Churches around Maine will be showing a film about climate change this week and next as part of an unprecedented nationwide push by faith-based groups to encourage people to view the care-taking of the environment as a spiritual obligation.

“Our focus is on mobilizing a religious response to global warming,” Bill Bradlee, managing director of Interfaith Power and Light, said Tuesday.

His organization, based in San Francisco with affiliates in 20 states, is an interfaith ministry pushing to deepen the relationship between ecology and faith.

Calling the campaign “Spotlight on Global Warming,” Interfaith Power and Light has sent DVDs of Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” or HBO’s “Too Hot Not to Handle,” to 4,000 congregations in all 50 states. More than 79 churches in Maine will be showing “An Inconvenient Truth,” which features Gore, who has also written a book with same title.

Sukie Curtis of Maine Interfaith Power and Light said she was hoping to inspire just 30 churches to show the film. “And we almost tripled that, so it’s been really an overwhelming success and really speaks to the fact that a lot of churches are looking for ways to engage this issue and were ready to grab this opportunity.”

Most of the Maine groups involved in the campaign are Christian, but there are also Quakers, two Jewish synagogues, and a Bahai community, Curtis said.

Across the country, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Hindus and other faiths also are participating, Bradlee said.

“We had a really amazing diverse turnout. In this time when religions are struggling to be civil with each other, this is something that has brought people together,” Bradlee said.

“I do see this as a spiritual issue,” said Rosalie Deri, a Quaker in Farmington. She has linked up with the First Congregational Church in Farmington to show Gore’s film Friday. “If you are considering that we are all part, in a religious form, of God’s creation, we have ultimate responsibility to take care of God’s creation.”

In Bridgton, the film will be shown at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 4 and Oct. 11. Sally and Jonathan Chappell of Bridgton, who sit on Maine Interfaith Power and Light’s board, brought the film to the church’s attention.

“This situation with climate change and the planet, with the use of fossil fuels, is really a moral question,” Jonathan Chappell said. “The stewardship of the creation is a basic faith-group concept, and more faith-based people we would hope would get involved in taking that stewardship seriously.”

According to Interfaith Power and Light, if 300,000 places of worship across the country reduced energy use by 25 percent, they would cut air pollution as much as removing 1 million cars from the road would.

Bradlee also pointed out that global warming will likely affect the poorest people in the planet the most harshly, and that churches have historically tended to the poor and the disadvantaged.

The organization also distributed the film, “Too Hot Not to Handle,” because some congregations were reluctant to show a film associated with Gore, a notable Democrat.

“We’re not interested in Al Gore; we’re interested in what he had to say,” Bradlee said. “We don’t want this to be a political statement, we want this to be a religious statement, a moral statement.”