| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"PagCal" |
| Date: |
12 Mar 2005 05:13:01 AM |
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Welcome to Doomsday |
Welcome to Doomsday
By Bill Moyers
1.
There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about
dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our
neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one
story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no
longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats
of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology
that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis.
Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while
ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by
what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it
impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise
intractable challenges.
In the just-concluded election cycle, as Mark Silk writes in Religion in
the News,
the assiduous cultivation of religious constituencies by the Bush
apparat, and the undisguised intrusion of evangelical leaders and some
conservative Catholic hierarchs into the presidential campaign,
demonstrated that the old rule of maintaining a decent respect for the
nonpartisanship of religion can now be broken with impunity.
The result is what the Italian scholar Emilio Gentile, quoted in Silk's
newsletter, calls "political religion"—religion as an instrument of
political combat. On gay marriage and abortion— the most conspicuous of
the "non-negotiable" items in a widely distributed Catholic voter's
guide—no one should be surprised what this political religion portends.
The agenda has been foreshadowed for years, ever since Jerry Falwell,
Pat Robertson, and other right-wing Protestants set out to turn white
evangelicals into a solid Republican voting bloc and reached out to make
allies of their former antagonists, conservative Catholics.
What has been less apparent is the impact of the new political religion
on environmental policy. Evangelical Christians have been divided. Some
were indifferent. The majority of conservative evangelicals, on the
other hand, have long hooked their view to the account in the first book
of the Bible:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created
him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said
to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;
and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air
and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
There are widely varying interpretations of this text, but it is safe to
say that all presume human beings have inherited the earth to be used as
they see fit. For many, God's gift to Adam and Eve of "dominion" over
the earth and all its creatures has been taken as the right to unlimited
exploitation. But as Blaine Harden reported recently in The Washington
Post, some evangelicals are beginning to "go for the green." Last
October the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an "Evangelical
Call to Civic Responsibility," affirming that "God-given dominion is a
sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse
the creation of which we are a part." The declaration acknowledged that
for the sake of clean air, clean water, and adequate resources, the
government "has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects
of environmental degradation."
But even for green activists in evangelical circles, Harden wrote,
"there are landmines."
Welcome to the Rapture!
There are millions of Christians who believe the Bible is literally
true, word for word. Some of them—we'll come back to the question of how
many— subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the nineteenth
century by two immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the
Bible and wove them with their own hallucinations into a narrative
foretelling the return of Jesus and the end of the world. Google the
"Rapture Index" and you will see just how the notion has seized the
imagination of many a good and sincere believer (you will also see just
where we stand right now in the ticking of the clock toward the
culmination of history in the apocalypse). It is the inspiration for the
best-selling books in America today—the twelve novels in the Left Behind
series by Christian fundamentalist and religious- right warrior Tim
LaHaye, a co- founder with Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority.
The plot of the Rapture—the word never appears in the Bible although
some fantasists insist it is the hidden code to the Book of
Revelation—is rather simple, if bizarre. (The British writer George
Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to
him for refreshing my own insights.) Once Israel has occupied the rest
of its "biblical lands," legions of the Antichrist will attack it,
triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who
have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the
Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at
the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious
opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and
frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I read the literature, including
The Rapture Exposed, a recent book by Barbara Rossing, who teaches the
New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and America
Right or Wrong, by Anatol Lieven, senior associate at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. On my weekly broadcast for PBS, we
reported on these true believers, following some of them from Texas to
the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you
they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical
prophecy. To this end they have declared solidarity with Israel and the
Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers.
For them the invasion of Iraq was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book
of Revelation, where four angels "bound in the great river Euphrates"
will be released "to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in
the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed—an essential
conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the
Rapture Index stood at 144—approaching the critical threshold when the
prophecy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the Son of God returns,
and the righteous enter paradise while sinners will be condemned to
eternal hellfire.
