The document discusses the relationship between Christianity, particularly Christian fundamentalism, and environmental policy in the United States. It provides historical context on how interpretations of passages from Genesis have been used to support both environmental domination and stewardship. It also outlines the rise of the "Wise Use" movement in opposition to environmental regulations and protections. This movement had ties to industry groups and found common cause with the Christian Right and Republican party to advocate for reduced environmental regulation during the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. The document examines the complex interplay between religious ideology and politics in shaping American environmental policy.

1. Neoconservatism, Nature and the
American Christian Right
Rich Harris

2. Preamble
 ―You simply can‘t talk honestly about the environment today
without criticizing the president. George W. Bush will go
down as the worst environmental president in our nation‘s
history. In a ferocious three-year attack, his administration
has launched over 300 major rollbacks of environmental
laws, rollbacks that are weakening our country‘s air, water,
public lands, and wildlife.‖
– Crimes Against Nature (Kennedy Jr., 2004)

3. Preamble
 Genesis 1: 28
– Dominion over nature
 Eschatology: beliefs of the end times
– Christ‘s return
 George Bush and the New Christian Right
– e.g. The Christian Coalition of America
 Has fundamentalist Christian belief shaped American
environmental policy?

4. ―Divine Destruction‖?
 ―At the suggestion that an extreme religious
ideology may be involved in the creation of
American environmental policy, most people –
even environmental activists – invariably fall into
an uncomfortable silence.‖
– Divine Destruction (Hendricks, 2005)

5. ―Divine Destruction‖?
 ―It now became clear, however, that American
environmental policy was also being greatly
influenced, even shaped, by certain Christian
Fundamentalists.‖

6. http://www.channel4.co
m/programmes/the-
doomsday-
code/episode-
guide/series-1/episode-1

7. My objectives
 Similar to those stated by Esther Kaplan (2004)
– ―This book [lecture] does not take up the role of Christianity
in people‘s everyday lives, nor does it seek to promote or
malign any particular faith. Instead it asks what impact the
Christian right, as a dogma-driven political movement, had
had in dictating American [environmental] policy.‖
 From, With God on Their Side:
George W. Bush and the Christian Right

8. Faith, religion and politics matter!
 ―What people do about their ecology depends on what
they think about themselves in relation to things around
them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs
about our nature and destiny – that is, by religion.‖
 ―Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the
remedy must all be essentially religious, whether we call
it that or not.‖
– The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis (White, 1967)

9. Faith, religion and politics matter!
 ―The neglect of our natural environment and its
degradation is not just bad policy; it is bad theology […]
Our private religion has fostered an individualism that
has not only diminished our social conscience for the
poor but also separated us from the earth itself.‖
– Seven Ways to Change the World (Wallis, 2008)

10. Faith, religion and politics matter!

11. Outline
I. Grand narratives
a. The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis
b. Reinventing Eden
II. Situating the debate
a. Climate change scepticism and the Christian Right
b. The Wise Use movement
III. Making Links
• Wise Use, GOP and the Christian Right
IV. Faith and belief or… ?
a. The ecotheology of James Watt
b. Other motivations
V. Other perspectives

12. I. GRAND NARRATIVES
(a) The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis

13. The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis
 Classic and oft-cited paper
– Lynn White Jr. (1967)
– Science, 155 (3767), pp. 1203–7
 A churchman worried by the impact of a particular
(presumed dominant) Christian theology in causing the
ecological crisis of the 1960s
– ―The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its
own implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink
our axioms.‖

14. The argument
 That modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology.
 That (in the Creation story) Christian theology establishes a
dualism of ―man and nature‖ and ―that it is God‘s will that man
exploit nature for his proper ends.‖
 That science and technology have joined ―to give mankind
powers which, to judge by many of the ecologic effects are out
of control.‖
 ―Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.‖

15. Some caveats
 ―When one speaks in such sweeping terms, a note of
caution is in order. Christianity is a complex faith, and its
consequences differ in differing contexts.‖
 White himself suggests looking to St. Francis of Assisi for
an alternative Christian view.

16. More caveats
 Our Treatment of the Environment in Ideal and Actuality
– Yi-Fu Tuan (1970)
– American Scientist, 58 (3), pp. 244–9.
 Although there may be truth in the generalization that
―the European sees nature as subordinate to man‖ it
―cannot be pressed too far‖.

