Eleanor Clift must be proud. Hodding Carter and Hedrick Smith, too.
Today’s mainstream-media mediocrities have rediscovered a bugaboo that once vexed their “journalist” forebears. Back in the ‘80s, the villain was the “religious right.” In 2022, it’s “Christian nationalism.”
The New York Times warns of “right-wing candidates for public office who explicitly aim to promote Christian power in America,” with “this current wave” seeking “a nation that actively prioritizes their particular set of Christian beliefs and far-right views and that more openly embraces Christianity as a bedrock identity.” Pundit Juan Williams wails that some “Republican voices are now pushing Middle Eastern-style religious hate to enlist followers and demonize rivals.” (The “far right” is scheming to “oppose the rising secular, liberal politics of educated women, racial minorities, and gay people.”) POLITICO screeches that a Pennsylvania “state senator who is widely seen as the archetype of the rise of Christian nationalism in the GOP” may destroy Josh Shapiro’s opportunity to become “our first Jewish president.” The Denver Post, after consulting “religious, political and social experts,” thinks that the ideals of U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) “threaten the rights of non-Christian — and typically non-white — Americans but also endanger the foundation of the country’s democratic process.”
Let’s stipulate that Boebert and her handful of fellow Bible-thumpers are a sorry lot. And that their fulminations are easily belied. As a 1797 treaty made blindingly clear, “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” Many Founding Fathers were deists — if not atheists. And several core principles of government in the Land of the Free, such as separation of powers and republicanism, derived from pagan — i.e., ancient Greek and Roman — thought.
Even if Boebert’s weltanschauung stood on solid historical footing, the movement pushing its bunk does not enjoy bright prospects. It’s awfully difficult to be a Christian nationalist if you’re not Christian. As no less a spouter of Beltway conventional wisdom than Al Hunt gleefully noted, the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2020 survey found that “white evangelicals, 14 percent of the respondents, are far outnumbered by the religiously unaffiliated or ‘nones’ — 23 percent. In fact, the ‘nones’ now outnumber white mainline protestants (16 percent) and white Catholics (12 percent).”
Christian nationalists do not comprise an incipient American theocracy. But there is indeed a substantial force of faith-based policymaking at work, right now, in the United States.
Decades ago, true environmentalism — i.e., reducing pollution and preserving wildlife habitat — gave way to a perverse kind of secular eschatology. Overpopulation, resource depletion, cancer-causing “toxins,” biotech run amok, and many other junk-science scares were trumpeted by academia, politicians, and the press. In time, each was exposed as exaggerated or nonexistent.
But then came the Mother of All Horrors.
“Global warming” gained traction in the late 1980s, and three decades later, its hysteria has massively intensified. But unlike Christian nationalists, adherents to the Cult of Carbon Consternation are firmly in control of both government and the private sector. From states’ renewable portfolio standards to the Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act,” municipalities’ anti-automobile measures to corporations’ pledges to go “green,” no dissent from the narrative is permitted. Ask a tough question or two, and you’re a “denier.”
Thoughtful observers marvel at the success of climate groupthink, because its dire predictions have been debunked, again and again. The Maldives has not sunk beneath the ocean. The North Pole is not bereft of ice. (Sorry, Al Gore.) Hurricanes, droughts, floods, and wildfires have not become more frequent and more severe.
Amazingly, none of their Harold Camping-esque failed predictions yield any consequences for weather warriors. It’s almost as if the more they get wrong, the more authority they accrue.
The late philosopher Paul Kurtz lamented that many Chicken Littles enjoy their preferred Apocalypse as a sort of “wish fulfillment,” offering an escape from the “mundane world.” And “realists who think that civilization and the human species are likely to muddle through periodic crises and mini-crises but still survive … end-of-the-world forecasts” aren’t accurately assessing the historical record, but ignoring the signs and portents, and whistling past what will soon be a planetary graveyard.
To those of us who eschew myth, superstition, and the narcissism of worst-case-scenarios — preferring facts, logic, and reason, as well as the comforting notion that we are almost certainly not living in the End Times — neither Christian nationalism nor eco-alarmism have appeal. But on the scale of horribleness, climate dogmatism unquestionably poses a much greater threat.
At least, that’s what the evidence shows.