Yesterday we noted Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council amusing himself by mocking Al Gore's concern about global warming.
Perkins is the head of a "pro-family" special interest lobby, so why is he so obsessed with pretending global warming is, as he puts it (quoting Sen. Head-in-the-sand Inhofe), "a hoax"? What does any of this have to do with being "pro-family"?
Well, like most of his colleagues on the religious right, Perkins long ago put all of his pro-family eggs in a partisan basket. This is The Bargain he has made in pursuit of The Prize. The Prize for Perkins is a Supreme Court that will, he hopes, one day overturn Roe v. Wade. To get there — to get Alito and Roberts and maybe one more — Perkins will say and do whatever his partisan patrons want him to do. Thank you, sir, may I have another?
This is the lens through which the religious right approaches every issue, the lens of partisan power politics. This approach is very much a matter of the end justifying the means — the end being The Prize mentioned above and the means being lockstep loyalty to the partisan agenda of the allies Perkins et. al. hope will one day secure that Prize.
Not all religious conservatives have made this Bargain. Consider, for example, the National Association of Evangelicals, which is an association of churches rather than a political interest group (they represent about 45,000 local congregations — think of these as churches filled with Ned Flanders types and you'll have a good idea of what they're like). The NAE and most of their membership would agree with the religious right about The Prize, but they are unwilling to make The Bargain, the all-or-nothing partisan gamble that shapes the politics of Perkins & Co. Thus, the NAE recently came out against global warming and against torture.
Those stances, as we discussed earlier, prompted a harsh backlash from the religious right, including this letter from Perkins, James Dobson and others, in which they explicitly argue that evangelicals must support "conservative views on politics."
By "conservative," of course, the letter-writers actually mean "Republican." After all, there's nothing inherently conservative about granting the executive branch the authority to torture whoever it decides it needs to torture with no checks or balances other than the government's assurance that it will police itself. This is just part of The Bargain that the religious right has made in pursuit of The Prize.
Not having made that Bargain, the NAE is freer to consider the facts of the matter on global warming. One set of such facts is the subject of a report due Friday from the International Panel on Climate Change. This report will examine the likely impact of climate change on the world's poorest people.
The New York Times' Andrew C. Revkin gives us a preview of this report, "Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms":
Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments. As the oceans swell with water from melting ice sheets, it is the crowded river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, along with small island nations, that are most at risk.
“Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic,” said Henry I. Miller, a fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost. We’ll see the same phenomenon with global warming.”
It is this impact on the world's poorest countries that drives much of the NAE's response to global warming. Those 45,000 churches in the NAE all sponsor missionaries, many of whom serve in the countries discussed in Revkin's article. And those missionaries are reporting the same thing the IPCC is.
Unlike the NAE, the religious right does not sponsor missionaries. If anything, it views mission agencies as competitors for market share of the evangelical tithe.
Evangelical missionaries are an interesting breed. If all you know about them is what you've read in The Poisonwood Bible, then your view is too narrow. These are people — thousands of them — who spend most of their lives outside of the American media bubble. They work as front-line providers of medical care, education and agricultural assistance. They may set sail (the anachronistic term lives on in missionary record-keeping) with the peculiar cultural baggage of America's evangelical subculture, but that quickly gets sifted, refined away by the reality of working cross-culturally. And their first-hand experience in places largely ignored by most Americans tends to produce a very different perspective on global ecology, health care and economics. (Although not always, unfortunately, which is why Kingsolver's novel still rings true.)
After years in the mission field, the biggest culture shock for many of these people comes when they return home. Unlike the media moguls of the domestic religious right, they're not invested in the political successes of the Republican Party. The parochial obsessions of our evangelical subculture strike them as foreign to the world they know and the work they believe God has called them to do. And yet here they are, guest-speakers in the pulpits of the often very conservative, very partisan churches on which they rely for financial support. They, too, are faced with a bargain of sorts, one that may require them to avoid certain topics if necessary in order to ensure continued support for their schools or clinics abroad.
But even if sometimes muted, the perspective these missionaries bring home has some influence on the churches that send them. And the NAE, at least, has come to recognize that you cannot support global missions while dismissing global warming.
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