| | The Anti-Environmental Armageddon Cult: 50 Million Bible Thumpers & 231 Members of Congress
>From <www.grist.org> Grist Magazine 10/27/04
The Godly Must Be Crazy Christian-right views are swaying politicians and threatening the
environment
By Glenn Scherer
27 Oct 2004
A kind of secular apocalyptic sensibility pervades much contemporary writing
about our current world. Many books about environmental dangers, whether it
be the ozone layer, or global warming or pollution of the air or water, or
population explosion, are cast in an apocalyptic mold.
- Historian Paul Boyer When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great
earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like
blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its
winter fruit when shaken by a gale; the sky vanished like a scroll that is
rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place ...
- Revelation 6:12-14 Abortion. Same-sex marriage. Stem-cell research. U.S. legislators backed by the Christian right vote against these issues
with near-perfect consistency. That probably doesn't surprise you, but this
might: Those same legislators are equally united and unswerving in their
opposition to environmental protection. Forty-five senators and 186 representatives in 2003 earned 80- to
100-percent approval ratings from the nation's three most influential
Christian right advocacy groups -- the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and
Family Resource Council. Many of those same lawmakers also got flunking
grades -- less than 10 percent, on average -- from the League of
Conservation Voters last year. These statistics are puzzling at first. Opposing abortion and stem-cell
research is consistent with the religious right's belief that life begins at
the moment of conception. Opposing gay marriage is consistent with its claim
that homosexual activity is proscribed by the Bible. Both beliefs are a
familiar staple of today's political discourse. But a scripture-based
justification for anti-environmentalism -- when was the last time you heard
a conservative politician talk about that? Odds are it was in 1981, when President Reagan's first secretary of the
interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural
resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
"God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will
come back," Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired. Today's Christian fundamentalist politicians are more politically savvy than
Reagan's interior secretary was; you're unlikely to catch them overtly
attributing public-policy decisions to private religious views. But their
words and actions suggest that many share Watt's beliefs. Like him, many
Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is
irrelevant, because it has no future. They believe we are living in the End
Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and
sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. They may also believe, along
with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that environmental
destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even
hastened -- as a sign of the coming Apocalypse. We are not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are
beholden to these beliefs. The 231 legislators (all but five of them
Republicans) who received an average 80 percent approval rating or higher
from the leading religious-right organizations make up more than 40 percent
of the U.S. Congress. (The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the
Christian Coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who earlier this year
quoted from the Book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come,
sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of
bread or of thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord!") These
politicians include some of the most powerful figures in the U.S.
government, as well as key environmental decision makers: Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),
Senate Republican Conference Chair Rick Santorum (R-Penn.), Senate
Republican Policy Chair Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), House Speaker Dennis Hastert
(R-Ill.), House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), U.S. Attorney General John
Ashcroft, and quite possibly President Bush. (Earlier this month, a cover
story by Ron Suskind in The New York Times Magazine described how Bush's
faith-based governance has led to, among other things, a disastrous
"crusade" in the Middle East and has laid the groundwork for "a battle
between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers,
reason and religion.") And those politicians are just the powerful tip of the iceberg. A 2002
Time/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies
found in the Book of Revelation are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter
think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Like it or not, faith in the Apocalypse is a powerful driving force in
modern American politics. In the 2000 election, the Christian right cast at
least 15 million votes, or about 30 percent of those that propelled Bush
into the presidency. And there's no doubt that arch-conservative Christians
will be just as crucial in the coming election: GOP political strategist
Karl Rove hopes to mobilize 20 million fundamentalist voters to help sweep
Bush back into office on Nov. 2 and to maintain a Republican majority in
Congress, says Joan Bokaer, director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the
Center for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy at Cornell University. Because of its power as a voting bloc, the Christian right has the ear, if
not the souls, of much of the nation's leadership. Some of those leaders are
End-Time believers themselves. Others are not. Either way, their votes are
heavily swayed by an electoral base that accepts the Bible as literal truth
and eagerly awaits the looming Apocalypse. And that, in turn, is sobering
news for those who hope for the protection of the earth, not its
destruction. Once Upon End Time Ever since the dawn of Christianity, groups of believers have searched the
scriptures for signs of the End Time and the Second Coming. Today, most of
the roughly 50 million right-wing fundamentalist Christians in the United
States believe in some form of End-Time theology. Those 50 million believers make up only a subset of the estimated 100
million born-again evangelicals in the United States, who are by no means
uniformly right-wing anti-environmentalists. In fact, the political stances
of evangelicals on the environment and other issues range widely; the
Evangelical Environmental Network, for example, has melded its biblical
interpretation with good environmental science to justify and promote
stewardship of the earth. But the political and cultural impact of the
extreme Christian right is difficult to overestimate. It is also difficult to understand without grasping the complex belief
systems underlying and driving it. While there are many divergent End-Time
