Yesterday I pointed out that Catholics have jumped on the environmentalist band-wagon. Gus Van Horn notes that influential Southern Baptists have declared “a biblical duty to stop global warming.”
The AP’s article continues:
The signers of “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change” acknowledged that not all Christians accept the science behind global warming. They said they do not expect fellow believers to back any proposed solutions that would violate Scripture, such as advocating population control through abortion.
However, the leaders said that current evidence of global warming is “substantial,” and that the threat is too grave to wait for perfect knowledge about whether, or how much, people contribute to the trend. …
Even before Monday’s statement, religious activism on climate change had broadened beyond just liberal-leaning churches. The 1993 “Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation” became a guiding document for the Evangelical Environmental Network. The Rev. Rich Cizik, Washington director of the National Association of Evangelicals, became a prominent environmental advocate, trying to persuade conservative Christians that global warming is real. Polls of younger evangelicals found they considered environmental protection a priority.
Van Horn comments:
For anyone who still thinks that religion is any kind of a bulwark against the left or socialism, please note the priorities [noted in the article]. The codified oral traditions of primitive tribesmen from millennia ago are to be obeyed even if they contradict minor aspects of this agenda, and yet they somehow know that this “threat” is “too grave” to worry about whether human beings really do contribute to global warming!
Over the last few decades, conservatives such as Bill Buckley have tried to capture the evangelical movement to create a “fusionist” challenge to the left. Now evangelicals are dragging conservatives (even further) to the left on economic issues. Conservatives long ago adopted the welfare state and various economic controls as their own, and now they are increasingly eager to impose economic restrictions based on the environmentalist agenda (for example, see John McCain). What few conservatives remain who actually care about liberty, individual rights, and free markets are finding that it’s hard to steer the wagon once it’s hitched to irrationalism.