Evangelicals Do A 180
By Saul Rosenthal
13 February, 2006
Countercurrents.org
I believe it was G. B. Shaw who said that the trouble with Christianity is that it's never been tried.
Comes now a clarion call, a surprising fiat from 86 evangelical poohbahs of the Christian Right, including the presidents of 39 evangelical colleges, who have been, for the most part, silent over much of the past century about the Biblical injunction to be good stewards of our precious little spinoff of Creation, with all its wondrous forms of life, not the least of which is Homo sapiens.
Welcome to the club of scientists who have been crying in the wilderness all these years the caveats about global warming you have finally heard and proclaimed: "Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors."
The alarm may be too late. Prime Minister Tony Blair believes we may have only 7 years to still the death knell that is sounding. In view of global complacency outside the scientific community, as well as the forces of opposition, it is hard to be sanguine about our future.22 high-profile evangelicals, for example, have opposed the majority initiative to fight global warning vigorously and with legislation.
E. Calvin Beisner, professor of historical theology at Knox Theological Seminary, who helped organize the opposition group - ironically called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance - said, "The science is not settled" on whether global warning was actually a problem or even that humans were causing it. Also, that the cost of energy for the solution would be too high.
Leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals, while supportive of the initiative of the 86, did not sign on for fear it would be seen as an endorsement by the entire Association.
This foot-dragging is symptomatic of national and international inertia on what a near unanimity of scientists see as the most serious threat to life on this planet. And that threat is far more than the global warming that the evangelical avantgarde is focusing on.
In addition to the greenhouse gases that are fouling our atmosphere, we are implacably destroying our rain forests and other valuable woodlands that replenish our oxygen, prevent soil erosion and flooding, and preserve many forms of life, including plant life, essential for our health, as well as a healthful balance for our entire biosphere.
We are also massively polluting our oceans, lakes, and rivers, killing animal, plant and coral matter. Despoiled and dead oceans are the death knell for the human race as well, an alarmed Jacque Cousteau had warned us.
In l962 there was a glimmer of hope for environmental activism with the publication of "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson. It alerted the world to the human and ecological dangers of the promiscuous use of pesticides, resulting in revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. "Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller with international reverberation.Even if she had not inspired a generation of activits, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters," wrote a critic for Time's 100 Most Influential People
of the Century.
But Carson's courageous defense of the truth met with a fierce assault from the chemical industry following the publication of "Silent Spring" and before the author's untimely death in 1964.
Assaults have continued on activists over the years. Including those against Al Gore in 2000 when the Christian Right stood foursquare behind the guy who beat him and who was no friend of ecologists but a great friend of the military/industrial complex that has waxed fat on a war that has wreaked much havoc on human life and the infrastructure of a country that was no threat to us.
Say what you will against Gore the politician, but as a student of the environment, and author of 4 books on the subject, his credentials are legitimate. Had his boss of 8 years not been exposed as a philandering dissolute, Gore would likely have won not by 500,000 votes but a landslide. There would have been no Neocons in power and therefore no war against Iraq, but instead a concentration on the real villains, Osama's cabal in Afghanistan that masterminded the 9/11 attack.
So now we have a quagmire in Iraq that won't quit, an escalation of insurgency and terrorism in that country, and worldwide wrath and violence from Muslim extremists that can be triggered by no more than a flushed copy of the Koran or a political cartoon.What chance does environmental salvation stand against a militarized world hell bent on squandering our wealth -- our minerals and energy resources, our scientific and technological savvy, and our mental and labor power -- on destructives.
The U.S. has 170 bases around the world in 120 counntries. And we spend 50 percent of the world's military budget, the equal of all the other countries combined. And the Pentagon is ever calling for more. And now, thanks to a "war without end" and new wars looming on the horizon, it will get more, even as social programs and our infrastructure and state needs go begging, jobs vanish overseas by the millions, the middle class is being squeezed by mountainous layoffs, and the national debt and trade imbalence are digging us into a hole so deep our progeny will be burdened with taxes for generations, trying to dig out of it.What chance does ecological sanity stand against such realities and against the global cost of fighting terrorism? And what chance do the have-nots of the world stand against leaders prodigal in making weapons to massacre while failing to save the poor, the starving, the victims of racial and ethnic strife and of new genocides?
"What a piece of work is a man!" Hamlet exclaims in an ironic speech of despair: "I have of late...lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
"Quintessence of dust" and yet "how like a god!"
Were we not, in Genesis, made in the image of God?
If so, how we have fallen short of that glory!
Ray Bradbury has always been a passionate supporter of the space program. He believes that we have a "divine destiny" impelling us to venture out into the immense celestial realms of our cosmic home which Creation has blessed us with. Just as in past centuries we have explored our earthly home, so bountiful, so beautiful, so rich in the splendors and largesse of nature.
But I fear too many signs argue against the dream of Bradbury and others clinging desperately to the hope of a victorious human experiment.
We may be destined, sooner rather than later, to follow into extinction the thousands of failed species that have preceded us. And not necessarily out of inexorable entropy, evolutionary fatigue or decay, but out of a failed character, a moral failure, a failure to surmount the beast in us, the hate, the bigotry, the envy, the greed, the egomania, the vindictiveness, the hubris, the lust for power and profit, the drive for exploitation, for dominion over our fellow creatures.
For "social Darwinism" -- the supremacy of the strong over the weak, the failure to love our neighbors as ourselves, which means, in a modern world of mass destruction, the ruin of both the strong and the weak.
Man created in the spiritual image of God?
God needs man as man needs God.
So did He or we fail?
After 15 billion years in the making of His great cosmic empyrean, surely among the billions of planetary systems in a billion galaxies, the odds attest to millions of planets with intelligent species who have learned selfless love and to build a paradigm of paradise that Bradbury dreamed of. To aspire to godliness and to be good stewards of their planets as we have failed to be.
God, alas, has not failed us.
But we have failed God.
A sad epitaph for Home sapiens.
For Homo horribilis.
