Kersten Turns Away from the Idol of Environmentalism
February 9th, 2007,“Environmentalists have embarked on a secular crusade,” reads the headline for Katherine Kersten’s column in the StarTribune yesterday. The conservative columnist argues that Christians should beware of turning environmentalism into a “secular religion” and quotes a Prof. Robert H. Nelson, who criticizes the “environmental gospel” as “Calvinism minus God.” She goes on to say that this “gospel” appeals to people who are “turning away from traditional religion”:
The green crusade satisfies the universal human hunger for meaning. At the same time, it asks little of believers: no tough commandments about forgiving your neighbor or not coveting his wife. Instead, it offers rituals like recycling and (for those who aspire to sainthood) biking to work.
I actually agree with Kersten that it’s possible to turn environmentalism into an idol. However, I am a Christian who is saddened that she fails to emphasize the need for the cultural changes that will reduce the impact of our energy- and stuff-hungry lifestyle. Instead she offers a critique of environmentalism that will allow other Christians to ignore environmentalists - even Christian environmentalists - as pagan kooks. We must especially beware of bicyclists!
Kersten attempts to end her column with a call for “more sensible approaches to environmental problems.” Yes, we need to speak civilly to one another and weigh the issues, but what is a “sensible approach” to the environment? Watching our culture eat up, burn up, and pave over the world? When was the last time she seemed concerned about the environment or asked people to make a change?
I believe that protecting the environment is one of those issues that people will look back on years from now and see that there was a clear choice between right and wrong, a choice between immoral foot-dragging and obstruction and moral action - something like the way we now see the civil rights movement of decades past. The apologies for environmental destruction that we hear today will not be treated kindly by history, and Christians will be among their harshest judges.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
You’re quite right, Bill, to score her for disinterest in our survival.
There’s a plain answer why that harpy and her kind don’t care. They measure earthly paradise with a dollar sign, and gaze past the rotting planet on their rapturous jackpot. Death cultists don’t recycle.
In fact, Kersten’s right wing Christianity is manifestly unable to deal with any of our problems.
Across the broad range of economic, social and geopolitical issues it has clumsily seen fit to address, we find only failure: ghastly want driven by its Prosperity Gospel, hatred stoked by its bullying of gays and lesbians, the abyss in Iraq that it helped dig.
It’s a record of pure catastrophe. If that’s how you get into heaven, the place needs better standards.
February 9th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Remember, Kersten also ran a blog item concerned with the treatment of prison guards at Guantanamo Bay, not the physical and legal status of the prisoners. Anyone who sides with the powerful over the helpless in such a dubious situation shows clearly her sadism and moral bankruptcy. That post provided sufficient grounds for the StarTribune to pull the plug on this odious demagogue.
Neither is it surprising that she finds the Biblical commandments to forgive and not to covet “tough.” A healthy person would not.
So, to think that Kersten might care about the environment is to expect too much. Her spite and destructiveness will be trained on it, too. Her world is a malignant one, where life is resented, not treasured. All true Christians, along with anybody who cares about maintaining an inhabitable planet, needs to jump off her careening, fume-spewing SUV immediately.