Evangelical Environmentalism and the Old New Right
In yesterday’s post, I traced the ascent of the New New Right to the evangelical push for the International Religious Freedom Act in the late 1990s. Today, no issue better illustrates the battle between this big-tent contingent of the evangelical movement and the old-line Christian Right than global warming. Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and his allies recently grabbed national headlines by attempting to silence or fire National Association of Evangelicals chief lobbyist Richard Cizik, who has been leading the evangelical environmental movement he calls “Creation Care.”
A staunch social conservative and fervent supporter of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, the Reverend Richard Cizik had looked skeptically on the environmental movement for decades. “Environmentalists were adherents to New Age faiths,” Cizik said in an interview. “It was a kind of mother earth mentality that said, ‘Evangelicals need not apply.’” As the chief Washington lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, Cizik knew he was not alone. A 1996 Brookings Institution study found that committed white evangelicals were by far the most antienvironment religious group in the nation. The study theorized that such attitudes were explained largely by dispensationalist theology, the belief among many evangelicals that the world will descend into chaos just before Jesus’s return. Such a view tends to render attempts at environmental preservation useless.
That’s what made Cizik’s signature-gathering campaign for the Evangelical Climate Initiative remarkable. Drawn up by Cizik and other evangelical leaders in 2005, the Evangelical Climate Initiative was a petition that declared global warming was happening and that the Bible demanded a response from evangelical Christians. It called on the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress to begin taking steps to combat the problem. With enough signatures, its drafters thought they would send a bold message to the Republican Party: that a huge chunk of its base was demanding action on an issue the Democratic Party had more or less owned since the emergence of the environmental movement in the late 1960s. If successful, the Evangelical Climate Initiative could turn the traditional politics of the environment on their head and open doors to bold new environmental laws.
Cizik’s own environmental awakening had begun in 2002, when a fellow evangelical pastor who had launched an anti-SUV “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign pressured Cizik into attending a conference on climate change in England. The conference featured a handful of evangelical scientists, who convinced Cizik that global warming was real and that it had disastrous consequences for life on earth. Cizik told the New York Times that he experienced a “conversion” in England around the climate change issue that was so intense as to be comparable to an “alter call,” the part of a Protestant church service when nonbelievers are called forward to accept Jesus as their savior.
After returning to the United States, Cizik helped organize meetings of evangelical leaders aimed at formulating an evangelical response to global warming. He bought hybrid Toyota Priuses for himself and his wife. Asked about the biblical basis for his newfound environmentalism, Cizik would say that, in granting man dominion over the earth, God had also entrusted man with the care of his creation. Indeed, Cizik refused to refer to his global warming activism as environmentalism; he insisted it be called “Creation Care.”
He wasn’t just being cute. Cizik, whose organization includes upward of thirty million American evangelicals, knew that born-again Christians had long frowned on the environmental movement’s embrace of government regulation and on its calls for population control. But polls suggest that evangelical attitudes toward the environment are complex. A 2004 Pew Research Center poll found that while many more evangelicals oppose environmental regulations than do adherents of other religious traditions, a slight majority actually favor stronger environmental regulations. Cizik thought that the secret to convincing more evangelicals to adopt some tenets of environmentalism was to dispense with the traditional environmentalist plea to protect nature for its own sake. “It has to be framed as a people issue,” Cizik said. “Evangelicals will understand it more clearly that way.”
That’s what the Evangelical Climate Initiative was for. “For most of us, until recently this has not been treated as a pressing issue or major priority,” the document acknowledged. It briefly laid out the scientific evidence for global warming. It framed global warming as a “people issue,” arguing that the expected environmental fallout, including a rise in sea level, droughts, and the accelerated spread of tropical diseases, would wreak havoc on the world’s poor. It cited more than a half-dozen biblical passages on mankind’s stewardship duties toward nature. And it called for federal legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions, possibly through a “cap-and-trade” program.
Collecting signatures for the Evangelical Climate Initiative was not easy. Leaders of some evangelical denominations told Cizik that signing on to such a traditionally liberal platform would be too risky unless he could give them political cover. They wanted him to first sign up an evangelical star with solid conservative credentials—someone like Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life. So Cizik and other Evangelical Climate Initiative boosters lobbied Warren over to their side, then used his support to prod the fence-sitters. As the unveiling of the document approached in early 2006, Cizik was visibly excited, especially over the prospect of lobbying traditional Republican allies in Congress—who were with him on issues like opposing gay marriage—on a cause so far outside their comfort zones. “The Natural Resources Defense Council or the Sierra Club is not going to change the minds of conservative Republicans,” Cizik said. “But is it conceivable that the National Association of Evangelicals could? It’s conceivable.”
