The Godly Must Be Crazy
Christian-right views are swaying
politicians and threatening the environment
By Glenn Scherer
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.
See the numbers laid out in
graph form, for the Senate and the House:
·
Senate ratings chart
·
House ratings chart
See how individual senators
and representatives score:
·
Senate Excel spreadsheet
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House Excel spreadsheet
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?*
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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