William Wilberforce would be scandalized by the pro-factory farming EATS Act

It's a diabolical end-run around laws that attempt to respect God’s created order.

Sows in gestation crates at a pig breeding facility in Waverly, Virginia, in 2010. (Photo by the Humane Society of the United States/Wikipedia/Creative Commons)

December 1, 2023

By 

Charles C. Camosy

 Purple Catholicism

(RNS) — My column last month explored the possibility that Pope Francis, in his new apostolic exhortation on the environment, “Laudate Deum,” might have pushed forward Catholic teaching on the status, treatment and use of non-human animals. Given the dramatic part factory farming of animals plays in global climate change, one might have expected to see more on this issue in the exhortation, which was a followup to his 2015 encyclical on the environment, “Laudate Si.”

But though “Laudate Deum” says many good things — particularly on the truth that “human life is incomprehensible and unsustainable without other creatures” — overall it was a disappointment. In a document otherwise full of specifics about how to critique the impact of the technocratic paradigm on God’s created order, there were no specifics about how to treat animals and no references to food, farms or farming.

Catholics have been playing catch-up with our Protestant brothers and sisters on this issue for some time: One of the most important voices in this regard belonged to that of William Wilberforce, member of Parliament, abolitionist and hardcore evangelical Christian who died in 1833. Wilberforce’s faith-driven social reforms also included efforts to improve how animals were treated.

The force of Wilberforce’s moral reputation is captured in a story his great-grandson told about walking with the elderly Wilberforce on a hill overlooking the city of Bath. Hearing a loud crack, they saw a man whipping a horse who was straining to pull a cart with a cargo of stone toward them up the hill.

---

RELATED: In a new ‘Animal Liberation,’ Peter Singer consolidates advances in animal rights

---

When Wilberforce protested about the man’s treatment of the animal, the cart owner swore at him and told him to mind his own business. Then the man abusing the horse studied the activist’s face, and asked, “Are you Mr. Wilberforce?”

When Wilberforce nodded in reply, the man with the whip said, “Well, sir, then I’ll never beat my horse again.”

Portrait of William Wilberforce by Anton Hickel (1794). (Image courtesy Wikipedia/Creative Commons)

Wilberforce not only changed the minds of individuals, he enacted laws to effect his reforms. With Hannah More and the other members of the Clapham Sect, he was convinced that changing systems of cruelty could only be achieved by changing both consciences and structures and laws.

Fast forward to our present moment and consider the practice of encasing mother pigs in concrete and metal cages so small these mothers cannot lie down or turn around. Or the practice of giving chickens no more room to roam than a piece of printer paper would cover. Wilberforce and his sect would be absolutely appalled and would almost certainly support laws to end these practices.

Happily, some states are creating laws to do just that. Ohio and Florida have said this is wrong, we as a state want no part in it. California has joined them, legally mandating (by ballot measure) that animal products entering that state should come from farms that do not engage in such cruelty.

Remarkably, some in Congress want to get around these common-sense laws via a measure called the EATS Act. If passed, it would forbid states from protecting their borders from products they have decided are immoral — whether narcotics like Salvia divinorum or pork from pigs tortured in factory farms.

There are so many arguments against the EATS Act, not least our commitment under federalism to let states make decisions based on the values of their inhabitants. But in my view the more powerful arguments are theological. Christians who share the vision of Pope Francis and William Wilberforce should oppose the EATS Act as a diabolical end-run around laws that attempt to respect God’s created order.

---

RELATED: ‘Is this kosher?’ Jewish billboards in LA call for humane eating practices.

---

That order resists our consumer throwaway culture. It calls on us to understand the connection between the torture of animals, the greed of human beings and the eco-emergency that is global climate change.  

Christians should be inspired by this vision of God’s order to contact their U.S. representatives and ask them to resist the EATS Act. It’s part of working toward a culture of animal protection instead of persecution, and of food and farming that bear witness to the peaceable kingdom of God.

Libcom.org

https://libcom.org/article/beasts-burden-antagonism-and-practical-history

Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History | libcom... 

Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History. An attempt to ... The authors of Beasts of Burden respond to Gilles Dauvé's Letter on Animal Liberation.

Libcom.org

https://libcom.org/article/letter-animal-liberation-gilles-dauve

Letter on animal liberation - Gilles Dauvé - Libcom.org 

Nov 18, 2005 ... Letter on animal liberation - Gilles Dauvé ... This is a letter sent by French readers to the authors of Beasts of Burden. This pamphlet has the ...

