Did Jesus Wear Birkenstocks?

By Alexander Zaitchik, New York Press. Posted December 17, 2004.

Its always a learning experience with the Christian Right. Visit the websites of the movement's leading organizations and you'll find out about problems you didn't know you had, threats you didn't know the country faced.

On the Eagle Forum homepage, for instance, you can read about the urgent need for a renewed U.S. military presence at the Panama Canal. The Family Resource Council site alerts visitors to the evil new line of Planned Parenthood Christmas cards. Or download the Christian Coalition for the latest on Congressman Todd Akin's efforts to stop lower federal court judges from holding hearings on the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. If you happen to be curious about how to protect the sanctity of marriage between man and woman, these sites offer a one-click shortcut to informational-pamphlet heaven.

But try to find any mention of the melting ice caps or the planet's quickening extinction rate, and ye shall seek in vain. In the world of the Christian Right, concern for the environment is still an atheistic socialist plot to bankrupt godly American industry; it has no place in the fight for the health and soul of the nation. Given that the Christian Right is foundational to the current Republican coalition, this isn't surprising. The party of George W. Bush is now preparing a devastating blitzkrieg against what remains of the regulatory controls clamped on industry in the last century. Today's GOP likes to toss around the name Teddy Roosevelt, but it has no use for the party philosophy expressed by T.R. when he declared, "[S]hort of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendents than it is for us"

With everyone focused on a few spots on the Supreme Court, over a third of the Environmental Protection Agency's staff will become eligible for retirement during the next four years. Future Bush appointees will dismantle the agency from the inside while a Republican Congress hacks away from the outside, teamwork that could very well result in the disappearance of the EPA as we know it by 2008. If this happens, there will simply be nothing left to save; the rebuilding will have to begin from scratch.

The party will pursue this scorched-earth policy as if there were a mandate behind it. As former EPA head Mike Leavitt recently told the UK's Independent, "The election was a validation of the philosophy and the agenda." Bush and Cheney were smart enough not to discuss this agenda in their campaign speeches, but it's known to include fiercer attacks on such landmark legislation as the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, the prying open of protected lands to mining and drilling – in the new Senate, the ANWR fight is all but lost – and the weakening or elimination of mandatory emission controls on a range of pollutants. On climate change, the administration will ignore even the tepid action recently recommended by the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy. In short, the agenda is radical and sweeping, with the last four years offering an aftertaste of what's in store. Given the impact this will have on millions of American families and upon creation itself, you might expect at least a few words of concern from influential pro-family Christian Right groups like Eagle Forum.

And you'd be right. The Eagle Forum correspondent at this month's UN Climate Change Conference in Buenos Aires, Cathie Adams, did indeed post a report expressing concern about climate change. Her worry? That delegates will again "conjure up a man-caused global warming theory" to force "developed countries [to] fill the coffers of corrupt Third World governments."

The Christian Coalition also has an environmental platform. In fact, one of the group's nine official areas of concern is protecting young people from pollution – "the pollution of pornography," that is.

Wondering where the environment might fit into the Christian Right's constellation of moral obsessions, I called the Christian Coalition's Florida headquarters. Since the state has taken a biblical battering of extreme storms and droughts over the last few years, and since worse is predicted as ocean temperatures continue to rise, I thought the Christian Coalition Florida office might be ahead of the curve on the issue, at least compared to the mothership in Washington.

I asked Bill Stephens, executive director for the Sunshine State, what he thought about the fact that some Christians feel a religious duty to protect the environment. He didn't seem to understand the question, so I rephrased it. Could he imagine one day including the environment among the Christian Coalition's current stable of issues?

After a long pause, Stephens emitted a verbal shrug. "To be honest, I've never really thought about it," he said.

Alexander Zaitchik is senior editor at New York Press.

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