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.