 Martini Judaism

Welcome to the ‘tribe,’ Alanis Morissette

Now that the singer is publicly Jewish, I have a job for her.

Alanis Morissette performs in Barcelona, Spain, in June 2008. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia/Creative Commons)

January 5, 2024

By 

Jeffrey Salkin

(RNS) — You want to talk about life imitating art?

Or, as the case may be, life imitating Torah?

Here goes.

In this week’s Torah portion, we read the story of the infancy and young adulthood of Moses. Moses was an Israelite infant, sent away by his parents to save him from the fate of Egyptian slavery. Pharaoh’s daughter goes to the Nile River to bathe and she spots the infant floating in a tiny, makeshift vessel. She adopts him as her son and raises him to maturity in her father’s palace.

At a certain point, Moses comes to sense that he has a connection with the Israelites — that they are, in fact, his people. He slays an Egyptian taskmaster who had been beating a slave; he intervenes in a quarrel between two Israelite slaves; he escapes from Egypt into the wilderness — and the rest is history.

Not only Jewish history, but the entire history of Western religion.

So Moses was a hidden “Jewish” child, unaware of his own identity until something (we are not quite sure what) happens. The spark is there and it becomes a flame.

Fast-forward to today — to the popular singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette, who has sold more than 85 million albums worldwide.

On a new episode of the PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” that is precisely what Alanis did. She found her roots, and she discovered she is Jewish.

Musician Alanis Morissette is featured in the Jan. 2, 2024, episode of the PBS show “Finding Your Roots.” (Video screen grab via PBS)

(To paraphrase the account in Kveller: This discovery gives new meaning to the song “You Oughta Know” — warning: racy lyrics).

Alanis is the daughter of a Canadian gentile father and a Jewish mother whose parents were Hungarian Holocaust survivors who had concealed their Jewish identity — similar to the parents of the late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

“I think there was a terror that was in their bones … just not wanting antisemitism. So they were doing it to protect us, to keep us in the dark,” Alanis told PBS host Henry Louis Gates Jr.

So, to quote the Talmudic line: What do we learn from this?

First, this is an updated version of the phenomenon that author David E. Kaufman called “Jew-hooing:”

Citing Jewish celebrities — “Didja know, Natalie Portman is Jewish!” — is characteristic of many Jews, and the persistent behavioral quirk has even been given a name: “Jewhooing.”  The puckish term befits an activity that some see as ethnocentric and crass — one might even object that it is not a fit topic for a serious study of American Jewish identity. But … while embarrassing to some, (it) is really just the tip of the iceberg and points to a deeper relationship between Jews and celebrity overall. It demonstrates that Jews are a part of America … and that Jews, despite their broad integration and participation in American life, nonetheless remain distinctive, even exceptional, and thus stand apart from America.

In the 1960s, the most famous case of “Jew-hooing” was the identification of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, nee Zimmerman, as Jewish. American Jews, simultaneously eager to fit in and to demonstrate ethnic pride and distinctiveness, even sometimes seemed to collect Jewish celebrities, the way kids collect baseball cards.

That was the point of Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah [or is it Chanukah?] Song,” which lists celebrities who are Jewish, “half Jewish,” i.e., Paul Newman and Goldie Hawn, and even one-quarter Jewish, i.e., Harrison Ford.

The point is: Ethnic pride is an essential part of American culture. (Who can forget the Greek father in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and his obsession with finding things with Greek origins? That movie could have been about any ethnic group.)

When it comes to the Jews, that game of “catch the Jewish celebrity” has always been big, because it points to our acceptance in American society. We need it and we crave it.

But, second: Timing, as they say, is everything — and so is the timing for this announcement about Alanis.

The Jewish psyche is raw and bruised. Perhaps we needed this announcement — even more than Alanis herself needed it— with a depth and resonance Alanis could not have anticipated.

At a time of proliferating Jew-hatred; at a time when many Jewish college students are putting their Stars of David inside their shirts, or considering taking off their kippot; at a time when many Jews are reportedly changing their surnames on Uber in order not to attract attention to themselves as Jews; at a time when many Jews are tempted to go back into the closet as Jews, and to pretend it is the America of the 1950s: We “needed” an A-list popular musician to publicly proclaim not only her connection to the Jewish people, but how that connection had become hidden in the first place.

