Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

As late as this May, 2006, Mark Tooley of the IRD was busy downplaying impending political realignments over global climate change, in a May 5th 2006 editorial for the Weekly Standard entitled Religious Climate Change? - The Religious Left thinks that global warming is about to break-up the Religious Right:

ON THE RELIGIOUS LEFT, the great hope these days is that the Religious Right is melting down over Global Warming. Liberal evangelical activist Jim Wallis rejoiced about the crack-up in a recent column, claiming that "the Religious Right is losing control" thanks to environmentalist evangelicals. Wallis, head of "Sojourners" and author of God's Politics: Why the American Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Just Does Not Get It, is predicting a "sea change" among evangelicals since the Religious Right has "now lost control of the environmental issue."

The reason for Wallis's optimism is the newly-created Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), endorsed by 86 religious leaders, which declared early this year that "human-induced climate change is real" and which urged legislation limiting carbon dioxide emissions. Those endorsing the ECI were mostly academics from evangelical colleges, with the notable exception of mega-church pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren. The New York Times and other media outlets lavished much attention on ECI's stance.

But the dog days of summer, several months later, saw Pat Robertson's unexpected and sweaty epiphany on Global Warming. Did Robertson have advance notice of the Bush Administration plans ? It is unlikely we will ever know but such recent conversions, as one major Christian right leader or faction after another peels off from the antienvironmentalist bloc to acknowledges the human role in Global Climate Change, can hardly be pleasing to Mark Tooley and  allies of the IRD.

Joseph Farah, writing at World Net Daily last mid February 2006, sums up the ideological worldview that George W. Bush's projected, sudden about face would challenge:

We Americans are being thoroughly indoctrinated by the mass media, the government schools, the propaganda arms of the federal government and the pseudoscience-government complex on the phony issue of global warming.

Now, if all that is not enough, some significant church leaders are attempting to make the global, pagan, socialistic agenda behind the conspiracy a matter of faith.

That's basically all you need to know about global warming. It's a bunch of hot air, all right - hot air generated by people whose goal is always the same, redistributing wealth and reordering civilization.

Farah, however, is far from the most prominent American to be making such claims. Talk To Action contributor Richard Bartholomew, at Bartholomew's Notes On Religion, notes the ideological view of US Senator from Oklahoma, James Inhofe:

Senator James Inhofe continues his war against the "hoax" of global warming with an attack on...the National Association of Evangelicals. Agape Press reports:

He claims liberals have convinced some evangelical groups to support global warming initiatives in order to bring in new funding that the Left can spend on other causes. Also, Inhofe asserts, liberals are "trying to suck up some of the evangelical crowd and put them into the issue of global warming. And when they do that, they give up their litmus tests. They give up their positions on abortion, their positions on gay marriage, and all that." However, the Oklahoma senator contends that the theory of global warming is a scare tactic being played up by the Left and the national media and that a number of Christian groups have bought into it. "I'm afraid there's one large organization, the National Association of Evangelicals, who have fallen into this trap," Inhofe laments.

So liberals made up global warming to fleece evangelicals for cash to fund abortion and gay marriage!

It is unclear as to how much the Bush Administration reversal - and the growing concern within the American evangelical community concerning global climate change - will harm Senator Inhofe's future political prospects, but needless to say those shifts can not help but  shed a light on Inhofe's peculiar take on the American environmental movement.

For a related story, see: Chewing On The Religious Right And Climate Change

Footnote:

During the record breaking heating of 1998, approximately 5% of the Earth's population became temporarily homeless, refugees from weather disasters.