The Evangelical Climate Initiative was unveiled in February 2006, bearing the signatures of eighty-six evangelical luminaries. In addition to Warren, they included Salvation Army chief Todd Bassett, Christianity Today editor David Neff, and the presidents of thirty-nine evangelical colleges.
But two signatures were conspicuously absent: those of National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard (who would step down later that year amid allegations that he had paid for drug-fueled trysts with a gay prostitute) and Washington lobbyist Richard Cizik.
Cizik’s name had originally been on the Evangelical Climate Initiative—he was, after all, one of the document’s chief architects and advocates. But at the last minute before its Washington unveiling, he’d requested that it be withdrawn. In January, as Cizik was coaxing other evangelical leaders to sign his document, the NAE received a one-page letter from a coalition of Christian Right leaders requesting that the NAE forgo adopting an official position on climate change. “Global warming is not a consensus issue, and our love of the Creator and respect for His creation does not require us to take a position,” the letter read, charging squarely at the central pillars of the Evangelical Climate Initiative. Written under the auspices of a group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, its signatories included Chuck Colson, the American Family Association’s Don Wildmon, and James Dobson.
In the eyes of Dobson and other Christian Right leaders, the Evangelical Climate Initiative was not only a concession to its liberal enemies, but a threat to the movement’s core agenda: fighting same-sex marriage, abortion, and the removal of religion from the public square. America’s cultural crisis was too dire for the evangelical movement to be distracted by a bunch of Christian tree huggers.
Cizik believed that taking a stand on global warming would actually lend more credibility to the Christian Right’s traditional agenda, which he wholly endorsed. If the evangelical movement succeeded in swaying key Republicans to pass global warming legislation, his thinking went, it would be much harder for the movement’s opponents to characterize it as out of the mainstream on causes like the Federal Marriage Amendment. Plus, successfully lobbying for a climate change bill could give the Christian Right something it rarely got: a legislative victory, which would remind Washington policy makers of the movement’s influence.
The January 2006 letter from Dobson and other Christian Right leaders was influential in its own right, though. Cizik removed his name from the Evangelical Climate Initiative before its public launch in Washington the following month. NAE president Ted Haggard, a Creation Care advocate who was expected to sign the document, announced that he would withhold his name, too.
Cizik has by no means given up on Creation Care, however. One of his top tasks continues to be convincing Bible-believing Christians, including, most importantly, Christian Right leaders, that environmentalism is nothing short of a biblical mandate. “Fundamentally, we are rescuing evangelicalism from bad theology,” he said. “…. That’s how important this is.”
Cizik’s ongoing Creation Care activism riled Christian Right leaders, including Dobson. In May 2006 Cizik even showed up in a provocative photograph in Vanity Fair’s “green issue,” where he appeared to be walking on water, barefoot. The NAE lobbyist, it seemed, still hadn’t gotten the message. So in spring or early summer of 2006, Dobson wrote to NAE's Colorado Springs headquarters calling for Cizik's firing, according to a source knowledgeable about the action. The NAE expressed its surprise at Dobson’s request, the source said—Dobson is a member neither of the organization’s board of directors nor of its executive committee—and vowed to stand by Cizik, who’d been at the organization for more than twenty-five years.
At a meeting earlier this month, the NAE board went even further, unanimously voting to reaffirm a platform that includes protecting the environment as one of seven policy priorities.
You've got a nice juicy story here with antagonists and protaganists and most importantly, internicene battles.
The whole idea of 'evangalism' is inherently rhetorical/political because it demands that you convince people of things and tell them what to do. So the idea that this relatively small group would have a giant impact on politics isn't so strange.
Clearly, the evangelical Pharisees have traded their integrity for 30 pieces of political silver. When you're horsetrading like this and balancing the need to save humanity from destruction with that of pleasing the oil lobby's minions in D.C. (who throw you a gay bashing bone now and then), you have to hand back your halo.
March 21, 2007 8:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Gilgoff,
Did you write your book before or after the 2006 elections? How did you measure who was winning the culture war?