17. Because…
 ―A culture‘s publicized ethos about its environment
seldom covers more than a fraction of the total range of
its attitudes and practices pertaining to the environment.
In the play of forces that govern the world, esthetic and
religious ideals rarely have a major role.‖

18. Tuan argues that
 There were vast transformations of nature in ―the pagan
world‖
– The Romans, for example
 Western intellectual contrasts with Chinese culture and
Taoist and Buddhist traditions are ―over generous‖
– Periods of deforestation, for example
 There are conflicts between an ideal of nature or
environment and of practice: ―ideals and necessities are
frequently opposed.‖

19. Nevertheless…
 Narrative is powerful, story-telling holds our imaginations
and shapes our experiences.
 The Creation story is enduring.
– And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful,
and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds
of the heavens, and over every living thing that moveth
upon the earth.
 Genesis 1: 28

20. I. GRAND NARRATIVES
(b) Reinventing Eden: the fate of nature in Western culture

21. Reinventing Eden
 Carolyn Merchant (2003)
– Professor of Environmental History, Philosophy and Ethics
ad the University of California, Berkeley.
 ―Narratives form our reality. We become their vessels.‖

22. Recovery of Eden narratives
 Merchant identifies two. Here we concentrate on the first:
 ―[This] Recovery of Eden story is the mainstream
narrative of Western culture. It is perhaps the most
important mythology humans have developed to make
sense of their relationship to their earth.‖

23. A first Recovery of Eden narrative
 Take a Christian theology of
– Eden (paradise), the Fall (Adam and Eve), salvation
(Christ), paradise (Heaven)
– and Genesis 1: 28
 And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful,
and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the
heavens, and over every living thing that moveth upon the
earth. (emphasis added)

24. A first Recovery of Eden narrative
 Linking with
– New World explorations, the Scientific Revolution and
European Enlightenment
 Becomes
– a narrative of redemption, of recreation, of taming nature, of
a new Eden on Earth
– A moral and ethical imperative to do so
 Manifest Destiny

25. A first Recovery of Eden narrative
 ―This story has propelled countless efforts by humans to
recover Eden by turning wilderness into garden, ―female‖
nature into civilised society, and indigenous folkways into
modern culture. Science, technology, and capitalism have
provided the tools, male agency the power and impetus.
Today‘s incarnations of Eden are the suburbs, the mall, the
clone, and the World Wide Web.‖

26. Eden?

27. The stewardship ethic of Genesis 2
 Merchant recognises the stewardship ethic of Genesis 2: 15
– And Jehovah God took the man, and put him into the garden of
Eden to dress it and to keep it.
 And without this,
– ―Dominion theology simply doesn‘t grasp the vision and purpose
of the Genesis story and, in fact, contradicts it. It is a false
theology used for the malicious interests of environmental
destruction in the name of so-called progress.‖
 Wallis (2008)

28. The stewardship ethic of Genesis 2
 Unfortunately, Genesis 2 has tended to be subsumed by
Genesis 1.
 And the meaning of ―stewardship‖ is easily contested (/
subverted) …

29.  Acton media
– www.effectivestewardship.com
Effective Stewardship DVD  Published by the Action
Institute
– ―for the study of religion and
liberty‖
– www.acton.org
 Online trailer
– http://www.effectivestewardshi
p.com/stewardship-of-the-
environment
 What are the themes and
ideologies underlying this
presentation?

30. II SITUATING THE DEBATE
(a) Climate change scepticism and the Christian Right

31. Cornwall Alliance
 www.cornwallalliance.org
 Read the Cornwall
Declaration (2000)
– http://www.cornwallalliance.
org/articles/read/the-
cornwall-declaration-on-
environmental-stewardship/
 See:
– http://www.resistingthegree
ndragon.com/

32. ―Wise Use‖ and the Christian Coalition
 ―[Pat] Robertson helped make anti-environmentalism
acceptable within the ranks of the fundamentalist clergy and
the mainstream of the Republican Party. Beginning in 1991,
Robertson and the Christian Coalition‘s then executive
director Ralph Reed, now an official with the Bush
campaign, put their media and organisational clout at the
disposal of the Wise Use agenda.‖
– Crimes Against Nature (Kennedy Jr., 2004)