Realizing, of course, that the announcement of her Jewish identity might make her the target of Jew-haters.

One final word.

I am pleased Alanis is “now” Jewish, even more pleased that she is pleased about that discovery.

I have a message for her.

Alanis, there is a seat waiting for you on El Al.

Buy an extra ticket for your guitar.

Let Alanis join the small, but growing, cadre of American Jewish celebrities who are choosing to show up and be present for Israel during this difficult time.

Like, for example, Jerry Seinfeld, who was in Israel recently with his family, visiting those who had been gravely injured on Oct. 7, as well as surviving hostages and their families; and who generously took photographs with passersby, including students on Taglit-Birthright trips.

That is precisely the kind of presence Israel needs right now. It is not mere celebrity-sighting. Such celebrities are opinion-makers.

Thanks, Jerry, for being such a mensch.

And that, my friends, is no yada-yada-yada.

A TikTok Jesus promises divine blessings and many worldly comforts

A scholar of American religion explains how a new phenomenon of Jesus images on TikTok is tapping into the prosperity gospel, a Christian belief that God will reward faith with this-worldly comforts.

Jesus images on social media promise divine rewards for today's fast-paced age. (TikTok)

November 16, 2023

By 

Brandon Dean

(The Conversation) — The TikTok profile Daily Believer (@believerdaily) has 70 videos with computer-generated Jesuses looking directly at the viewer, beseeching them to stop scrolling and watch the next minute’s worth of content.

All these Jesuses are long-haired and bearded, recalling artist Warner Sallman’s ubiquitous 1940 painting “Head of Christ.” Some wear the crown of thorns, some look alarmingly like the actor Jared Leto. Nearly all promise a surprise or “good news soon” in exchange for the viewer liking, commenting “Amen” or sharing it with their friends and family. With this digital outreach, the Daily Believer has gained, as of Nov. 13, 2023, 813,200 followers and over 9.2 million likes.

As a scholar of religion in the U.S. and its intersection with popular culture, I have been studying the ways American Christians use media and popular culture to perform religious work and evangelical outreach for the past 13 years. I argue that this TikTok phenomenon, in which viewers are promised good luck for sharing, liking and commenting on videos of a computer-generated Jesus, is close to what is known as the prosperity gospel – that is, a Christian belief that God will reward faith with this-worldly comforts, like health and wealth.

Computer-generated Jesus

<p

If they do, they will receive a blessing within an hour. If they do not, computer-generated Jesus issues a thinly veiled threat of damnation by quoting Matthew 3:10, which has John the Baptist saying, “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

It is a TikTok chain letter – one whose creator can be monetarily compensated, by TikTok, between 2 cents and 4 cents for every 1,000 views. For example, “Welcome Jesus into Your Home” could have earned the creator $900 from TikTok views alone, with the possibility for additional money earned on sites like Facebook Reels.

It is simple and effective. While the Daily Believer’s views are dwarfed by TikTok megastars like socialite Kylie Jenner and social media personality Khaby Lame, its engagement percentages are much higher, receiving some form of engagement from about one out of every four viewers.

Whether or not there are religious motivations underlying the Daily Believer’s desire for viewer engagement, there are monetary benefits for sure. The TikTok Creator Fund pays creators who have over 10,000 authentic followers based on the number of views, comments and sharing.

Faith equals wealth and health

Preacher T.D. Jakes attends the grand finale Woman Thou Art Loosed! Homecoming Day 2 at Georgia World Congress Center on Sept. 22, 2022, in Atlanta, Ga.
Marcus Ingram/Getty Images

Religious and monetary motivations are not mutually exclusive. In fact, their union is key to one of the more popular recent developments in American and global Christianity – the prosperity gospel, a subsection of Charismatic Christianity that says God will ensure followers’ material wealth and happiness as long as they believe in God.

The closest nonreligious analogy to the Daily Believer’s content is the chain letter where the recipient is promised good luck for forwarding and curses for breaking the chain. Such letters had their heyday in the mid-20th century as paper letters and in the late 1990s and early 2000s as emails and social media posts.

Two of the United States’ most famous preachers, T.D. Jakes and Joel Osteen, teach that individual faith in God will be rewarded by God in the form of material wealth and health.

However, the Daily Believer further simplifies this formula. Viewers don’t really need to have a specific set of Christian beliefs to participate and benefit. All that they need to do is to say “I believe” and share the content with friends and family.

