Bill Moyers is worried about the Apocalypse:
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.
Bill Moyers is one of the most humane and hopeful people I've ever heard, read or watched. He's always impressed me for his ability to be unflinching about the bad things he sees, scrupulous in describing and analyzing problems, but optimistic about the potential for change and regeneration. So it was bracing to read this piece in the New York Review of Books in which he admits to being worried about the Rapture.
Actually, it's not the rapture that's got him worried. Instead, he's worried that believers in the rapture and the impending "end days" are such a powerful voting bloc for the Republicans that we've ended up with public policy perverted by these believers' disregard for the environment. While some evangelicals do express a concern for the environment, those who believe in the impending rapture have no logical reason to care for how the earth will be preserved for later generations.
More below the jump
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Also posted at The Next Hurrah]
Listen to John Hagee, pastor of the 17,000- member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who is quoted in [Biblical scholar Barbara] 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.
This leads Moyers to make what I believe is the best assessment of the role of evangelical Christianity in the life of George W. Bush and the policies of his administration:
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 Dick 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.
One would be hard-pressed to find a more succinct summary of the relationships between religion, policy and the Republican party. He also makes clear that these are not policies being pursued amid ignorance of their implications for the future. Musing on what we're doing to the generation of his young grandchildren, and asking God for forgiveness for not knowing what we're doing, he realizes
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?
In the end, however, Moyers' good sense and his mix of skepticism and optimism lead him to the moralist conclusion we've come to expect:
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.
Beyond the moralist's imploring us to "save the world," I think Moyer may have drawn attention to an Achilles heel of the radical right's political might and the policy it engenders. It's an almost universal wish of every parent to leave their children to a better world than what they themselves experienced. It's why parents without a high school diploma work so hard to help their children get a college education, it's why parents try to provide their children with opportunities they were denied or didn't kow existed, and it's why people don't spend all their money but upon their death often bequeath some of their wealth to their children. And maybe this is a reflection of my growing up in a family of Catholics, some who before converting had been in Calvinist sects, but guilt is also a powerful motivating factor; when people are confronted with news that the costs of what they do today will have to be borne by today's toddlers and tomorrow's newborns, they are more likely to reconsider their behavior and beliefs. This outlook was a reason behind the success in 1992 of Ross Perot in peeling off marginal Republican voters distressed by the federal deficit but not yet willing to vote for Bill Clinton.
Few marginal republican voters adhere to the apocalyptic beliefs of the readers of Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" series or the preaching of Pat Robertson or the other evangelists quoted by Moyers. To convince these non-evangelical Republican-leaning swing voters that everyone's future is being sacrificed at the unholy alter of fundamentalist Christianity wedded to rapacious corporations from the polluting and extractive industries won't be an easy task, but it's a task that seem well-worth pursuing.