Reece
March 21, 2007 8:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
I've enjoyed your excerpts so far, but they seem at oods with the title of your book. As you note, Dobson and his culture warriors are losing their grip over the evangelical community itself. All demographic surveys show that egalitarianism and tolerance of homosexuality are increasing with each passing generation. Stem-cell research has provided a wedge issue for the cultural left. Creationism is getting little to no traction. What is the evidence for the religious right winning the culture war?
March 21, 2007 8:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Creation Care", environmentalism or whatever a person would like to call it does not fit in well with the whole idea of an American Theocracy. God made this planet for us to exploit for our own good and with the coming Rapture why preserve it? By saying it is important to preserve our habitats on this piece of cosmic debris is tantamount to trivializing God's importance in the eyes of the evangelical right wing political ideologues. Besides it will hurt the value of the big oil/energy stocks they and their followers hold...
March 21, 2007 8:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
You nailed it, Libertine.
March 21, 2007 9:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
I was impressed with this paragraph:
I wish Cizik hadn't withdrawn his name. But even if he did, the call still went out. He shouldn't have responded to "pressure". Perhaps he wouldn't have, if there had been some from the left to welcome and encourage him with their support.
I'm less impressed with the use of the word "pressured" in the context of the paragraph (which of us hasn't twisted a friend's arm to do something in which we have a deep interest?) than I am with a lesson to be learned from this. Evangelicals are open to being convinced of certain things to which we're committed: once they're convinced, they don't lose their zeal for convincing others, and there's a long historical trail demonstrating this, stretching back at least as far as the beginnings of the Abolition Movement.
Interesting, too, is the beginnings of an Evangelical Left, which I argue is not a contradiction in terms. They are significant enough for Kos to provide a community for them, Street Prophets. There, one will find links to numerous blogs, religious or spiritual in inspiration and on the left side of the spectrum politically. The mix is fascinating: not only is the Christian left represented on the blogroll, but the Jewish Left and the Islamic left. Anyone looking for a relief from boredom or suffering from withdrawal pangs when posting is slow at the Café could find things to think about over there.
Jim Wallis may self-promote just a wee bit too much for my taste, but God's Politics, presents interesting takes on things. Readers of TPM Café would find things to disagree with there, but things to agree with, as well.
I guess my point is this. There needs to be a way to harness the energy and zeal of Evangelicals, whether right or left, when the cause they espouses is in agreement with our progressive belief system. We seem quite willing to get into cat-fights and hissy fits with others (look at the number of replies to Amatai Etzioni's latest, or to just about anything MJRosenberg writes) without saying "go, and never darken my door again" to those on the other side of the issue, whether it happens to be anonymity for posters or who's more to blame for the problem in Israel/Palestine. Tempers roil, and sometimes the rhetoric nearly makes the screen sweat, but, with a change of issue -- say, to the firing of prosecutors, or global warming and what to do about it -- we recognize that very much more unites us than divides us, and if we don't exactly kiss and make up, we applaud each other for fighting the good fight where conscience allows.
There will be no easier way to defang Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson, than to make Evangelicals welcome to join us upon issues with which they are in agreement with us, letting them go their own way when their consciences require it. Barack Obama has a real ability to do this. So does Bill Moyers. We'd do well to cultivate it, or at least keep an open mind about it.
aMike
March 21, 2007 1:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
You refer to white evangelicals as a "relatively small group" with "a giant impact on politics," but white evangelicals account for about a full quarter of the electorate, representing around 80 million Americans. And evangelical Christianity is seeing its numbers grow in the U.S., even as mainline churches and the Catholic church are losing members...
March 21, 2007 2:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wrote most of the book before the '06 elections, but updated it to include the 2006 election results. The final chapter shows how the Democrats redoubled their efforts to reach evangelicals and other religious voters after their historic losses in those two communities in the 2004 election, and some of those efforts paid off in the Democratic gains of 2006. For instance, John Kerry's 2004 religious outreach director was marginalized inside the campaign, but she started a religious outreach consulting firm that was hired by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2006 and by a handful of Democratic candidates. The races where she was active were where the Democrats saw their most dramatic gains among evangelical and other religious voters in 2006. To me, the fact that Democrats are now making a serious play for the evangelical vote is more evidence that evangelicals are winning the culture war.
