Welcome To The Green Christian Backlash

Samuel Casey Carter, executive editor of Crisis Magazine wites an attack piece on the recent “green” Christianity trend for National Policy Analysis. Like most conservative Christian attack-dogs his biggest insult to these evangelical groups is to deny their status as Christians and compare them to paganism.

“Now that secular liberalism has all but driven orthodox religion out of public life, it should come as no surprise that heterodox spirituality has become the latest battering ram of the left. In a time when the Bible has been expunged from schoolrooms as an icon of Western bigotry, biblical arguments are now oddly on the comeback, recast as a fashionable means of pushing a leftist agenda. What is not to be expected is the degree to which well-meaning Christians have become the spokesmen of these distortions. Embracing the tenets of radical environmentalism without an eye to the manner in which these teachings are fundamentally hostile to Christian tradition, a new brand of Christian is out to save the earth, but in so doing he may well flip his faith upon its head.”

Not content with dragging his oppenents over the coals he also finds time to slander ancient paganisms.

“Without Christianity, science is impossible. The rational investigation of the world can proceed only on the assumption that the universe is an ordered place. The laws of physics, for example, are regular and predictable. If instead, physical laws were the whim of some capricious rock nymph, no coherent account could ever be given for the way things work. Pantheism and paganism of any kind just don’t allow for scientific inquiry.”

Like most slanders it has no ring of truth. Carter ignores all scientific and social progress made by ancient pagan civilizations or the fact that “Christian” progress made later was built on the backs of previous “pagan” cultures and ideas. But then this article isn’t an attack on theology or belief, it is an attack on any conservative Christian group who dares to break from the coalition that preserves the current power structure and status quo. If anything this article is a sign that the conservative “Christian” political monolith is scared that they are losing the very voters who put them in office. All in the name of mother earth.

Tags: Neopaganism