This is about a changing of the guard on the religious right, and an older generation losing power as younger Evangelicals expand their political interests beyond the issues that have made Evangelicals a de facto subsidiary of the GOP for a generation. As Prof. Darryl Hart recently said:
Since the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s and the Christian Coalition in the 1980s, Hart noted, evangelicals have become a reliable constituency of the Republican Party, focusing much of their political energy on moral issues and biblical values. "But biblical standards of morality have a way of also nurturing an interest in biblical standards of justice," he said.
"Consequently, while the older generation of evangelicals read the Bible for its application to sex and family relations, younger evangelicals turn to holy writ for guidance on war, hunger and poverty…The irony is that once the religious right let the genie of Bible-based politics out of bottle of American conservatism they may have unleashed a Protestant force that Republicans will find impossible to harness."
While I'm sure that Dr. Dobson et al. are angry at Rich Cizik in part for principled reasons -- i.e., they really do hold, however mistakenly, that conservation ought not be an issue for Evangelicals -- I believe that their anger also comes because Cizik threatens their ability to be power brokers within the Republican Party. Here's what Cizik told Amy Sullivan in a New Republic story last year: "There's going to be a lot of political reconsideration on this in the coming year. The old faultlines are no more." Last August, Dobson laid into Cizik, accusing him of opposing capitalism and pretty much hating America because of his conservationist activism. Which is just crazy-malicious, and so over the top that it suggests the following translation: "I'm melting! Melting!"
Happily, the NAE leadership appears to understand exactly what's behind this latest Dobson move against Cizik, telling the WaPo:
[NAE chief] the Rev. Leith Anderson, defended Cizik as "a great asset." He also said that the Dobson letter was released to the news media before it was received by the board. "I guess that says it all," he said.
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Actually, population decline in this century is going to make life really difficult for us. But anyway, if we want to take this discussion to a new thread, I've posted Erin's comment to a separate blog entry. Maybe we could take the discussion there.
The difference between a Christian conservationist and an environmentalist can be summed up in this way: the first wishes to conserve and protect the natural resources of the planet for the sake of future generations, while the second wishes to eliminate future generations for the sake of the planet. Erin, do you and others who have expressed opposition to population control really believe that we can be good stewards of the earth while the human population continues to expand exponentially? As more people fill up the landscape, we cut down forests for wood and to create farmland; we pollute and deplete the aquifers; we kill off animal populations for food or to make room for livestock; we farm or graze animals on fragile soils, resulting in erosion that makes the land barren. I m not expressing hatred of people when I say this. People can t help it; they want to eat. But how is it beneficial to people to live in a depleted, barren landscape of constant scarcity?
Is it your idea that the human population can expand indefinitely, forever? I don t see how that is possible. But just for the argument, let s assume that we find new sources of energy, new sources of food coupled with vastly more efficient distribution networks so we can avoid wide-spread famine, and that we discover how to purify polluted water and desalinate the ocean. Let us further assume that the resulting increase in energy use will have no bad effects on climate, and that we can make all the adjustments we ll have to make without creating massive population displacement. Even if all this is stipulated, if the human population continues to expand, eventually we will reach the point where every square inch of land and sea must be exploited to keep the humans alive. There will be no place for wilderness or for wild animals, which will be extinct. Eventually there will be no place for domestic animals, either. If we re still eating meat, we ll be eating some kind of engineered meat product that doesn t require living space. And then, as we continue to increase, the time eventually MUST come when there simply isn t any more room. The earth and its resources are finite. The human capacity to reproduce is not. This is just a fact. At some point, our growth WILL be stopped. If we don t make the choice to control it ourselves, it will be done for us by disease, famine, or war. It seems to me that it would be better to use reason and technology to control growth at a point where we can still preserve some of the other beings who share this earth with us. It seems to me that it is objectively evil--to use a term popular in the Catholic Church--to extinguish lives that were created by God. This is especially true of the higher orders of animals who have a degree of sentience and can experience pain and sorrow in their own way--animals like gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, and whales. But it s true even of birds, fish and amphibians. Who are we to destroy what God has made, to wipe it out as if it had never been, to make it impossible for any human, ever again, to wonder at its beauty? Does this bother you at all when you advocate for unchecked population growth? How would you propose to deal with extinction of animals and destruction of the natural environment? What degree of poverty and deprivation is acceptable in the pursuit of greater numbers? How much limitation of freedom would you accept when scarce resources have to be rationed? Is there ever a point where you would consider it prudent to restrain growth in order to provide a better life for fewer people? Do you take a fatalistic view and plan on expanding until an act of God kills billions? Not rhetorical questions--I m genuinely puzzled by this and would like to hear your explanation.
Oops, sorry, didn't see Rod's last comment until after I had posted. I will move this over to the new topic.
Rod, I don't think the NAE has 1% the influence of Focus on the Family. Dobson may be right or wrong here, but I don't think you're seeing a changing of the guard so much as the horse turning around to swat the fly stinging his rear end and risking looking foolish in the process. That's not a slap at Cizik so much as it is a characterization of the relative importance of the NAE versus Focus in the evangelical world.
St_Iraneus: "What I sense at the evangelical college where I teach is that a lot of evangelical folks on the left (students and professors) are profoundly embarrassed by traditional Christian stands on sex and life and weary of confrontation, and attempt to buy cultural cache and approval by showing concern for environmental action, etc." versus Prof. Hart from the initial post: "Consequently, while the older generation of evangelicals read the Bible for its application to sex and family relations, younger evangelicals turn to holy writ for guidance on war, hunger and poverty The irony is that once the religious right let the genie of Bible-based politics out of bottle of American conservatism they may have unleashed a Protestant force that Republicans will find impossible to harness." The former strikes me as the perception of an imagination uncharitable toward both the thought and motives of those he's describing. The latter strikes me as accurate. Theologically orthodox evangelical Christians who take seriously God's call to a Christian life, who see good use as preferable to selfish or thoughtless waste, who question the macroeconomic paradigm and ask what effect our political and economic decisions and the way we live have on actual individuals and communities, who doubt individualism and long for Community...doesn't this sound familiar? I agree that we evangelicals who have an expanding political vision are at a fork in the road, though. We have always heard from the old guard that that which is not conservative is liberal. As we come to terms with our not being 'conservative' in the sense in which Dobson et.al. use the term we are being forced into a choice: accept the paradigm and conclude that since we're not 'conservative' we must be liberal, redefine 'conservative', or abandon the false paradigm. The attitudes in this thread make the former more likely.
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