As Republican officials accelerate their efforts to weaken environmental regulations and attack climate scientists, energy corporations are reaping the benefits of a decades-long effort to put a more benevolent, humanitarian, and even religious spin to their anti-environmental activism. Among their most valuable allies are the Religious Right organizations and leaders who have emerged as ready apologists for polluters and critics of efforts to protect the environment. The Religious Right’s attacks are intended to lend credence to the efforts of corporations and the GOP to quash the Environmental Protection Agency and chip away at state and federal environmental safeguards. And increasingly, Republican leaders themselves are echoing the same misleading arguments and themes of the Religious Right’s corporate apologists. Buoyed by corporate finances and a radical ‘dominion theology,’ the Religious Right has become more aggressive and fanatical in its defense of corporations and denial of climate science. Trying to combat the increasing number of evangelical Christians who are part of the “creation care” movement that is calling for a greater commitment to combat climate change, the Religious Right is working to misrepresent the environmental movement as dangerously deceitful, harmful to the poor and destructive to Christianity.

Corporate America's Religious Right Power Play

Painting Environmental Protection as Anti-Christian

Blending Fundamentalism With Climate Change Denialism

As the 2010 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and major gains in Senate and the states have hardened the GOP’s anti-environment stance, the Religious Right’s enthusiastic embrace of climate change denial has seeped even further into GOP discourse about the environment. Conservative religious leaders have lent credence and a veneer of righteousness to the rapidly growing climate change denialism in the GOP, and in turn GOP leaders have begun to pick up their talking points. Land of the Southern Baptist Convention argued that environmentalists’ “exaggerated or baseless fears lead to unreasonable policies that can do a lot more harm than the things feared,” Fischer of the American Family Association said that “exaggerations, myths, and outright lies are commonplace in the environmental movement” and Focus on the Family’s Minnery lamented, “when we think about science, we think about the truth; yet in so-called global warming science, we’ve gotten a lot less than the truth many times.” Increasingly, Republicans are using the ideological rhetoric of groups like the Cornwall Alliance as they launch attacks against the Environmental Protection Agency, climate scientists, and efforts in both Congress and state legislatures to regulate polluters. In fact, both Religious Right leaders and some Republican officials are suggesting that the very notion that humans are harming the planet is somehow a repudiation of the biblical story that God promised Noah after the flood that He would never again destroy the earth. Congressman John Shimkus (R-IL), who is now chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, during a 2009 hearing said: “I want to start with Genesis 8, verse 21 and 22, ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood, and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done. As long as the earth endures, sea time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.’ I believe that’s the infallible word of God and that’s the way it’s going to be for His creation. The second verse comes from Matthew 24, “And He will send his Angels with a loud trumpet call and they will gather His elect from the Four Winds, from one end of the Heavens to the other.” The earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy the earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood. Congresswoman and likely presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-MN) derided House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s environmental policies, telling the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow,“[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she’s just trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago, they saved the planet — we didn’t need Nancy Pelosi to do that.” The leading climate change denialist in the Senate, Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who is the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, agreed with a caller on a radio show who claimed that “the world is just changing like it usually does,” replying: “I think what he’s saying is God’s still up there. We’re going through these cycles.… I really believe that a lot of people are in denial who want to hang their hat on the fact, that they believe is a fact, that man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, are causing global warming. The science really isn’t there.”

In Praise of CO2

Crocodile Tears for the Poor

Conclusion