theologies and sects, the most politically influential are the
dispensationalists and reconstructionists. Tune in to any of America's 2,000 Christian radio stations or 250 Christian
TV stations and you're likely to get a heady dose of dispensationalism, an
End-Time doctrine invented in the 19th century by the Irish-Anglo theologian
John Nelson Darby. Dispensationalists espouse a "literal" interpretation of
the Bible that offers a detailed chronology of the impending end of the
world. (Many mainstream theologians dispute that literality, arguing that
Darby misinterprets and distorts biblical passages.) Believers link that
chronology to current events -- four hurricanes hitting Florida, gay
marriages in San Francisco, the 9/11 attacks -- as proof that the world is
spinning out of control and that we are what dispensationalist writer Hal
Lindsey calls "the terminal generation." The social and environmental crises
of our times, dispensationalists say, are portents of the Rapture, when
born-again Christians, living and dead, will be taken up into heaven. "All over the earth, graves will explode as the occupants soar into the
heavens," preaches dispensationalist pastor John Hagee, of the Cornerstone
Church in San Antonio, Texas. On the heels of that Rapture, nonbelievers
left behind on earth will endure seven years of unspeakable suffering called
the Great Tribulation, which will culminate in the rise of the Antichrist
and the final battle of Armageddon between God and Satan. Upon winning that
battle, Christ will send all unbelievers into the pits of hellfire, re-green
the planet, and reign on earth in peace with His followers for a millennium. Dispensationalists haven't cornered the market on End-Time interpretation.
The reconstructionists (also known as dominionists), a smaller but
politically influential sect, put the onus for the Lord's return not in the
hands of biblical prophesy but in political activism. They believe that
Christ will only make his Second Coming when the world has prepared a place
for Him, and that the first step in readying His arrival is to Christianize
America. "Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land --
of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for
the Kingdom of Christ," writes reconstructionist George Grant. Christian
dominion will be achieved by ending the separation of church and state,
replacing U.S. democracy with a theocracy ruled by Old Testament law, and
cutting all government social programs, instead turning that work over to
Christian churches. Reconstructionists also would abolish government
regulatory agencies, such as the U.S. EPA, because they are a distraction
from their goal of Christianizing America, and subsequently, the rest of the
world. "World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to
accomplish," says Grant. "We must win the world with the power of the
Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less." Only when that conquest
is complete can the Lord return. Don't Worry, Be Happy People under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected to
worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts,
floods, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the
Apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when
you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture? And why care about converting
from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves
and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a Word? Many End-Timers believe that until Jesus' return, the Lord will provide. In
America's Providential History, a popular reconstructionist high-school
history textbook, authors Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell tell us that:
"The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the
world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece."
However, "the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and
that there is no shortage of resources in God's Earth. The resources are
waiting to be tapped." In another passage, the writers explain: "While many
secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has
made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate
all of the people." Natural-resource depletion and overpopulation, then, are not concerns for
End-Timers -- and nor are other ecological catastrophes, which are viewed by
dispensationalists as presaging the Great Tribulation. Support for this view
comes from an 11-word passage in Matthew 24:7: "[T]here shall be famines,
and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places." Other End-Timers see
suggestions of ecological meltdown in Revelation's four horsemen of the
Apocalypse -- War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death -- and they cite a verse
mentioning costly wheat, barley, and oil as foretelling food and fossil-fuel
shortages. During the End Time, the four horsemen shall be "given power over
a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild
beasts of the earth." Some End-Timers note that Revelation 8:8-11 predicts a
fiery mountain falling into the sea and causing great destruction, followed
by a blazing star plummeting from the sky. This star is called "Wormwood,"
which dispensationalists say translates loosely in Ukrainian as "Chernobyl." A plethora of End-Time preachers, tracts, films, and websites hawk
environmental cataclysm as Good News -- a harbinger of the imminent Second
Coming. Hal Lindsey's 1970 End-Time "non-fiction" work, The Late Great
Planet Earth, is the classic of the genre; the movie version pummels viewers
with stock footage of nuclear blasts, polluting smokestacks, raging floods,
and killer bees. Likewise, dispensationalist author Tim LaHaye's "Left
Behind" novels -- at one point selling 1.5 million copies per month --
weave ecological disaster into an action-adventure account of prophesy. At RaptureReady.com, the "Rapture Index" tracks all the latest news in
relation to biblical prophecy. Among its leading environmental indicators of
Apocalypse are oil supply and price, famine, drought, plagues, wild weather,
floods, and climate. RaptureReady webmaster Todd Strandberg writes to
explain why climate change made the list: "I used to think there was no real
need for Christians to monitor the changes related to greenhouse gases. If
it was going to take a couple hundred years for things to get serious, I
assumed the nearness of the End Times would overshadow this problem. With
the speed of climate change now seen as moving much faster, global warming
could very well be a major factor in the plagues of the tribulation." Another prophecy index points to acts of nature (drought in Ethiopia, famine
in South Africa, floods in Russia, fires in Arizona, heat waves in India,
and the breakup of the Antarctic ice shelf) as proof of the approaching
doomsday, noting that "When these things begin to come to pass, then look
up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh" (Luke 21:28). According to a chart on the End-Time website ApocalypseSoon.org, we are at
"the beginning of sorrows" (Matthew 24:3-8) marking the Great Tribulation.
