The Zong

As our country wages war, we are told by our government and its supporters that our enemies, wherever they may be, are religious fanatics who wish to do us harm, zealots who are not to be reasoned with. Their unwavering religious views shape their lives every day, from the laws they abide by to their skewed views of science. My question is, why do we need to spend so much time and money killing religious zealots abroad when we have so many of them right here in River City?

Just for “fun,” I read an article last Friday in the Baptist Press about Al Gore’s Oscar and climate change. To be fair, it bills itself as “News With a Christian Perspective,” but the article reads like a half-assed attempt to use religion to discredit actual science. I mean, it obviously isn’t the first time or even the brazillionth time, but that doesn’t make it okay. They kick the article off with this assertion:

When Former Vice President Al Gore won an Academy Award for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” Feb. 25, a key assertion in his film on global warming — that human-induced climate change will cause a rise in sea levels of some 20 feet in the near future — had already been refuted by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That’s one hell of a lead, don’t you think? Well, maybe it isn’t, but it might have some integrity behind it if it were true. The assertion cited is listed on the film’s website reads as follows, under the heading “If the warming continues, we can expect catastrophic consequences”:

Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.

See, this “assertion” is really more of a “prediction” made by actual “scientists.” The website cites the Washington Post, a “newspaper” that in 2006 won four “Pulitzer Prizes.” The article is entitled “Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change,” and it is about the consequences of catastrophic climate change. Here’s what it says could happen:

Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer, who also advises the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said one of the greatest dangers lies in the disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold about 20 percent of the fresh water on the planet. If either of the two sheets disintegrates, sea level could rise nearly 20 feet in the course of a couple of centuries, swamping the southern third of Florida and Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.

That sounds pretty drastic, but nowhere on the film’s website or in the article does it say this level of water rising is a certainty, it simply states that it could be a catastrophic result from continued global warming. At any rate, the IPCC report doesn’t really strike me as much of a refutation or even a contradiction (at no point does it discuss the Greenland Ice Sheets, as far as I can see), but the conservative press trots it out all over the place, using a report that actually refutes everything conservatives have been peddling for decades to “refute” a tiny little part of Al Gore’s (Oscar-winning) documentary. Kind of gives you some insight into how scared shitless conservatives are that he might run for president.

But this is kind of beside the point. After this lame attempt at a gotcha, the Christian perspective really starts speaking in tongues.

Gore is at least partly right in his call for “creation care,” according to Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Human beings, Land said, have a responsibility to care for the planet, including cutting pollution in the atmosphere.

“We don’t have the right to treat the earth as if it is our own,” Land told Baptist Press. “It is God’s and He will hold us accountable for the stewardship of His creation. We should stress divine ownership, human stewardship and human responsibility.”

You heard him, folks. God is gonna be pissed if we don’t get our shit together. Maybe that’s why, for the first time ever, there are some evangelicals who actually read what the “scientists” on Al Gore’s side are saying. Or maybe it’s just the overwhelming evidence that they’re being presented with.

Jim Ball, a Baptist and director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, also said CO2 emissions may cause permanent damage to the world’s poorest communities if fossil fuel consumption is not curtailed and new energy sources remain untapped. Ball’s network, together with Creation Care magazine, sponsored a discussion in recent years that attempted to answer the question, “What would Jesus drive?”

“We are not the adjudicators of the science. But when we see major reports from scientists, signed off on by government officials, we have to take it seriously,” Ball told Baptist Press in an interview. “We need to accept what the majority of experts are telling us and move on from there.”

Hallelujah! I would say it’s a real sign of the times when a Baptist is asking if Jesus would want him to drive a hybrid, but then I realized that Mr. Ball is probably in the minority when he admits he is not one of the adjudicators of the science.

Because there has been no scientific consensus on the cause of global warming and other topics related to global climate change, Land and more than 20 other Christian public policy experts, such as Focus on the Family’s James Dobson and Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, refused last year to sign a statement on climate change that encouraged President Bush to seek a solution to environmental problems. The men also encouraged the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) not to take a position on the matter.

Let me take this moment to say, “what the fuck?” The consensus reached by the scientists in the report that this very article just fucking cited said, and I quote:

“The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment Report (TAR), leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming…”

“Very high confidence” in this report means greater than a 90% chance of being accurate. I’ll bet global warming really likes those odds, but hey, I’m no adjudicator of the science or nothin’. The general consensus is actually that when an immobile, clunky international body of scientists like the IPCC says something is “very likely,” the debate isn’t just over; it was probably over several years before.

This article actually seems relatively balanced (if you’re the Pope) until you get to the wacky stuff about “creation care.” I’m no theologian, but it sounds like “creation care” states that God has our back as long as we assert our place as the center of the universe by taking out the garbage and hunting and legislating against gay people and stuff like that.

Even with several evangelical groups conceding that the world has been warmer in recent years, many confess that they are uncomfortable with the religion of global warming, a seemingly elevated and sometimes virtually divine view of nature offered by the political left. They have, as a result, taken steps to ensure that Christian evangelical teachings on climate change and human responsibility keep both man and nature in their respective positions in relation to God and to each other.

“It certainly is good theology to exercise creation care,” Land said. “And you have to balance the command in Genesis to have dominion over creation with the command to till it, or take care of it. Human beings are, of course, the highest form of creation, so anything we do should show the world that human beings come first. Nature is there to serve man, and it becomes unbiblical when you start talking about nature with a capital ‘N.’“

I know it’s silly to be pointing to this article and getting all in a snit about it, but the truth is, there’s a pretty large circulation for these kinds of publications, and when they continue to insist that there is somehow still a debate on climate change, it comes from a type of fear and ignorance that I have a hard time understanding. I realize that everyone’s a little nervous now what with Jesus’ tomb being found by James Cameron, and I realize that accepting the fact that God isn’t going to just keep global warming away with his holy magic wand doesn’t really jell with the omnipresence of a forgiving deity, it’s just hard for me to take it when quotes like this get bandied about:

“It is an expression of God’s determination that He is going to sustain all the normal cycles of this ecosphere that make it habitable for man and all God’s creatures. So we have God’s promise as a starting point for investigating the claims about global warming. This gives Christians and Bible-believing persons grounds for defending a more conservative position than environmentalists who not only ignore God’s promise to Himself, but also the fact that God wisely designed this earth to be resilient, with positive and negative feedback mechanisms that prevent great global catastrophes.”

I find it incredible, even by the standards of the Church, that an institution founded and built around faith in things that cannot be proven is so reticent to accept proven scientific fact. It speaks volumes upon volumes about the GOP and their alignment with these fundamentalists, and stands as yet another shining example of what fuels the stone-age mindset of our rickety republic.

- M.G.