Robert Cabin’s article ”Thank God Environmentalism Is Dead” Wednesday, May 18, in the Huffington Post is the latest in a string of articles by Leftwing journalists and bloggers showing that they believe Cornwall Alliance’s critiques of the environmental movement, particularly our Resisting the Green Dragon videos and book, are fueling the decline in American public concern about eco-catastrophe.

Cabin, professor of ecology and environmental science at Brevard College, writes, “A recent Gallup poll found ‘historically low levels of public worry about environmental problems,’ and more than a third of those polled believe the environmental movement ‘has done more harm than good.’”

“Once upon a time,” he continues, “Americans responded to environmental disasters by passing landmark laws like the Clean Air Act. Now it seems our support for the environment decreases with each new oil spill. What happened?”

The major cause, he’s convinced, is “the rising influence of the Christian Right, which appears to have helped convince an increasing number of Americans that there is no need to worry about urgent environmental problems such as climate change because ‘God has the reins, and He will save us.’” (Of course that caricature of our reasoning grossly misrepresents and oversimplifies, but who’s looking for reasonable discourse in this conversation?)

And what’s the biggest threat to environmentalism on the Christian Right?

The doubts about eco-catastrophe are “skillfully nurtured and inflamed,” Cabin writes, “by some powerful evangelical Christian organizations and their often well-heeled allies. For example, as detailed in a Huffington Post blog last December, several conservative Christian leaders recently joined with the Cornwall Alliance to promote Resisting The Green Dragon, a 12-part DVD series featuring prominent religious leaders bashing the environmental movement for ‘seducing and scaring’ our children and ‘trumpeting exaggerations and myths.’ They and other Christian Right leaders also accuse environmentalists of ‘worshiping the creation rather than the Creator’ and believing that humans should ‘serve the earth rather than the other way around.’ Another recent article noted that the Cornwall Alliance, Focus on the Family and other conservative groups are now pushing Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death, a new book about environmentalists’ ‘anti-human’ and ‘anti-Christian’ philosophies.”

Cabin’s article is just the most recent in a growing number that have recognized that Cornwall Alliance’s Resisting the Green Dragon—both the videos and the book—are a serious threat to the Green juggernaut. Some assert that our portrayal of the environmental movement as religious and a threat to historic, orthodox Christianity misrepresents environmentalism.

But one of the world’s foremost scholars on religious environmentalism, Dr. Bron Taylor, though a Dark Green Religionist himself, begged to differ, writing—in Huffington Post of all places:

Progressives may ridicule those who claim that there is now a cultural ‘War on Christmas’ but Christian conservatives do have reason to worry. They know that their cultural influence has been waning, and that those with evolutionary and ecological worldviews are growing in number and influence. A DVD series released by a group of conservative Christians entitled “Resisting the Green Dragon,” provides one recent example of such fears. These fears are based on an accurate perception that there is a religious dimension to much environmentalism. Those expressing such fears understand, accurately, that those engaged in nature-based spiritualities, both overtly and in subtle ways, are converting many to an evolutionary worldview and an environmentalist spirituality and ethics. They know that this is one reason they are having trouble even keeping their own children in the fold. [emphases added]

Clearly, the Cornwall Alliance and Resisting the Green Dragon are having an impact. The video series got its public introduction on Fox New Channel’s Glenn Beck October 15, 2010. Now that the book’s been out for a few months, too, the Greens are more upset than ever.

But temper tantrums are no substitute for reasoned argument. The facts are there, as documented in the videos and the book (with its 645 source notes!). If some environmentalists don’t want environmentalism characterized as religious, and specifically anti-Christian, perhaps they should renounce the atheistic, pantheistic, panentheistic, and animistic views of their fellow environmentalists. It might do their movement good for them to clean their own house before throwing stones at their critics.

Resisting the Green Dragon’s influence is large and growing. We’d like to provide free copies to thousands of churches. Your donation today can help us do that. And if you don’t already own both the videos and the book, order here.

 

Featured Image Courtesy of Vichaya Kiatying Angsulee/freedigitalphotos.net