March 21, 2007 2:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
The excerpts so far have been taken from the epilogue of my book, which is titled "The Post-Dobson Christian Right." Most of the book, however, is devoted to Dobson's successes in the last decade: the passage of the first federal abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade in President Bush's first term, the passage of constitutional amendments banning gay marriage in roughly two dozen states, and the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004. My book argues that Dobson was key to all those developments, which I take as proof that evangelicals are winning the culture war.
March 21, 2007 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Then how do you explain the success of the National Association of Evangelicals' Richard Cizik in collecting signatures for the Evangelical Climate Initiative--with such stars as Rick Warren signing on--or the unanimous NAE board vote earlier this month reaffirming environmentalism as a key component of the organization's policy agenda? While you're being facetious, you do pretty well capture the anti-environmental arguments of the old guard Christian Right.
March 21, 2007 2:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well put. There are more and more Democrats thinking like you. It's no mistake that one of Sen. Hillary Clinton's first hires for her presidential campaign was a southern evangelical Hill staffer to direct her religious outreach.
March 21, 2007 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't wish to seem antagnostic, kindly allow me this?
I hear that number "80 million" often and I have to tell you I have a difficult time accepting it. I have no numbers of my own, no polls, no studies, I simply can't see 80 million "evangelicals". Maybe one of the reasons is I don't know anyone who is an evangelical, yet I do know Jehovah Witnesses and as far as I know they make no claim to 50/75 million. Then again I don't know any Mormons.
As I said, I've seen this number mentioned often, how was it arrived at?
March 21, 2007 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: And evangelical Christianity is seeing its numbers grow in the U.S., even as mainline churches and the Catholic church are losing members...
Since religious practice (and to some extent even religious belief) are (slowly) declining in the US, I doubt that any group is actually growing. The Mainline churches are declining, that is true. The Catholic Church appears to be holding even, due mainly to immigrants, above all Hispanic immigration. To the extent that Protestant evangelists (and let's count Pentacostals and even in the LDS in that category for now) are growing it is mainly due to their cannibalizing the membership of the mainline Protestants and (to a much a lesser extent) the Catholic Church. I wonder however if the new moderation we are seeing in the politics of this new Religiuous Right might be due to these converts bringing some non-rightwing notions with them, much as states like Virginia and Arizona are moderating due to the immigration of more liberal Americans.
March 21, 2007 4:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: My book argues that Dobson was key to all those developments, which I take as proof that evangelicals are winning the culture war.
Except that their victories are either trivial (the abortion "restrictions"), ephemeral (the state gay marriage amendments), or backfiring seriously (the reelction of Bush). Overall the country has become more not less socially liberal. Opinion has not shifted on abortion, premarital cohabitation is widely accepted, even the Catholic Church makes no serious effort to ban birth control, gays are more accepted every year, prayer in school seems quaint and silly to most Americans, and Creationism in school curricula has been roundly rejected. Moroever to the extent that the Religious Right clings to George Bush they are probably going to perish with him. They have no hero at all in the 2008 candidate field and will almost certainly find themselves marginalized no matter who is elected the next president.
March 21, 2007 4:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: God made this planet for us to exploit for our own good and with the coming Rapture why preserve it?
How many poeople believe in an imminent Rapture? I mean REALLY believe? I would suggest anyone with a 4012K, an IRA, a college fund for kids, a mortgage or any other long term plan or obligation holds no such belief even if they claim otherwise. The behavior simply denies it.
March 21, 2007 4:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
A source generally counted on as reliable is the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. For some reason my navigation bar keeps disappearing when I click on the Survey Section. Click on it in the column to th left, and you'll find a number of very interesting surveys on politics and issues. One which may be the source of the 80,000,000 figure is The American Religious Landscape and the 2004 Presidential Vote: Increased Polarization
Table 7 indicates that 26% of the American Population self-identifies as Evangelical. Figuring a population of 300+ million, I gather that would come out to about 80,000,000, more or less. This would of course count children. I don't know enough about the surveying techniques or whether the sample size was large enough, but the surveys were conducted under the auspices of the University of Akron.
Hope this is useful.
aMike
March 21, 2007 5:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
James Watt believed in an imminent Rapture and he is a former Secretary of the Interior. Many wealthy people are in the movement aiding the movement, funding think tanks etc., etc., etc.
March 21, 2007 8:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
But the bottom line is it never came to fruition. It sounds like Cizik is very sincere and determined in his effort but the powers to be in the movement are formidable, the "old guard" is still firmly in control. I have very few if anything to praise the Evangelical political right for...but if they ever make a positive impact in addressing global climate change I would be the first one to stand up and applaud. I just don't see it happening...I guess the glass looks half empty to me.
