The Road To Environmental Apocalypse by Glenn Scherer
Forty-five senators and 186 representatives 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 in 2003. 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. … [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 the public testimony that helped get him fired. …
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 leading religious-right organizations make up more than 40 percent of the U.S. Congress. …
Today, most of the roughly 50 million rightwing 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 rightwing anti-environmentalists. In fact, the political stance of evangelicals on the environment and other issues ranges 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. …
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