Turning likes and shares into cash

This lack of denominational-specific beliefs allows for the widest possible engagement with a wider Christian community.

The TikTok videos can appeal to a spectrum of Christian groups that may have theological, ethical and social disagreements.

Additionally, the Daily Believer’s requests for social media engagement is analogous to the prosperity gospel’s idea of tithing. In the prosperity gospel, tithing – the donation of a portion of your income to the church – is framed as “seed faith,” a monetary investment to demonstrate a person’s faith, and lack of faith will be punished as surely as faith is to be rewarded.

Seed faith and engagement with the Daily Believer’s TikTok videos have the same ritualistic function – give a little time, money or effort to get even more material rewards. They also both serve to make the person behind the request wealthier or increase their cultural clout.

Warner Sallman’s portrait of Jesus, ‘Head of Christ.’
Uncle Bobbit/flickr, CC BY

By framing these requests as coming directly from the Son of God, not the influencer or content creator, the Daily Believer has made engagement with its social media religious work, which comes with a promise of divine reward in the here and now. It has transformed like-farming – the social media phenomenon of asking for viewer engagement – into the word of God.

Use of Jesus’ image

At the same time, it is difficult to see the Daily Believer’s content as having a missionary or outreach function. It seems aimed at those who would already consider themselves Christian and offers little in the way of persuasion or explanation of why someone should be a Christian.

The Daily Believer is not the only TikTok profile engaged in a type of “smash that like button if you love Jesus” content production. Within the larger phenomena of #ChristianTikTok, there are multiple profiles engaged in theological discussion and doctrinal issues. There are even more profiles that forgo discussion in favor of performing praise and worship.

The use of Jesus’ image as the deliverer of the message is more unique.

But the Daily Believer, with its digital Jesus and its bare-bones gospel of “Believe,” serves as an example of a new expression of an ancient religious motivation – the securing of this-worldly health, wealth and reward in exchange for following the will of the deity or deities.

(Brandon Dean, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of Iowa. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Anti-slavery efforts of Thomas Paine is theme for January 29, 2024 online event

AMERIKA'S FORGOTTEN INTERNATIONALIST FOUNDING FATHER

Thomas Paine Memorial Association

January 8, 2024

By 

RNS Press Release Distribution Service

The Thomas Paine Memorial Association (TPMA) is celebrating both the January 29th birthdate of Thomas Paine and Black History Month, with an international event focusing on Paine’s significant anti-slavery efforts. 

Black leaders, educators, celebrities, politicians, social influencers, and others duly impressed with Paine’s foresight and warnings of civil unrest to end slavery are scheduled to appear throughout this greatly anticipated event. Guests include comedian Ty Barnett; Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY 16th District); Representative Shontel M. Brown (D-OH 11th District); poet Victor Harris; feminist/activist Dom Jones; emergency room doctor and nontheist activist Wil Jeudy; educator, author and historian Richard Newman; Professor Anthony Pinn; Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD 8th District); Smithsonian Museum Curator Teddy Reeves; and Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN 5th District).

Also participating will be event planners TPMA president Margaret Downey, and History Professor Christopher Cameron, author of Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism.

Musical performances by Cynthia McDonald, a member of Godless Gospel and leader of Chicago’s Black Nonbelievers chapter, will open and close the event.

Actor Ian Ruskin will recite a letter that Paine wrote to Thomas Jefferson, using the persona of an enslaved person to emphasize the urgency of ending slavery. The 1808 letter, written seven months before Paine’s death, reveals a frustrated and angry abolitionist who had lost patience with those who participated in the debauchery. 

Thomas Paine expert Gary Berton, president of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, will be in attendance to introduce the letter from “A Slave” and answer questions.

“Thomas Paine stood for equality like no other Founder and more people should know his legacy,” says Downey.

“This event will prove that Thomas Paine’s legacy should be honored and recognized. A Thomas Paine monument in Washington, DC is needed to complete the story of the founding of the United States of America,” she continued.

A post-event social hour will allow audience participation. Sculptor Zenos Frudakis will Zoom from his studio in Glenside, Pennsylvania to show his clay statue of Thomas Paine.

Sponsors of the Monday, January 29, 2024 event are the Thomas Paine Memorial Association, Black Nonbelievers, the Secular Coalition for America, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Center for Inquiry, and the Freethought Society. 