The site links to a BBC News article on infectious diseases and a chronicle
of extreme weather events on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross
Gelbspan's climate-change website as evidence of those unfolding sorrows.
However, it adds a stern disclaimer regarding these external links: "We do
not, by any means, approve or recommend some of the sites that this page
links to. They were chosen simply because they document literally what the
Word of God prophesies for the End Days." If I Had a Hammer To understand how the Christian right worldview is shaping and even fueling
congressional anti-environmentalism, consider two influential born-again
lawmakers: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Senate Environment
and Public Works Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.). DeLay, who has considerable control over the agenda in the House, has
called for "march[ing] forward with a Biblical worldview" in U.S. politics,
reports Peter Perl in The Washington Post Magazine. DeLay wants to convert
America into a "God centered" nation whose government promotes prayer,
worship, and the teaching of Christian values. Inhofe, the Senate's most outspoken environmental critic, is also
unwavering in his wish to remake America as a Christian state. Speaking at
the Christian Coalition's Road to Victory rally just before the GOP sweep of
the 2002 midterm elections, he promised the faithful, "When we win this
revolution in November, you'll be doing the Lord's work, and He will richly
bless you for it!" Neither DeLay nor Inhofe include environmental protection in "the Lord's
work." Both have ranted against the EPA, calling it "the Gestapo." DeLay has
fought to gut the Clean Air and Endangered Species acts. Last year, Inhofe
invited a stacked-deck of fossil fuel-funded climate-change skeptics to
testify at a Senate hearing that climaxed with him calling global warming
"the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." DeLay has said bluntly that he intends to smite the "socialist" worldview
of "secular humanists," whom, he argues, control the U.S. political system,
media, public schools, and universities. He called the 2000 presidential
election an apocalyptic "battle for souls," a fight to the death against the
forces of liberalism, feminism, and environmentalism that are corrupting
America. The utopian dreams of such movements are doomed, argues the
majority leader, because they do not stem from God. "DeLay is motivated more than anything by power," says Jan Reid, coauthor
with Lou Dubose of The Hammer, a just-published biography of DeLay. "But he
also believes in the power of the coming Millennium [of Jesus Christ], and
it helps shape his vision on government and the world." This may explain why
DeLay's Capitol office furnishings include a marble replica of the Ten
Commandments and a wall poster that reads: "This Could Be The Day" --
meaning Judgment Day. DeLay is also a self-declared member of the Christian Zionists, an End-Time
faction numbering 20 million Americans. Christian Zionists believe that the
1948 creation of the state of Israel marked the first event in what author
Hal Lindsey calls the "countdown to Armageddon" and they are committed to
making that doomsday clock tick faster, speeding Christ's return. In 2002, DeLay visited pastor John Hagee's Cornerstone Church. Hagee
preached a fiery message as simple as it was horrifying: "The war between
America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse!" he said, urging his
followers to support the war, perhaps in order to bring about the Second
Coming. After Hagee finished, DeLay rose to second the motion. "Ladies and
gentlemen," he said, "what has been spoken here tonight is the truth from
God." With those words -- broadcast to 225 Christian TV and radio stations --
DeLay placed himself squarely inside the End-Time camp, a faction willing to
force the Apocalypse upon the rest of the world. In part, DeLay may embrace
Hagee and others like him in a calculated attempt to win fundamentalist
votes -- but he was also raised a Southern Baptist, steeped in a literal
interpretation of the Bible and End-Time dogma. Biographer Dubose says that
the majority leader probably doesn't grasp the complexities of
dispensationalist and reconstructionist theology, but "I am convinced that
he believes [in] it." For DeLay, Dubose told me, "If John Hagee says it,
then it is true." Onward Christian Senators
James Inhofe might be an environmentalist's worst nightmare. The Oklahoma
senator makes major policy decisions based on heavy corporate and
theological influences, flawed science, and probably an apocalyptic
worldview -- and he chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works
Committee. That committee's links to corporate funders are both easier to trace and
