There Is No Tomorrow
by Bill Moyers
The Star Tribune, January 30,
2005
www.truthout.com
One of the biggest changes in politics
in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It
has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the
Oval Office and in Congress.
For the first time in our history,
ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues
hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what
is generally accepted as reality. The offspring of ideology and
theology are not always bad but they are always blind. And that
is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the
facts.
One-third of the American electorate,
if a recent Gallup Poll is accurate, believes the Bible is literally
true. This past November, several million good and decent citizens
went to the polls believing in what is known as the "rapture
index."
These true believers subscribe to
a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple
of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible
and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination
of millions of Americans. Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre:
Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "bibli-cal lands,"
legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown
in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted
are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers
will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven,
where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their
political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores,
locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that
follow.
I've reported on these people, following
some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious
and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the
rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That is why they
have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements
and backed up their support with money and volunteers. That is
why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted
in the Book of Revelations, where four angels "which are
bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the
third part of man." For them a war with Islam in the Middle
East is something to be welcomed - an essential conflagration
on the road to redemption. The rapture index - "the prophetic
speedometer of end-time activity" - now stands at 153.
So what does this mean for public
policy and the environment? As Glenn Scherer reports in the online
environmental journal Grist, millions of Christian fundamentalists
believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded
but hastened as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
We're not talking about a handful
of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs.
Nearly half of the members of Congress are backed by the religious
right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress
earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most
influential Christian-right advocacy groups. They include Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,
Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon
Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip
Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian
Coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who before his recent
retirement quoted from the biblical Book of Amos on the Senate
floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will
send a famine in the land." He seemed to relish the thought.
Onward Christian Soldiers
And why not? There's a constituency
for it. A 2002 Time/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans
believe that the prophecies found in the Book of Revelations are
going to come true. Tune in to any of the more than 1,600 Christian
radio stations or flip on one of the 250 Christian TV stations
across the country and you can hear some of this end-time gospel.
And you will come to understand why people under the spell of
such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to
worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the
droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological
collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible?"
These people believe that until Christ
does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high
school history book, America's Providential History, which contains
the following: "The secular or socialist has a limited resource
mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut
up so everyone can get a piece." However, "the Christian
knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is
no shortage of resources in God's earth while many secularists
view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has
made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to
accommodate all of the people." No wonder Karl Rove goes
around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward
Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers
in this past election, including many who have made the apocalypse
a powerful driving force in modern American politics.
Once upon a time I thought that people
would protect the natural environment when they realized its importance
to their health and to the health and lives of their children.
Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that
- it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.
Immoral Imagination
Mike Leavitt, the former administrator
of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, declared the election
a mandate for President Bush on the environment - a mandate for
an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the
Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, as well as the
National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government
to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources.
The Environmental Protection Agency
had even planned to spend $9 million - $2 million of it from the
administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to
pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes.
These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children,
but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and
the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well
as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs
for the study.
I read all this and then look at the
pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren:
Henry, age 12; Thomas, age 10; Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane,
nine months. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs
and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do."
And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right.
We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying
their trust. Despoiling their world."
And I ask myself: "Why? Is it
because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have
lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation
at injustice?"
What has happened to our moral imagination?
The news is not good these days. I
can tell you that as a journalist I know the news is never the
end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free
- free to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight
is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer
to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my
desk.
What we need is what the ancient Israelites
called "hocma" - the science of the heart, the capacity
to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
Bill Moyers was host until recently
of the weekly public affairs series "NOW with Bill Moyers"
on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first
appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks upon receiving
the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health
and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
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