Pre-registration for the event, which begins at 4:00 PM PST/7:00 PM EST, is required. You can find the pre-registration link here.

TPMA has been charged by Congress with creating a long-overdue monument to this “forgotten founder” in Washington, DC. A bill sponsored by Representatives Raskin and Spartz was signed into law by President Biden in December 2022. TPMA is in the midst of finding a location and getting final approval for the monument. Raskin and Spartz now serve as the nonprofit group’s honorary co-chairs. Learn more about TPMA here.

 

For more information, please contact the event coordinators:

Margaret Downey, President
Thomas Paine Memorial Association (A nonprofit educational 501(c)3 organization)
Email: Margaret@ThomasPaineMemorial.org

Christopher Cameron, Board Member
Thomas Paine Memorial Association
Email: Christopher@ThomasPaineMemorial.org

###

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Religion News Service or Religion News Foundation.

 Opinion

Rabbi David Wolpe’s pagans aren’t the ones I know

The distinguished rabbi characterizes a broad collection of small faiths as idolators of nature or money.

(Image by Rihaij/Pixabay/Creative Commons)

January 2, 2024

By 

Nathan M. Hall

(RNS) — The rising sun is shining through my south-facing windows, just over a week after the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. As a scientifically minded person, I understand that this means that the amount of daylight minutes will be increasing until the summer solstice in June. As a modern Pagan (yes, with a capital “P”), I celebrate it as a return of the light after the dark half of the year, bringing clarity and illumination.

It’s clear that I’m not the kind of Pagan Rabbi David Wolpe wrote about last week in The Atlantic in his essay “The Return of the Pagans,” and I can’t say I know any who are. Wolpe, a distinguished rabbi in Los Angeles for most of his career and now a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, working from a monotheistic worldview — one specifically rooted in the Bible — describes Pagans as the arch embodiments of evil or simply idolaters. 

“The worship of natural forces generally takes two forms: the deification of nature, and the deification of force,” Wolpe states at the outset of his essay, and concludes, “Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.”

Wealth is a particularly odd attraction to assign to Pagans (“Wealth is a cover for, or a means to, the ultimate object of worship in a pagan society,” he writes later, “which is power”), which shows his confusion about who modern Pagans are. His description of Pagans is so clearly a characterization he sets up in order to puncture some trends of our modern era. In itself, this is fine; I don’t agree with some of them either. But it was unfortunate that he chose to create a straw man of Paganism to knock around.

To do so, Wolpe abandons any nuance in describing cultures of antiquity. While there may be kernels of truth to biblical accounts, to land on them as one’s sole source for information about other religions, much less vast numbers of cultures in human civilization, is distressing. I would attribute it to a lack of intellectual curiosity, but Wolpe, a university lecturer, is known for questioning the historicity of the story of the Bible’s Book of Exodus. He can hardly plead ignorance.

Rabbi David Wolpe in a recent video about Hanukkah on social media. (Video screen grab)

Wolpe’s real point seems to be that people on the left have been promoting the primacy of nature, while those on the right award it to the individual. Both, to him, connote some form of what he calls Paganism.

But having used Paganism to call out the failings of the political left and right and to decry how our culture has ruptured along these lines, Wolpe wants us to believe that, if there is a way out, it’s through someone’s interpretation of the Bible. If only, in Wolpe’s view, we weren’t so focused on the beauty of creation, of the pleasures of the body or the acquisition of material wealth, we would be in a better alignment with what the deity of biblical monotheism intended.

What is Paganism, if not the brittle collection of stereotypes Wolpe has assembled? It’s a term that has historically included those moderns who follow pre-Christian religions from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa — think the beliefs of ancient Greece and Egypt, but also modern-day Druids and Heathens. Paganism in some places includes attempts at reconstructing these ancient religions or devising modern approaches and adaptations that stretch far beyond its history.

It includes practitioners of witchcraft; tree-hugging animists; close-knit, family based groups; and large magickal academies. It includes Indigenous peoples from parts of Europe and the Mediterranean. Most importantly, it includes people from any part of the world who simply decide that Paganism is the best description for what they practice.

In the United States and Europe the term Pagan has anecdotally been fading in recent years, as different individuals’ and groups’ practices have become more clearly defined — though Wolpe’s piece has given it new life. In the short time since it was published on Christmas Day, there has been an uproar from practitioners of this small collection of beliefs and religions who have overwhelmingly rejected his message.

