Campaign industry 'Jesus' loves money, not environment
“Join Us for the Hanging of the Greens!” declared a roadside church sign, here in our native Appalachians. It was an early December dusk, my nature-nut carpool winding its way home.
“A hanging?” Our driver stared. “Now they’re gonna hang us?” The rest of us gazed back there blankly.
“Oh — no,” I finally got the connection. “They mean Advent greenery.” The sole churchgoer in the car, I was steeped in Christian tradition and fond of those greens.
“Pine! Holly! Lots of life,” I explained, “inside the church. You’d love it!”
Our driver looked skeptical. A naturalist and watershed advocate, a dad and a firm atheist, he’d long been put off by the political, anti-green Jesus that now seems to dominate.
This Jesus has morphed from the one depicted by the actual gospels — a humble figure who hiked alone in the wilderness, climbed mountains to pray, preached outdoors and insisted that God cared for the fate of every bird.
Today’s hijacked, campaign-industry Jesus loves money. Not life. He disdains nature and warns faith-based voters against wilderness protections, clean water rules, climate science and particularly the wicked “environmentalist.”
Values-voter messaging makes this clear. God has no interest in protecting creation. He prefers big-money power brokers, a deregulated market and politicos who aim foremost for these ends.
It is this religion that bugs my atheist friend beyond belief. It also bothers believers, including many exiting the church.
The Pew Research Center finds that record percentages of Americans who believe in God no longer subscribe to institutional religion. The Barna Group, a Christian polling firm, likewise found that 59 percent of childhood churchgoers now disconnect from church by age 15.
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Among the reasons young adults cite is that “Christians demonize everything outside of the church.” That “everything” includes the planet and any human knowledge of it.
Twenty-five percent said, “Christianity is anti-science”; 22 percent said the church was “ignoring the problems of the real world.”
Even among those who stay, “younger Evangelicals are more concerned than their parents and grandparents about current issues such as environmental protection,” said Russell Moore, an ethics official for the Southern Baptist Convention.
But Moore doesn’t find their concerns contrary to Christian doctrine. What he finds counter to “historic Christianity” is what he calls a “prosperity gospel huckster” creed that reveres big money and worldly power. Disguised as “Christian,” it’s actually “the old Canaanite fertility religion,” Moore wrote in a recent column on campaign politics.
Pope Francis has also been rebuking Christians for this modernized Baal-worship. Deifying money, the pope points out, demands the constant sacrificing of wildlife species, water quality, people and the biosphere.
The fact is, Christian leaders have been condemning this sacrificial cult of materialism and speaking up for “creation care” for several decades now, even coming together for ecumenical resolutions, rallies and political appeals.
In the 1990s, media stories abounded regarding the “greening of the church.” In 2005, hundreds of evangelical leaders signed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, urging climate protection as a biblical, ethical imperative.
What happened to this church greening? The headier, more alluring form of green intervened. Big money.
Numerous billionaire coalitions in the United States rely on a faith-based voting bloc, even to support their big-polluter-friendly platform.
Gaining religious devotion to this cause at odds with life requires funding vast amounts of Orwellian think-tank talk, fear-mongering and fake ministries. Christian voters must be persuaded that a “pro-life” God has no interest in a living planet.
This persuasion often takes the form of scare tactics. In December, The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation (a big-oil funded “ministry” which warns Christians to flee the “green dragon cult” of “environmentalism”) condemned climate scientist and Evangelical Katherine Hayhoe’s work as “dangerous … climate alarmist dogma!”
Billions of dollars fuel this preaching of the anti-life Jesus. It’s part of an enormous octopus of fake-news generators funded by anonymous political dark money.
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The good news is, this darkness hasn’t overcome the light. Faith-based calls for creation care just keep multiplying.
Hundreds of pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals this month sent an open letter to Donald Trump, urging him to head his EPA not with Scott Pruitt, but someone actually willing to “protect human life from pollution.”
The Catholic Climate Covenant is likewise petitioning Trump to “take swift and meaningful” climate action.
Interfaith rallies toward this end, across the nation are also in the works.
“We are uniting behind the one planet that we share,” explained Baptist environmental liaison Tom Carr.
That’s a vision any human, religious or not, could surely embrace for 2017 — realistic, yet hopeful beyond belief.
Liza Field is a conservationist, tree-planter, and ethics teacher in Southwest Virginia. This column is distributed by the nonprofit Bay Journal News Service.
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