more infamous than its ties to religious fundamentalism, and it's true that
the influence of money can scarcely be overstated. From 1999 to 2004, Inhofe
received more than $588,000 from the fossil-fuel industry, electric
utilities, mining, and other natural-resource interests, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics. Eight of the nine other Republican members
of Inhofe's committee received an average of $408,000 per senator from the
energy and natural resource sector over the same period. By contrast, the
eight committee Democrats and one Independent came away with an average of
just $132,000 per senator from that same sector since 1999. But the influence of theology, although less discussed, is no less
significant. Inhofe, like DeLay, is a Christian Zionist. While the senator
has not overtly expressed his religious views in his environmental
committee, he has when speaking on other issues. In a Senate foreign-policy
speech, Inhofe argued that the U.S. should ally itself unconditionally with
Israel "because God said so." Quoting the Bible as the divine Word of God,
Inhofe cited Genesis 13:14-17 -- "for all the land which you see, to you
will I give it, and to your seed forever" -- as justification for permanent
Israeli occupation of the West Bank and for escalating aggression against
the Palestinians. Inhofe also openly supports dispensationalist Pat Robertson, who touts
every tornado, hurricane, plague, and suicide bombing as a sure sign of
God's return; who accused both Jimmy Carter and George Bush Sr. of being
followers of Lucifer; and who makes no secret of the efforts of his
Christian Coalition to control the Republican Party, according to Theocracy
Watch. A good fundamentalist, Inhofe scored a perfect 100 percent rating in 2003
from all three major Christian-right advocacy groups, while earning a 5
percent from the League of Conservation Voters (and a string of zeroes from
1997 to 2002). Likewise, eight of the nine other Republicans on the
Environment and Public Works Committee earned an average 94 percent approval
rating in 2003 from the Christian right, while scoring a dismal 4 percent
average environmental approval rating. The one exception proves the rule:
Moderate Lincoln Chafee (R.-R.I.) last year earned a 79 percent LCV rating
and just 41 percent from the religious right. As committee chair, Inhofe has subtly chosen scripture over science. The
origins of his 2003 Senate speech attacking the science behind global
climate change, for example, reveal his two masters: the speech is traceable
to fossil fuel industry think tanks and petrochemical dollars -- but also to
the pseudo-science of Christian right websites. In that two-hour diatribe,
Inhofe dismissed global warming by comparing it to a 1970s scientific scare
that suggested the planet was cooling -- a hypothesis, he fails to note,
held by only a minority of climatologists at the time. Inhofe's apparent
source on global cooling was the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion
and Liberty, a Christian-right and free-market economics think tank. In an
editorial on that site called "Global Warming or Globaloney? The Forgotten
Case for Global Cooling," we hear echoes of Inhofe's position. The article
calls climate change "a shrewdly planned campaign to inflict a lot of
socialistic restriction on our cherished freedoms. Environmentalism, in
short, is the last refuge of socialism." Inhofe's views can be heard in the
words of dispensationalist Jerry Falwell as well, who said on CNN, "It was
global cooling 30 years ago ... and it's global warming now. ... The fact is
there is no global warming." Inhofe's views are also closely tied to the Interfaith Council for
Environmental Stewardship, a radical-right Christian organization founded by
radio evangelist James Dobson, dispensationalist Rev. D. James Kennedy of
Coral Ridge Ministries, Jerry Falwell, and Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest
who has been editing Vatican texts to align the Catholic Church's historical
teachings with his free-market philosophy, according to E Magazine. The ICES environmental view is shaped by the Book of Genesis: "Be fruitful
and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of
the seas, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on this
earth." The group says this passage proves that "man" is superior to nature
and gives the go-ahead to unchecked population growth and unrestrained
resource use. Such beliefs fly in the face of ecology, which shows humankind
to be an equal and interdependent participant in the natural web. Inhofe's staff defends his backward scientific positions, no matter how at
odds they are with mainstream scientists. "How do you define 'mainstream'?"