What bothers me most, perhaps, is not that nearly everything Wolpe says about Paganism is simplistic or just plain wrong, or his laziness or even his political argument — it’s where his article appeared.

The Atlantic is read by people of a host of different religious and spiritual worldviews — Christians and Jews, of course, but also Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, followers of African traditional religions, Indigenous North American religions and yes, people who have claimed or inherited the descriptor of Pagan as part of their background. Its readers also include atheists, agnostics and so many more. 

There was certainly a way of calling out the behaviors of the people Wolpe wants to blame for our culture’s dysfunction without demonizing those who believe differently than he does. It speaks to a lack of empathy and ability at a time when we have seen a record number of hateful incidents directed at members of minority faiths, not least antisemitic hate.

That the magazine’s editors didn’t challenge Wolpe’s article for being too myopic is troubling. Pieces like his can commonly be found in publications that skew toward more religiously or politically tailored points of view, where Paganism is used as a stand-in for a collection of traits to be mourned or avoided. I can’t entirely fault a monotheist like Wolpe for seeing his path as the only true and correct way of interacting with the world or divinity, but The Atlantic should have considered the harm of allowing the term “Pagan” to be used as a dog whistle.

(Nathan M. Hall is a freelance journalist and author who lives in Florida. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Right-Wing Christians Are Making Climate Apocalypse a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The strident climate denial of white evangelical Christians is stoking our march toward a human-generated apocalypse.

By JP Sottile ,

TRUTHOUT

January 8, 2024

AYO WALKER / TRUTHOUT


Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.

On November 17, 2023, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) rejected science textbooks and teaching materials from eight educational publishers. Their objections were based in large part on references to “manmade” climate change, on “negative portrayals of fossil fuels,” and, amazingly enough, on evolution. In a nod to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, the “Judeo-Christian” culture warriors at Texas Values issued a press release celebrating the “Unanimous Vote to Stop Science Textbooks from Making a Monkey Out of You and Your Kids.” For them, the “most egregious textbook was a Biology book” that dared to discuss “how humans are members of the ‘great ape family’ and asked students when humans appeared in primate lineage.” Even worse, the McGraw Hill-produced textbook “contained images comparing a human skeleton to a chimpanzee skeleton.” They warned the SBOE against rubber-stamping science materials that “present Evolution as fact” or fail to offer students the theological alternative of “Creationism.”

The SBOE also heard objections from Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, whose job, as the Houston Chronicle’s Chris Tomlinson pointed out, “has nothing to do with railroads and everything to do with oil and gas.” Christian, who’d previously “found success in the music industry with his country/gospel band, the Mercy River Boys,” was appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to serve as Texas’s representative on the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. So it’s unsurprising that, Tomlinson noted, he “fired off a letter demanding that textbooks ignore global warming and the role fossil fuels play in overheating the planet.” It’s also unsurprising that the SBOE agreed. Simply put, oil and politics do mix in the Lone Star State. The overlooked catalyst of that mixture is reactionary forms of religion. And it’s increasingly fueled by Christian “dominionism.”

Dominionism embraces the notion that some Americans are “called” by the Almighty to impose Christian-based governance over the land and its people. It’s essentially interchangeable with Christian nationalism. Political dominionism also conveniently echoes a belief in terrestrial dominionism, which, using the Book of Genesis as its guide, asserts man’s right to dominion over the entire natural world. And yes, it is “man’s” right, not “humankind’s” or “humanity’s,” because it’s overtly patriarchal, with a male God atop their theological pyramid. It is a worldview deeply threatened by the fact of biological evolution. At stake is dominionists’ belief that they are uniquely created in God’s image. If humans, like all of this planet’s lifeforms, are the product of a natural, ubiquitous process, their role as God’s special “Mini-Me” is in jeopardy. Evolution also implies that the Earth wasn’t given to man to simply use as he sees fit. And using the Earth as man and his oil companies see fit is a very appealing idea in Texas.

Stay in the loop

Never miss the news and analysis you care about.