And a sincere thank you for replying to my comments...
March 21, 2007 8:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks much for the reference, I can see where the 80 million figure came from. Here's where I get confused
26.3% define themselves as "evangelicals" but the survery shows that figure breaking down this way:
Traditional Evangelicals: 12.5%
Centrist Evangelicals 10.8%
Modernist Evangelicals 2.9%
I guess in my view I have a hard time seeing the Centrist and Modernist types seeing themselves as evangelicals.
I used to be a practicing Catholic and I knew Charasmatic Catholics, the type I might compare to my view of Evangelicals.
I could never see myself as a Centrist or Modernist Charasmatic.
I guess this all has to do with the definition of "Evangelical."
Thanks again for the reference, valuable stuff :)
March 22, 2007 6:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
aMike is right. The Evangelicals can be our slaves. All we have to do is love them, fear them and do everything they tell us to do.
If only we espouse creation science, endorse the bell curve, abandon negroes and hispanics, purge gays, repeal roe vs wade, make war on third world nations, force women back into the kitchens, and penalize people for sex, eliminate the barrier between church and state, de-secularize the remaining social programs, install the ten commandments (all 17 of them) in public buildings and enforce prayer in schools and then the people who support Falwell, Robertson and Dobson will abandon them and flock to us.
Uh huh.
Right.
Yep.
I can see that, yeah.
Makes a lot of sense.
Or maybe not.
March 22, 2007 7:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
I doubt he REALLY believed it, as I define real belief. Come on, if you actually and truly thought the End Of The World was imminent, you'd quit your job, liquidate your assets and head for some survivalist camp in the hills. In the vast majority of cases when people say they "believe" this doctrine, it's just pure lip service by rote, or at most they think it's something that might happen someday, but not any time soon.
March 22, 2007 9:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'll see if I can find out more about how those divisions are categorized. One of the problems with letting people define themselves is that they do just that...they start with themselves, and use their experience/belief to define the larger category. I rather think that the crux of the difference may be hinted at in the book, which I'm going to read as soon as I can get my hands on a copy.
I suspect that the "modernists" have little or no problems with reconciling their religious beliefs with contemporary science. I would guess that a significant number of the centrist ones also are pretty much living in the world described by Darwin. I went to a pietist/evangelical high school and college, and in both schools we were taught evolutionary science--no problems.
What interests me is that centrists/modernists together are equal in number to traditionalists, roughly half of the total. This split actually goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, with the publication of The Fundamentals, which were written in response to the Higher Criticism Movement. I don't expect anyone will want to read The Fundamentals from cover to cover, but there are two things I find interesting about them, and these go some way to explain modern Fundamentalism.
First, if one looks at the table of contents and notes the authors of these tracts, one sees that they are written, by a melange of authors, from scholars at well respected schools to laymen one step away from anonymity. While there isn't an absolute concordance, the earlier chapters seem to have the more distinguished authorship and the more rigorous, even scholastic, framework of argument.
Second, and perhaps more important for understanding what happened, is that the books were underwritten and distributed free to "ministers of the gospel, missionaries, Sunday School superintendents, and others engaged in aggressive Christian work throughout the English speaking world." In other words, works written by highly educated scholars wound up in the hands of persons without the training to critically examine them. The end result was a fracturing of the Protestant world into Biblical literalists (who would be the traditional Evangelicals) and the rest, who were able to think more metaphorically about the basic texts of Christianity.
So there's one explanation of the categories. This can be overlaid with a geographic distribution. The schools which produced the documents in the first place were northern and European by and large. But the heart of what one might call traditional fundamentalist Evangelicalism was southern and south-central, what we loosely call the Bible Belt now. There, both the clergy and laity were less educated. This of course was also the area which lost the Civil War, and generally rejected all things which smacked of Northern new-fangledness.
I've gone on too long. Hope this has some interest to you.
aMike
March 22, 2007 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not too long at all....it was a good read, thanks. :)
March 22, 2007 4:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Come on, if you actually and truly thought the End Of The World was imminent, you'd quit your job, liquidate your assets and head for some survivalist camp in the hills.
I think it depends on what is meant by "imminent." If you mean one year, then your argument makes sense. But what about people who think the end of the world is coming, say, in the next 100-200 years? Having a 401k then makes sense, but worrying about global warming or overpopulation? Not so much.
