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. …
[Speaker of the House Tom] DeLay, who sets the House environmental agenda, has said that the Almighty has anointed him to “march forward with a Biblical worldview” in U.S. politics, reports Peter Perl in The Washington Post. 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 for the repeal of 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 are not inspired by God.” …
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, reports The Christian Science Monitor. 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.
Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party
“Christians are mandated to gradually occupy
all secular institutions until Christ returns”
Apocalypse soon – English Homepage
Men today would rather believe Darwin than Moses. They forget that the science of Kepler, Copernicus and Sir Isaac Newton is obsolete today and that the theories of today’s scientists will be just as archaic in ten or twenty years.