Politics and the Religious Imagination by John Dyck & Paul Rowe & Jens Zimmermann

Author:John Dyck & Paul Rowe & Jens Zimmermann [Dyck, John & Rowe, Paul & Zimmermann, Jens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9780415779982
Google: rXQ7AQAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 8440233
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-01-15T12:33:15+00:00

Challenges

Of course, finding issues of common concern may be the easy part. The more difficult challenge facing the religious environmental movement may be ignoring the many issues on which they fundamentally disagree with secular and liberal environmentalists. In fact, the repeated storyline one uncovers when learning about religious environmentalists is the deep suspicions each side of the cultural divide has toward the other, in spite of growing agreement on environmental issues.

A common theme sounded by religious conservatives concerned with environmental issues is the historical association (in their minds) of environmentalists with pro-choice causes, “nature-worship,” anti-corporate attitudes, hostility toward organized religion, and big-government solutions.36 This division is particularly relevant in discussions of population control, which many environmentalists view as central to environmental protection. Religious conservatives view any notion of population control as highly problematic and as part of a socially liberal agenda. Many still view the environmental movement as largely a product of the 1960s (and they do not mean that in a good way). Evangelicals, says Jim Ball, leader of EEN, “don’t know many environmentalists, but they have the idea they are pretty weird – with strange liberal, pantheist views.”37 A scholar of religion and politics, John Green, says, “Their [evangelicals’] stereotype of environmentalists would be Druids who worship trees.”38

Secular environmentalists, though not the focus of this chapter, seem to have difficulty comprehending that religious evangelicals (particularly conservatives) could legitimately be concerned with environmental issues. They tend to be uncomfortable with the hostility of evangelicals toward evolution, as well as with their support for other conservative positions on many of the social issues mentioned above.

The suspicion of these groups toward one another is entirely understandable, given that they have been on different sides of so many of the central cultural (and even, to a certain extent, economic) issues of the last thirty years. Each side can speak of the other as though they come from another planet. Environmentalists, in this oversimplified view of religious conservatives, embrace non-traditional family arrangements and new-age spiritual practices and support left-wing causes. Secular environmentalists, for their part, are confused by the unfamiliar beliefs of many religious Americans, such as nationalistic patriotism, rigid controls on sexual behavior, and strong adherence to the traditional nuclear family. These stereotypes may seem flippant, but the attitudes are very real on both sides. Such deeply ingrained impressions must be overcome if such groups are to develop a meaningfully strong coalition on behalf of stricter environmental regulations.

In addition to the deeply held suspicions the masses of each movement may have toward one another, a broad environmental coalition must overcome the reluctance of many conservative religious elites toward cooperation. Their reluctance is less because of their dislike of environmentalists generally (though that may be true) and more because they operate within the elite leadership of the Republican Party coalition. As such, they are wary of jeopardizing that coalition with what they see as concerns that are not (in their eyes) fundamental to the moral agenda. A real question remains about whether religious

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