Email*








Theology of Hydrocarbons

There’s little doubt that Texas is the buckle on this nation’s Bible Belt. It also happens to be its leading petrostate. But this marriage of oil and religion, of profits and prophets, is not unique to Texas. A similar coupling is found in neighboring Louisiana, the home state of recently “raised up” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and home to both a politically dominant oil sector and a politically potent cadre of white evangelicals. A similar pairing is found in the leading OPEC-Plus nations (the “Plus” denotes Russia’s recent coordination with the cartel’s production quotas). Saudi Arabia, in particular, is an infamous purveyor of a once-obscure, extremely fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. It’s a variant the country exported around the Muslim world throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. Saudi Arabia’s cocktail of hydrocarbons and religious dogma served it and the interests of its U.S. partners in the oil- and military-industrial complexes in the decades after President Richard Nixon essentially switched the U.S. dollar from the gold standard to an “oil-based” standard rooted in Saudi petrodollars.

Interestingly enough, Saudi Arabia’s oil- and gas-rich OPEC-Plus partners in Russia are currently in the process of promoting religious fundamentalism and a reactionary culture war to their economically weary population. And in what might be the oddest example of religious hydrocarbonization, the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya population from the Rakhine State in Myanmar was catalyzed by a Buddhist fundamentalist’s incendiary propaganda. That purge coincided with the discovery of vast gas reserves in the hydrocarbon-rich Rakhine Basin. Although it’s rarely reported, Myanmar’s ruling junta is fully enmeshed with the oil industry. We could even view Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government in Israel as a potential example given Israel’s recent discoveries of oil and gas and his government’s embrace of the most radicalized, fundamentalist elements in all of Judaism.


Denial Doesn’t Change Our Climate Reality: Earth Is Becoming a Sacrifice Zone
Communities that have contributed little to the climate crisis are bearing its brunt — but nowhere on Earth is safe.
By JP Sottile , TRUTHOUTMay 7, 2023

Although correlation does not necessarily mean causation, the repeated correlation between the exploitation of hydrocarbons and the exploitation of religious doctrine is striking. Norway and the U.K. might be the exceptions that prove the rule. Both are major hydrocarbon producers, but both are notably (perhaps even famously) irreligious nations. Is it just a coincidence that those two governments are not mired in denial of anthropogenic climate change, nor have they been hostile to ameliorating its impact? The U.K. has its share of denialists. But even former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was often referred to as “the British Trump,” made significant commitments to address climate pollution — quite unlike the real Donald Trump. The real, windmill-hating Trump rehabilitated and rescued Saudi Arabia from an economic crisis, turned over environmental policy to the oil-industrial complex and is now regarded by many political evangelicals as this nation’s first truly evangelical president. Some even see him as “elevated” by God. It’s a term similar to the one used by the GOP’s new climate- and evolution-denying speaker of the House, who also compares himself to Moses.


This marriage of oil and religion, of profits and prophets, is not unique to Texas.

In many ways, Trump’s 2016 election epitomized the marriage of oil and God. It was the consummation of a long courtship that began when Ronald Reagan romanced Jerry “Moral Majority” Falwell during the 1980 presidential election. That politically convenient coupling blossomed into a decidedly messy affair during the oil- and violence-soaked presidency of George W. Bush, who, as it happens, was an oil-drilling evangelical hailing from the Bible Belt’s buckle in Texas. Sadly, this marriage has divorced many evangelicals from reality.
Buckle Up: It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Century

A comprehensive survey released in October 2023 by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that while a “majority of Americans (61%) believe that climate change is caused mostly by human activity,” white evangelical Protestants remain steadfast in their refusal to accept it, year after year of record-breaking heat notwithstanding. Despite mounting evidence, “just three in ten white evangelical Protestants (31%) believe that climate change is caused by humans.” According to PRRI, those white evangelical Protestants are decidedly out of step with other Americans of faith:


Three-fourths of Hispanic Catholics and religiously unaffiliated Americans (76%) believe climate change is caused by human activity, as do the majority of other non-Christians (70%), Jewish Americans (67%), Hispanic Protestants (61%), Black Protestants (59%), other Protestants of color (59%), white Catholics (56%), white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (54%), and about half of Latter-day Saints (48%).

Amazingly, about “two in ten white evangelical Protestants (19%) believe there is no solid evidence of climate change,” meaning they don’t explain it away as something “natural” or as an expression of the will of God. Instead, they simply think it doesn’t exist. It’s all the more daunting given PRRI’s findings on white evangelical Protestants’ views of the “climate crisis.” While the percentage of “religiously unaffiliated Americans” who described climate change as a “crisis” rose from 33% in 2014 to 43% in 2023, the percentage of white evangelical Protestants who believed climate change was a crisis “went down from 13% to 8% during the same period.”