33. II SITUATING THE DEBATE
(b) The Wise Use movement

34. What is ―Wise Use‖?
 A response to the ―wilderness‖ mentality within
environmentalism and the ancient forest campaigns of the
1990s
 The idea that ―people are nature‘s managers, charged with
the responsibility of using the resource wisely‖(Proctor,
1995)
 A reaction to those who ―equate productive work in nature
with destruction‖ and ―the demonization of modern
machines and the sentimentalization of archaic forms of
labor‖ (White, 1995)

35. What is ―Wise Use‖?
 A ―complex new social movement centred on the uses of rural
environments – and the strongest anti-environmental backlash in
the twentieth-century USA.‖
 ―A vehicle and arena of political-economic struggle with particular
class orientations … it functions mainly to defend privileged elite
and corporate access to resources, and may also be a wedge in a
larger neoliberal project.‖
 ―Part of a larger, conscious program of economic liberalism
designed to roll back much of the twentieth century‘s social
protection legislation.‖
– McCarthy (1998)

36. What is ―Wise Use‖?
 A grassroots movement?
 An industrial campaign?

37. What is ―Wise Use‖?
 Another (or older) way of viewing nature
– ―If the Wise Use perspective – that there‘s too much
wilderness protection and environmental hysteria and not
enough logging, pesticide spraying, and mini-mall construction
– seems a bit strange […] it might help to remember that the
idea that the earth‘s resources are limited and must be
managed in a sustainable way, is a new and still-fragile
construct within our culture. In contrast, appeals to property
rights and the promise of unlimited frontiers hold a deep and
aiding place in our nation‘s social history going back more
than half a millennium‖ (Helvarg, 2004)

38. Contested Nature
Eugene, Oregon (1989) Nye County, Nevada (1994/5)

39. A Broad History of Wise Use
 The phrase is attributed to Gifford Pinochet who became
chief forester of the nation under (Teddy) Roosevelt‘s
Presidency.
 Pinochet believed in the ―wise use‖ of resources to be
utilised to meet people‘s needs but was also a
conservationist believing government control of forests
was required to stop the destructive practices of big
logging companies.

40. A Broad History of Wise Use
 Counter to Pinochet the Wise Use movement campaigns
on:
– Resource production on federal lands
– Property rights
 ―takings‖
– Environmental (de)regulations

41. A Broad History of Wise Use
 Emerges during the Reagan Presidency
 Reagan endorsed the ―Sagebush Rebellion‖
– Legislation for state takeovers of federal land, supported by
the Cattleman‘s Association, Farm Bureau Federation, oil, coal
and gas industries, NRA.
 Influence of rightwing, conservative thinktanks
– e.g. Heritage Foundation (set up by Joseph Coors)
– Note uneasy tension between protectionism and free market
privatisation
 Role of direct-mail fundraises (e.g. Alan Gottlieb)

42. A Broad History of Wise Use
 Gathers momentum during the George Bush Sr.
Presidency
– Bush is more savvy to a growing environmental
consciousness in the American public
 Reauthorized the Clean Air Act
– Not especially popular with the Right
 Had run against Reagan in 1980
– Economic downturn

43. A Broad History of Wise Use
 National Wilderness Conference (Las Vegas, June, 1988)
 Multiple Use Strategy Conference (Reno, August, 1988)
– Follow-up publication, The Wise Use Agenda
 drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; log Alaska's
Tongass National Forest; gut the Endangered Species Act;
open public lands to motorised recreation; privatise national
parks, for people "with expertise in people-moving such as
Walt Disney.―
 Representative of the NRA, Farm Bureau, Mountain States
Legal Foundation, Exxon, DuPont, and of mining and timber
associations present.

44. A Broad History of Wise Use
 Initially peaks c. 1995
– Attack on Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building by militia
associates Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols
 Calls into question the more extreme language of Wise Use
and connections to the militia movements
 Movement‘s industry funders back away
– Federal government shutdown of 1995
 Clinton Vs Congress
 anti-environmental riders on the Budget bill

45. A Broad History of Wise Use
 Appears to re-emerge, politically institutionalised, with
the George Bush Jr. Presidency
 ―While traditional wise-use paranoia still proves effective,
its rhetoric is softening […] Now that they occupy the
seat of power, the wise-use movement no longer needs
its blowhards and bullies as it quietly and effectively
implements its radical agenda‖ (Halvarg, 2004)

46. III MAKING LINKS
• Wise Use, GOP and the Christian Right

47. Wise Use, GOP and the Christian Right
 ―There are increasingly close ties between those who
subscribe to the ideas of Wise Use and members of
fundamentalist Christian churches and organizations.‖
– Divine Destruction (Hendricks, 2005)
 ―The most important vector for hammering the Wise Use
agenda into the Republican Party‘s platform was the
Christian right‖
– Crimes Against Nature (Kennedy Jr., 2004)
 Evidence?