What does this mean for public policy and the environment? Listen to
John Hagee, pastor of the 17,000- member Cornerstone Church in San
Antonio, who is quoted in Rossing's book as saying: "Mark it down, take
it to heart, and comfort one another with these words. Doomsday is
coming for the earth, for the nations, and for individuals, but those
who have trusted in Jesus will not be present on earth to witness the
dire time of tribulation." Rossing sums up the message in five words
that she says are basic Rapture credo: "The world cannot be saved." It
leads to "appalling ethics," she reasons, because the faithful are
relieved of concern for the environment, violence, and everything else
except their personal salvation. The earth suffers the same fate as the
unsaved. All are destroyed.
How many true believers are there? It's impossible to pin down. But
there is a constituency for the End Times. A Newsweek poll found that 36
percent of respondents held the Book of Revelation to be "true
prophecy." (A Time/ CNN poll reported that one quarter think the Bible
predicted the 9/11 attacks.) Drive across the country with your radio
tuned to some of the 1,600 Christian radio stations or turn to some of
the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear the Gospel of the
Apocalypse in sermon and song. Or go, as The Toronto Star's Tom Harpur
did, to the Florida Panhandle where he came across an all-day conference
"at one of the largest Protestant churches I have ever been in," the
Village Baptist Church in Destin. The theme of the day was "Left Behind:
A Conference on Biblical Prophecy about End Times" and among the
speakers were none other than Tim LaHaye and two other leading voices in
the religious right today, Gary Frazier and Ed Hindson. Here is what
Harpur wrote for his newspaper:
I have never heard so much venom and dangerous ignorance spouted
before an utterly unquestioning, otherwise normal-looking crowd in my
life.... There were stunning statements about humans having been only
6,000 years on Earth and other denials of contemporary geology and
biology. And we learned that the Rapture, which could happen any second
now, but certainly within the next 40 years, will instantly sweep all
the "saved" Americans (perhaps one-half the population) to heaven....
But these fantasies were harmless compared with the hatred against Islam
that followed. Here are some direct quotes: "Islam is an intolerant
religion—and it's clear whose side we should be on in the Middle East."
Applause greeted these words: "Allah and Jehovah are not the same
God.... Islam is a Satanic religion.... They're going to attack Israel
for certain...." Gary Frazier shouted at the top of his lungs: "Wake Up!
Wake Up!" And roughly eight hundred heads (at $25.00 per) nodded
approval as he added that the left-wing, anti-Israel media—"for example,
CNN"—will never tell the world the truth about Islam. According to these
three, and the millions of Americans they lead, Muslims intend
ultimately "to impose their religion on us all." It was clear, Harpur
wrote: "A terrible, final war in the region is inevitable."
You can understand why people in the grip of such fantasies cannot be
expected to worry about the environment. As Glenn Scherer writes in his
report for the on-line environmental magazine Grist, why care about the
earth when the droughts, floods, famine, 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? Why bother to convert to alternative sources of energy
and reduce dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East? Anyway,
until Christ does return, the Lord will provide.
Scherer came upon a high school history book, America's Providential
History, which is used in fundamentalist circles. Students are told 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." The
Christian, however, "knows that the potential in God is unlimited and
that there is no shortage of resources in God's Earth.... 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."
While it is impossible to know how many people hold these views, we do
know that fundamentalists constitute a large and powerful proportion of
the Republican base, and, as Anatol Lieven writes, "fundamentalist
religiosity has become an integral part of the radicalization of the
right in the US and of the tendency to demonize political opponents as
traitors and enemies of God and America"—including, one must note,
environmentalists, who are routinely castigated as villains and worse by
the right. No wonder Karl Rove wandered the White House whistling
"Onward Christian Soldiers" as he prepared for the 2004 elections.
2.
I am not suggesting that fundamentalists are running the government, but
they constitute a significant force in the coalition that now holds a
monopoly of power in Washington under a Republican Party that for a
generation has been moved steadily to the right by its more extreme
variants even as it has become more and more beholden to the
corporations that finance it. One is foolish to think that their bizarre
ideas do not matter. I have no idea what President Bush thinks of the
fundamentalists' fantastical theology, but he would not be president
without them. He suffuses his language with images and metaphors they
appreciate, and they were bound to say amen when Bob Woodward reported
that the President "was casting his vision, and that of the country, in
the grand vision of God's master plan."