That’s right. As climate-stoked disasters and record-breaking heat waves piled up after 2014, the sense of urgency among white evangelicals actually declined. Amazingly enough, the mounting evidence they saw or perhaps even experienced did less than nothing to convince them.


As climate-stoked disasters and record-breaking heat waves piled up after 2014, the sense of urgency among white evangelicals actually declined.

Importantly, though, there is a widening gulf between politically ascendant Evangelicals and the majority of U.S. Christians who do not reject well-established science or the evidence they can see with their own eyes. As the PRRI survey notes, more than twice as many of the people described in the study as Hispanic Catholics agree with climate science, which may reflect the reality that they are all too often on the receiving end of climate pollution’s consequences. Climate-accepting Catholics also have a champion in Pope Francis. He is the first pope to hail from Latin America, and he is also the world’s most prominent religious advocate of both mitigating climate pollution and halting mass extinction. But his revolutionary 2015 letter on the environment hasn’t had the impact in the U.S. that it’s had in the rest of the Catholic world.

On the eve of the COP28 global climate summit in the oil-soaked United Arab Emirates, Reuters reported on the unique recalcitrance of U.S.-based Catholic institutions in the face of the pope’s clear call to care for creation. Titled Laudato Si’, his letter inspired “hundreds of Catholic institutions around the globe” to divest from oil and gas — but not in the U.S. Reuters found that eight years after the pope’s letter, “not a single diocese has announced it has let go of its fossil fuel assets.” In fact, U.S. Catholic “dioceses hold millions of dollars of stock in fossil fuel companies” and “at least a dozen are also leasing land to drillers.” As the PRRI survey revealed, this puts them at odds with their own parishioners.
Hitting the Gas

The findings from PRRI might be little more than a sociological curiosity if this motivated minority didn’t also wield disproportionate political influence. Their dogmatic sense of manifested destiny obstructs the path to not only mitigating climate pollution, but all forms of pollution and, saddest of all, our cataclysmic consumption of the animal kingdom. But it is perfectly in keeping with a self-serving theological invention that hands dominion over all things to a self-appointed “elect.” And if they ever pause to doubt the righteousness of facilitating mass extinction to service an insatiable hunger for hydrocarbons, they can find solace in the “Ark Encounter” amusement park in Kentucky.

There, the “young Earth” fiction spun by curator and evolution denier Ken Ham is set against the biblical story of the Great Flood. Ham, with an assist by Mike Johnson before he was “raised up” by God to the speakership, built what he claims is an exact replica of the ark Noah built to save his family and Earth’s terrestrial creatures during a mass genocide orchestrated by an angry God. Ham’s ark is meant to demonstrate both the literal truth of the ancient biblical allegory (one predated by the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh) and reveal “the lie” of evolution. He even tries to “prove” that dinosaurs lived side by side with humans. This fantastical claim is made necessary by the equally fanciful claim that the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old. He’s only off by about 4.54 billion years.

Reuters found U.S. Catholic “dioceses hold millions of dollars of stock in fossil fuel companies” and “at least a dozen are also leasing land to drillers.”

The belief, though, that God did, in fact, wipe out every living human save for Noah and his family is an End Times “proof of concept.” Through the Great Flood, God has revealed his apocalyptic proclivities. At the same time, our collective responsibility for stoking calamitous floods in Pakistan or Africa or Europe or even central California is not only ignored, it is actively denied. Thanks to this willful ignorance, their apocalyptic End Times prophecy starts to fulfill itself as the seas rise, the storms get angrier, and animals die off in ever more staggering numbers. The behaviors catalyzing that quite palpable, human-generated apocalypse are not only not stopped, but embraced with a type of fanatical zeal once displayed by inquisitors and crusaders. And if they continue to pursue their agenda and feed its self-fulfilling prophecy of eschatological doom, I think we’re going to need a bigger ark. We certainly won’t need any more oil tankers.

JP SOTTILE is a freelance journalist, published historian, radio co-host and documentary filmmaker (The Warning, 2008). His credits include a stint on the “NewsHour” news desk, C-SPAN and as newsmagazine producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington. His weekly show, “Inside the Headlines With The Newsvandal,” co-hosted by James Moore, airs every Friday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, Iowa. He blogs under the pseudonym “The Newsvandal.”