community’s struggles are tied to the environment. “Knowledge is power, but it isn’t powerful until you apply the knowledge that you obtain,” Williams said. “We’ll continue to push forward until that happens.”