Those who fight the everyday battle between light and darkness — religious people — will allow the darkness to win for one hour Saturday.

Members of Metro Atlanta churches, synagogues and the region's growing component of faith-based environmental organizations will switch off lights between 8 and 9 p.m. Saturday.

The groups are acting in concert with Earth Hour 2008, a national event sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to show support for taking action on climate change.

"We are seeing a growing awakening. The scales are dropping off of our eyes to this connection between serving God and caring for God's creation," said Alan Jenkins of Atlanta's Earth Covenant Ministry, a Presbyterian-based environmental network.

The ministry is also sponsoring a candlelight environmental vigil Thursday at 7 p.m. at Druid Hills Presbyterian Church.

Katy Hinman, the executive director of another metro Atlanta faith-based environmental group, Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, said the group is encouraging people from its 120 associated Christian, Jewish and Buddhist congregations to participate. The group helps congregations "go green" by doing free energy audits and providing teaching information or speakers on the environment as a theological issue.

Interest in what the group terms "creation care" has been growing among people of faith, especially in the last 18 months, Hinman said.

Not every faith group is on board.

Jonathan Merritt, a 25-year-old Southern Baptist seminary student from Duluth, sparked a row in his denomination this month. He wrote a statement calling for Baptists to protect the environment and which admits that humans have something to do with global warming. Many leading Southern Baptists signed it.

The Southern Baptist Convention's position is skeptical on human links to global warming. The idea of the link has attracted resistance from those within the conservative denomination.

The convention released a barrage of statements, opinion pieces and news stories immediately, noting the Merritt statement was not its position. Also, within days, a group of conservative and evangelical leaders, such as Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Republican insiders Paul Weyrich and Gary Bauer, and Sadie Fields, chairman of the Georgia Christian Alliance, released a statement urging U.S. senators to vote down climate change legislation that would cap emissions.

At the same time, Jenkins said, concerns about global warming seem to have provided a tipping point for many people of faith, causing them to get involved.

"And this is happening in all ecclesiastical bodies, from the most conservative to the most liberal," he said.

Atlanta has become a regional center for the movement, with organizations such as his, Hinman's and the national Evangelical Environmental Network.

"There is a growing sense that God's gospel is good news for the whole world and we ought to care about the whole world," said Rusty Pritchard, the network's national director of outreach.