48. Influential networks?
 American Freedom Coalition
– Affiliated to the Unification Church
 Founded by Sun Myung Moon, also owns The Washington
Times
 Invited to attend and sponsor the Reno conference and
acknowledged in book.
 Kennedy cites Ron Arnold as head of the Washington State
Chapter of the AFC although Halvarg quotes Arnold‘s denial of
any links
 Links to (some) of the Christian Right
– Although Moon‘s religious view are heretical!

49. Influential networks?
 Federalist Society
– Its purpose (http://www.fed-soc.org/aboutus/)
 Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly
dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which
advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some
members of the academic community have dissented from
these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with
(and indeed as if they were) the law.

50. Influential networks?
 Federalist Society
 The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a
group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the
current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles
that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation
of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that
it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say
what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both
to promote an awareness of these principles and to further
their application through its activities.

51. Influential networks?
 Federalist Society
 This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to
place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and
the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the
importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law
students and professors. In working to achieve these goals,
the Society has created a conservative and libertarian
intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal
community.

52. Influential networks?
 Federalist Society
– Members include
 John D. Ashcroft
– United States Attorney General (2001 – 5)
 Gale A. Norton
– United States Secretary of the Interior (2001 – 6)
» ―a veteran of the Wise Use movement‖
 Spencer Abraham
– Founder of the Federalist Society and Secretary of Energy
(2001 – 5)
 http://mediatransparency.org./story.php?storyID=20

53. Influential networks?
 Christian Coalition
– ―When the Wise Use allies hooked up with Pat Robertson‘s
Christian Coalition, they hit a home run. Robertson‘s
special contribution to right-wing theology was to substitute
environmentalists for communists as the new threat to
democracy and to Christianity.‖
 Kennedy Jr. (2005)

54. Influential networks?
 The Moral Majority
– Co-founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye
 LaHaye is the writer of the Left Behind series of books
which are about Revelation, the ―end times‖ and ―the
rapture‖.
– A big funder was Joseph Coors
 Who also founded the Heritage Foundation
– which was involved in the ―Sagebush rebellion‖
 And the Mountain States Legal Foundation
– to challenge environmental laws

55. However…
 Wise Use is an amorphous term; could link most people
to it?
 It is one thing to demonstrate (or allege) intersecting
networks and quite another to asset that environmental
pollution is the US is actually driven by a dominion
theology and an apocalyptic Christianity.

56. IV FAITH AND BELIEF OR…?
(a) The Ecotheology of James Watt

57. James Watt
 Links are often made between James Watt, dominion theology,
―end times‖ eschatology and undisciplined resource
exploitation.
– President of the Mountain States Legal Foundation
– Secretary of the Department of the Interior under Reagan
(1981 – 3)
 Resigned after saying in a speech, ―"I have a black, a woman,
two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.―
 In 1995 was indicted on 25 felony counts of perjury, unlawful
concealment and obstruction of justice.
– Hired Gale Norton as a lawyer for the MSLF

58. James Watt
 Anti-environmentalist and pro-business
– "If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in
the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box
should be used‖ (speech to Green River Cattlemen's
Association, 1991)

59. James Watt
 ―Watt was a proponent of ―dominion theology‖, an authoritarian
Christian heresy that advocates man‘s duty to ―subdue‖ nature.
His deep faith in laissez-faire capitalism and apocalyptic
Christianity led Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his
department and distributing its assets … During a House oversight
hearing, Mr. Watt cited the approaching Apocalypse in an answer
to a Congressman‘s question about the need to leave some of our
scenic resources for future generations … ―I do not know how
many future generations we can count on before the Lord
returns.‖
– Kennedy Jr. (2004)

