For many the "holidays" is just a reason to spend. For evangelicals the season has special meaning: It's time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, who apparently told us to destroy our planet.
Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, on what we call "Black Friday" (the day the big retail stores start to turn a profit, "in the black") millions of Americans do what President Bush told us to do after 9/11: line up in the dark before the store opens for super savings and SHOP! It's an unhappy spectacle: tens of millions of humans manipulated to horde, spend and gorge.
We are vulnerable to being manipulated because of a 100,000-year-old leftover, and now useless, evolutionary quirk that makes us want to horde more, more and more! (It's the same sort of quirk that makes our bodies store fat when we eat too much, so we won't die in the lean months of winter that, of course, in the modern world, never arrive, so we just get fatter.) But it isn't an extra bit of dried deer meat or a few more berries that we horde these days, it's globe-destroying stuff that we don't need and that next year, when we replace it all again, will prove that all that stuff we bought last year--flat screen TVs, SUVs, trips to Mexico--never made us happy.
Many people who claim to have a spiritual moral base are worse than anyone when it comes to contributing to the mound of trash burying us and the carbon accumulating that threatens life on earth. In America this group has dominated our politics for the last 30 years. When it comes to helping or harming our planet, many evangelicals believe that there is a conflict between environmentalism and their religious beliefs. They want to know why they should bother with restoring our beleaguered planet. How does that "fit" their religious agenda?
There are plenty of evangelicals who feel positively threatened by even a discussion of topics like global warming. They see it as a distraction from evangelism. They have bought into being good right wing Republicans. And because the Republican Party has failed to address environmental issues many evangelicals also see environmentalism as morally wrong. Isn't that "earth-stuff" a "left wing" thing? Better to destroy the earth than to embarrass "our" Jesus-loving-Saudi-hugging-oil-industry president.
An article in the Wall Street Journal, "Split Over Global Warming Widens Among Evangelicals," (Andrew Higgins, Sept 8, 2007) summed up this debate well and (coincidently) ties it into my family by mentioning my late evangelist father, Francis Schaeffer.
WACO, Texas Suzii Paynter, director of the public policy arm of Texas's biggest group of Baptist churches, traveled to central Texas early this year to talk to a local preacher about a pressing 'moral, biblical and theological' issue. She wanted to discuss coal.
Christians have a biblical mandate to be 'good stewards of God's creation,' Ms. Paynter says she told the Rev. Frank Brown, pastor of the Bellmead First Baptist Church here in the county where President Bush has his ranch. So, Texas Baptists should demand that controversial plans to build a slew of coal-fired power plants be put on hold.
Mr. Brown was not impressed. God, the pastor said, is 'sovereign over his creation' and no amount of coal-burning will alter by a 'millisecond' his divine plan for the world. Fighting environmental damage is 'like chasing rabbits,' he recalls telling her. It just distracts from core Christian duties to spread the faith and protect the unborn....
[M]any veteran leaders of the religious right regard the green movement as a dangerous distraction. Shortly before his death in May, Virginia Baptist preacher the Rev. Jerry Falwell denounced the clamor
over global warming as 'Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus.'
An episode this spring brought national attention to the brewing dispute. Mr. Weyrich joined two dozen other conservative Christian leaders in warning that global warming 'is dividing and demoralizing' evangelicals. In a letter to the National Association of Evangelicals, they denounced the umbrella group's Washington-based vice president for governmental affairs, Richard Cizik, an outspoken champion of action against global warming. They demanded that he shut up or resign.
The NAE's board backed Mr. Cizik, who has continued to speak out. Combating climate change, says Mr. Cizik, is no longer just for 'latte-sipping, endive-eating elitists from Harvard' but a core issue
for all Christians....
In speeches at Wheaton College in 1968, Francis Schaeffer, a hugely influential evangelical intellectual who died in 1984, criticized fellow Christians for neglecting 'God's creation.' Though a conservative, he
hailed 'hippies' for their attacks on 'the poverty of modern man's concept of nature.' His remarks were collected in a 1970 book, 'Pollution and the Death of Man.' But Mr. Schaeffer's call to arms over the environment was soon drowned out [by the evangelical political agenda]..."
If fundamentalist/evangelical/Republican type of anti-environmental "Christianity" continues to gain political clout as it has in the Bush Jr. years we are in deep trouble. There are a lot of evangelicals. Don't underestimate their power to destroy our earth.
If all that matters to the hundreds of millions of evangelicals (in America and around the world) is getting people to believe in Jesus, while we literally rape the earth and destroy the human future, then we are doomed. According to the Republican/evangelical/Bush "gospel" Jesus wants consumerism baptized as freedom, stuff to replace spiritual experience, love and community. The most important battle for our earth may turn out to be theological, not scientific.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD--How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back."
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Posted December 18, 2007 | 01:19 PM (EST)