That will mean one thing to ***** Cheney and another to Tim LaHaye, but
it will confirm their fraternity in a regime whose chief characteristics
are ideological disdain for evidence and theological distrust of
science. Many of the constituencies who make up this alliance don't see
eye to eye on many things, but for President Bush's master plan for
rolling back environmental protections they are united. A powerful
current connects the administration's multinational corporate cronies
who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core
constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for
the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving
the interests of economic elites.
The corporate, political, and religious right's hammerlock on
environmental policy extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its
members before the election—231 legislators in all (more since the
election)—are backed by the religious right, which includes several
powerful fundamentalist leaders like LaHaye. Forty-five senators and 186
members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings
from the most influential Christian Right advocacy groups. Not one
includes the environment as one of their celebrated "moral values."
When I talk about this before a live audience I can see from the look on
the faces before me just how hard it is for a journalist to report on
such things with any credibility. So let me put on a personal level what
sends the shiver down my spine.
I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a
confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring
it about. I confess to having always been an optimist. Now, however, I
remember my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think
of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so
worried?" And he answered, "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."
I'm not, either. Once upon a time I believed that people will protect
the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health
and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure.
It's not that I don't want to believe this—it's just that as a
journalist I have been trained to read the news and connect the dots.
I read that the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency
has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the
environment. This for an administration:
* that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and
the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and
their habitats, as well as the national Environmental Policy Act that
requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage
natural resources;
* that wants to relax pollution limits for ozone, eliminate vehicle
tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport
utility vehicles, and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment;
* that wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to
keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the
public;
* that wants to drop all its New-Source Review suits against
polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached
earlier with coal companies;
* that wants to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling and
increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch
of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal
wild land in America;
* that is radically changing the management of our national forests
to eliminate critical environmental reviews, open them to new roads, and
give the timber companies a green light to slash and cut as they please.
I read the news and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency
plotted to spend $9 million—$2 million of it from the President's
friends at the American Chemistry Council—to pay poor families to
continue the use of pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have
been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering
an end to their use, the government and the industry concocted a scheme
to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's
clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.
I read that President Bush has more than one hundred high-level
officials in his administration overseeing industries they once
represented as lobbyists, lawyers, or corporate advocates—company
insiders waved through the revolving door of government to assure that
drug laws, food policies, land use, and the regulation of air pollu-tion
are industry-friendly. Among the "advocates-turned-regulators" are a
former meat industry lobbyist who helps decide how meat is labeled; a
former drug company lobbyist who influences prescription drug policies;
a former energy lobbyist who, while accepting payments for bringing
clients into his old lobbying firm, helps to determine how much of our
public lands those former clients can use for oil and gas drilling.
I read that civil penalties imposed by the Environmental Protection
Agency against polluters in 2004 hit an fifteen-year low, in what
amounts to an extended holiday for industry from effective compliance
with environmental laws.
I read that the administration's allies at the International Policy
Network, which is supported by Exxon-Mobil and others of like mind and
interest, have issued a report describing global warming as "a myth" at
practically the same time the President, who earlier rejected the
international treaty outlining limits on greenhouse gases, wants to
prevent any "written or oral report" from being issued by any
international meetings on the issue.
I read not only the news but the fine print of a recent appropriations
bill passed by Congress, with ob-scure amendments removing all
endangered species protections from pesticides, prohibiting judicial
review for a forest in Oregon, waiving environmental review for grazing
permits on public lands, and weakening protection against development
for crucial habitats in California.
I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the
computer —pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age twelve; Thomas, ten;
Nancy, eight; Jassie, three; SaraJane, one. I see the future looking
back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we
know not what we do." And then the shiver runs down my spine and I am
seized by the realization: "That's not right. We do know what we are
doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling
their world."
And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are
greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to
sustain indignation at injustice?
What has happened to our moral imagination?
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And
Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"
I see it feelingly.
Why don't we feel the world enough to save it—for our kin to come?
The news is not good these days. But as a journalist I know the news is
never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free
not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. The will to fight
is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to
those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. We
must match the science of human health to what the ancient Israelites
called hochma—the science of the heart, the capacity to see and feel and
then to act as if the future depended on us.
Believe me, it does.
.
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