Welcome to Doomsday, by Bill Moyers
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Volume 52, Number 5 · March 24, 2005
Feature
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!
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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 prophesy 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.
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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
prophesy." (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."
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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."
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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.
"Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one,some bigger than others"
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| User: "ENESSA QUA ONNICA" |
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| Title: Re: Welcome to Doomsday? |
06 Mar 2005 11:16:47 PM |
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I've got my VIP box seat reserved and plenty of
popcorn to last thru until the end of the show.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Welcome to Doomsday? |
07 Mar 2005 04:14:13 PM |
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You will need a webcam, or From a distance!
LB
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Welcome to Doomsday? |
06 Mar 2005 05:13:21 PM |
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Yes it is a worry, but why is it so?
Perhaps they need a road map.
see also:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/perspective/stories/s1313491.htm
and
http://www3.griffith.edu.au/01/griffithreview/toc.php
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