60. However
 Was it an Apocalyptic statement or merely a fact?
 Bratton (1983) notes that although Watt was part of an
emerging ―Christian politic‖ and made a number of statements
relating his Christian beliefs to environmental management,
there is little evidence of a consistent ―ecotheology‖ driving his
decision making
– ―Although some journalists have interpreted Watt‘s religious
view as formative in his environmental policies, a close look at
the secretary‘s statements provide good evidence that his
economic and political views also greatly influence his
ecotheology.‖

61. Similarly, today
 ―As to whether dominionists are using a different
interpretation of Revelations to justify the purposeful
interpretation of environmentally harmful policies, he said ‗I
don‘t see a focused agenda from them to destroy the Earth
for Christ‘s return. They might be interpreting the Bible and
using the dominion message to justify their actions that are
based on greed. It‘s really all about free market capitalism
and greed.‖
– Hendricks (2005) quoting Peter Illyn

62. IV FAITH AND BELIEF OR…?
(b) Other motivations

63. Money and power?
 ―Big Business has more of an influence than the Bible.‖
– Hendricks (2005) quoting Bruce Barron
 ―What puts Bush/Cheney in a whole new league … is
their open sale of our whole government to corporate
interests, which now run the US for themselves.‖
– Cruel and Unusual (Miller, 2004)

64. Economics?
 ―A key truism about the anti-enviro movement: at its core it
is not about differing conservation philosophies or ecological
worldviews, religion, or politics, but about basic economic
interests.‖
 Helvarg (2004)

65. Economics?
 ―The reality is that the majority of Americans are seeing their
real wages decline and job security evaporate as the
economy of the United States in integrated into a new global
economy, dominated by transnational corporations. Rural
America is particularly hard hit by farm debt and
consolidation and liquidation of natural resource industries.‖
– Helvarg (2004)

66. A personal opinion
 I would generally take the view that American
environmental policy, like the Wise Use movement is,
– ―a site of political-economic contradictions and struggle,
both between classes and between capitalists‖ (McCarthy,
1998)
 Cannot entirely dismiss the influence of
Reconstructionism and theocratic efforts to erode the
separation of church and state.
– Miller (2004), Kaplan (2005), Skaggs et al. (2004)

67. Libertarian
―The Holy Trinity‖ politics and
‘traditional
(sic) values’
ENVIRON-
MENTAL
POLICY
Christian Extractive
Right industries

68. V OTHER PERSPECTIVES

69. Other Perspectives
 ―The point is whether the biblical narrative itself has
required such Christians to act negligently or badly,
where they have so acted, or whether the biblical
narrative itself presents a quite different vision of the
world from the one pursued by these badly-behaved
Christians, a vision sometimes misunderstood and
misconstrued by its readers.‖
– Provan (2008)

70. Other Perspectives
 Kearns, for example, identifies three main
―ecotheological ethics‖
– Christian Stewardship ethic
– Eco-justice ethic
– Christian spirituality ethic

71.  Read the statement at
http://christiansandclimate.org/l
earn/call-to-action/
– Claim 1: Human-Induced
Climate Change is Real
– Claim 2: The Consequences of
Climate Change: An Climate Change Will Be
Evangelical Call to Action Significant, and Will Hit the
Poor the Hardest
– Claim 3: Christian Moral
Convictions Demand Our
Response to the Climate
Change Problem
– Claim 4: The need to act now
is urgent. Governments,
businesses, churches, and
individuals all have a role to
play in addressing climate
change—starting now.

72.  A project of The Alliance
for Climate Protection,
founded by Al Gore.
wecansolveit.org  It has the support of Pat
Robertson (cf. Christian
Coalition)
– Watch the short
YouTube video at
http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=NhmpsUMdTH
8

73. A Rocha: www.arocha.org

74. http://ew.ecocongregation.org/

76. Tearfund:
http://www.tearfund.org/Campaigning/Climate+change+and+di
sasters/

77. CoE: http://www.shrinkingthefootprint.cofe.anglican.org/

78. CONCLUSION

79. Neoconservatism and Nature
 The Bush regime has had a poor environmental record.
 There are overlapping interests between the Christian
Right and a neoconservative political agenda.
 Their environmental policies may be influenced by a
―dominion‖ reading of Genesis 1, though thereare other
more compelling explanations for their actions.

80. Neoconservatism and Nature
 Whilst theologies of the environment are still contested
(see, for example, www.we-get-it.org or The Action
Institute), the increasingly dominant narrative is based on
the partnership ethic of Genesis 1 and 2 and linked to
social justice.