By Bill Moyers
Sunday 30 January 2005
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime
is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has
come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power
in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time
in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly
of power in Washington.
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven
true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite
being contradicted by what is generally accepted as
reality. When ideology and theology couple, their
offspring are not always bad but they are always
blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians
alike, oblivious to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first
secretary of the interior? My favorite online
environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist,
reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S.
Congress that protecting natural resources was
unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus
Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last
tree is felled, Christ will come back."
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know
what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious.
So were his compatriots out across the country. They
are the people who believe the Bible is literally true
- one-third of the American electorate, if a recent
Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several
million good and decent citizens went to the polls
believing in the rapture index.
That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you
will find that the best-selling books in America today
are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written
by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right
warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe
to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th
century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took
disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a
narrative that has captivated the imagination of
millions of Americans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British
writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant
dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding
to my own understanding): 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 lifted out of their clothes and
transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right
hand of God, they will watch their political and
religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores,
locusts and frogs during the several years of
tribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the
literature. I've reported on these people, 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. That's why they have declared
solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and
backed up their support with money and volunteers.
It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up
act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four
angels "which are 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 - just one point below
the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow,
the son of God will return, the righteous will enter
Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal
hellfire.
So what does this mean for public policy and the
environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of
reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer - "The Road
to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see
how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe
that environmental destruction is not only to be
disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as
a sign of the coming apocalypse.
As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a
handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden
to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before
the recent election - 231 legislators in total and
more since the election - are backed by the religious
right.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th
Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings
from the three most influential Christian right
advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,
Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy
Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert
and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to
score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was
Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from
the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The
days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send
a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the
thought.
And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002
Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans
believe that the prophecies found in the book of
Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter
think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive
across the country with your radio tuned to the more
than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel
turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you
can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will
come to understand why people under the spell of such
potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts
it, "to worry about the environment. 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? And why care about converting
from oil to solar when the same God who performed the
miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few
billion barrels of light crude with a word?"
Because these people believe that until Christ does
return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a
high school history book, "America's Providential
History." You'll find there these words: "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." However, "
he Christian
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."
No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House
whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian
Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers
on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse
a powerful driving force in modern American politics.
It is hard for the journalist to report a story like
this with any credibility. So let me put it on a
personal level. 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.
So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I
think of 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 agreed with Eric
Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global
Environment 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 that - it's just that I read the news and
connect the dots.
I read that the administrator of the U.S.
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, which
requires the government to judge beforehand whether
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 plants 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.
I read the news just this week and learned how the
Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend
$9 million - $2 million of it from the
administration's friends at the American Chemistry
Council - to pay poor families to continue to use
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 were going 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 all this in the news.
I read the news just last night and learned that the
administration's friends at the International Policy
Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others
of like mind, have issued a new report that climate
change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising"
scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an
embarrassment."
I not only read the news but the fine print of the
recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with
the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to
it: a clause removing all endangered species
protections from pesticides; language prohibiting
judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of
environmental review for grazing permits on public
lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken
protection 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. 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 I am stopped
short by the thought: "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.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you,
though, that 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. And 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. What we need is what the ancient
Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart
... the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if
the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
-------
Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly
public affairs series "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS.
This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first
appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks upon
receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from
the Center for Health and the Global Environment at
Harvard Medical School.
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