asked a miffed staffer. "Scientists who accept the so-called consensus about
global warming? Galileo was not mainstream." But Inhofe is no Galileo. In
fact, his use of lawsuits to try to suppress the peer-reviewed science of
the National Assessment on Climate Change -- which predicts major
extinctions and threats to coastal regions -- arguably puts him on the side
of Galileo's oppressors, the perpetrators of the Christian Inquisition,
writes Chris Mooney in The American Prospect. "I trust God with my legislative goals and the issues that are important to
my constituents," Inhofe has told Pentecostal Evangel magazine. "I don't
believe there is a single issue we deal with in government that hasn't been
dealt with in the Scriptures." But Inhofe stayed silent in that interview as
to which passages he applies to the environment, and he remained so when I
asked him if End-Time beliefs influence his leadership of the most powerful
environmental committee in the country. And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon So weird have the attempts to hasten the End Time become that a group of
ultra-Christian Texas ranchers recently helped fundamentalist Israeli Jews
breed a pure red heifer, a genetically rare beast that must be sacrificed to
fulfill an apocalyptic prophecy found in the biblical Book of Numbers. (The
beast will be ready for sacrifice by 2005, according to The National
Review.) It can be difficult for environmentalists, many of whom cut their teeth on
peer-reviewed science, to fathom how anyone could believe that a
rust-colored calf could bring about the end of the world, or how anyone
could make a coherent End-Time story (let alone national policy) out of the
poetic symbolism of the Book of Revelation. But there are millions of such
people in America today -- including 231 U.S. legislators who either believe
dispensationalist or reconstructionist doctrine or, for political
expediency, are happy to align themselves with those who do. That's troubling, because the beliefs in question are antithetical to
environmentalism. For starters, any environmental science that contradicts
the End-Timer's interpretation of Holy Writ is automatically suspect. This
explains the disregard for environmental science so prevalent among
Christian fundamentalist lawmakers: the denial of global warming, of the
damaged ozone layer, and of the poisoning caused by industrial arsenic and
mercury. More important, End-Time beliefs make such problems inconsequential. Faith
in Christ's impending return causes End-Timers to be interested only in
short-term political-theological outcomes, not long-term solutions.
Unfortunately, nearly every environmental issue, from the conservation of
endangered species to the curbing of climate change, requires belief in and
commitment to an enduring earth. And yet, no amount of scientific evidence
will likely shake fundamentalists of their End-Time faith or bring them over
to the cause of saving the environment. "It's like half this country wants to guide our ship of state by compass --
a compass, something that works by science and rationality, and empirical
wisdom," quipped comedian Bill Maher on Larry King Live. "And half this
country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do
in the old Roman Empire." Those who doubt the dangers of such faith-based guidance need only recall
the 9/11 hijackers, who devoutly believed that 72 black-eyed virgins awaited
them as their reward in paradise. In the past, it was not deemed politically correct to ask probing questions
about a lawmaker's intimate religious beliefs. But when those beliefs play a
crucial role in shaping public policy, it becomes necessary for the people
to know and understand them. It sounds startling, but the great unasked
questions that need to be posed to the 231 U.S. legislators backed by the
Christian right, and to President Bush himself, are not the kind of
softballs about faith lobbed at the candidates during the recent
presidential debates. They are, instead, tough, specific inquiries about the
details of that faith: Do you believe we are in the End Time? Are the
governmental policies you support based on your faith in the imminent Second
Coming of Christ? It's not an exaggeration to say that the fate of our
planet depends on our asking these questions, and on our ability to reshape
environmental strategy in light of the answers. Many years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to his "religious
grandparents," who, whenever they were asked about the future, proclaimed,
"Armageddon's comin'!" And they believed it. Christ was due back any day, so
they never bothered to paint or shingle their house. What was the point?
Over the years, I drove by their place and watched the protective layers of
paint peel, the bare clapboards weather, the sills and roof rot. Eventually,
the house fell into ruin and had to be torn down, leaving my friend's
grandparents destitute. In a way, their prediction had proven right. But this humble apocalypse, a
house divided against itself, was no work of God, but of man. This is a
parable for the 231 Christian right-backed legislators of the 108th
Congress. Their constituency's cherished beliefs may lead to the most
dangerous and destructive self-fulfilling prophecy of all time. - - - - - - - - - -
Glenn Scherer is an author and freelance journalist whose stories have
recently appeared in Salon.com, TomPaine.com, and other publications. He is
former editor of Blue Ridge Press, a syndicated environmental commentary
service in the Southeast.
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