March 23, 2007 7:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
The key British evangelical scientist is:
Sir John Houghton
Former chief meteorologist of the United Kingdom. Has personally briefed Her Majesty on global warming (a devotee of the countryside and things natural, she has become aware of changes in the bird and wildlife, particularly at Sandringham on the east coast of Britain, and asked for a private briefing: note this is unusual for the Monarch to do so).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_T._Houghton
Houghton's textbook on Global Warming is among the best, he is the UK's representative to the IPCC. The chapter on the moral dimensions of global warming is excellent (and not written only from a Christianist perspective).
http://www.amazon.com/Global-Warming-Complete-John-Houghton/dp/0521528747/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-4369603-0815306?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174665001&sr=8-1
Global Warming: the Complete Briefing
(note new edition due in November)
Evangelicism is primarily, in the UK, a movement within the Anglican (Episcopal) Church itself, and the Anglican Church is fundamentally an intellectual, catholic (with a small c), religion.
I don't know if you have seen the film 'Amazing Grace'
http://www.amazinggracemovie.com/
about William Wilberforce and the fight against slavery, but there are echoes of the fight against slavery in the fight against Global Warming.
In that, slavery, like CO2 emission, was a fantastically profitable industry, protected by vast swathes of financial interest and moneyed society. It was argued again, and again, that Britain and the Empire (and later the American South) could not survive the economic dislocation of ending slavery, the abrogation and seizure of private property and the violation of personal rights that this required.
No economic argument ever overturned slavery.
Slavery was overturned by a vast transcendant act of faith.
Global warming will not been beaten by a series of cold intellectual arguments, by posts on realclimate.org (important that those will be).
It will be beaten by a vast, profoundly emotional and spiritual turning amongst the people of the developed world and countries like China, that our future, the future of our children and grandchildren, and our trust of this earth, matters more than our own wellbeing.
One day, we as human beings will decide amongst ourselves, 'enough' on the question of global warming.
Just as one day, the British Parliament rose, and ended slavery within the Empire. And sent the Fleet, in violation of international law, out to the far flung reaches of the Atlantic, to end the international slave trade.
Just as one day, a President of the United States, a dour and lanky man with a history of depression, on the cusp of stalemate in a brutal Civil War, penned a short declaration
If we are to save this planet, and our place upon it, it will require acts of faith, not just of reason.
We can only pray that enough of us we reach that moment, in time.
March 23, 2007 8:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
The first Christians really did believe this and thought sex was unneccesary because of the Messiah's imminent return.
The 'rapture' business is largely just cultural fun for these people. It's a way for them to engage in pseudo science fiction (the series of novels on a post 'fall' world are often cited as evidence of the widespread belief in rapture) and at the same time gives them s superiority trip ("I'm going to the good place) and also a resentmentful cruelty trip that Nietszche talked about as being the basis for Chrisitanity (sexy rich people will BURN!)
March 23, 2007 11:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
But they're coming around on global warming. The idea is that they might move left in OUR terms, not that we become their prison bitches.
March 23, 2007 11:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
I know that belief in a rapture within one's lifetime was expected by early Christians. (And the idea that sex was unnecessary was only believed by a branch of them.) But I don't understand how that gets to a belief in rapture being just "cultural fun."
I mean, I agree that the popularity of a particular series of speculative fiction doesn't prove anything. But I don't like arguments based on refusing to accept others' beliefs qua beliefs, but focusing on them as a cover for something else. That strikes me as incredibly dismissive and not conducive to a genuine understanding.
March 23, 2007 11:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Americans like to believe in fun things like; UFOs, ghosts, Yeti, Nessie, Astrology, and the Rapture.
Oh, I forgot 'laying of the hands' and 'speaking in tongues'.
March 23, 2007 12:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: I know that belief in a rapture within one's lifetime was expected by early Christians.
This is not correct. The early Christians never heard of any "rapture". That doctrine was invented in the 19th century. You may be confusing this with the last Judgment/Second Coming which IS an ancient doctrine. And yes, there certainly is reason for a Christian to be concerned about the environment even if he thinks the judgement is tomorrow (or, even especially if he thinks it will be tomorrow) as God may not be pleased to find his creation a mess, much as landlord would be outraged to find his tenants have trashed his property, which is the point these "creation care" folks are making.
March 23, 2007 2:13 PM | Reply | Permalink