Later on today, delegates at the Values Voter Summit will gather for a breakout session with Dr Calvin Beisner from the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
The title? Global Warming Hysteria: The New Face of the Pro-Death Agenda.
The summit, praised by the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder for presenting the ‘mild-mannered’ face of mainstream American conservatism (gulp), will hear that a belief in manmade climate change rests on “an unbiblical view of God, mankind, and the environment.”
Climate change policies, they will be told, will cause hundreds of millions of deaths. And this loss of life will not be accidental. Environmentalism is rooted in “hostility to humanity”. Fear of global warming is being deliberately stoked to prepare the way for a new Holocaust that will drastically reduce global population.
“If people are the problem,” the event’s publicity asks, “what’s the final solution?“
Dr Beisner is at the forefront of the campaign to keep the Evangelical and environmental movements at loggerheads. Shocked by the rise of a green-tinged evangelism, he has warned Christians believers in manmade climate change to butt out of the field:
What troubles me more than anything about it is something that as a theologian, as a churchman, has troubled me about many different issues where- religious leaders speak out on political hot topics. And that is the importation of religious moral authority into something where the speaker doesn’t have specific expertise in that, all right?
I’ve gone down the list of all the 86 signers of the [Evangelical Climate Initiative]. And I can’t identify any who have expertise in the science of global warming or in the economics of energy policy. And I embrace their motives. But I do not think that they have the technical knowledge to be able to speak knowledgeably on this.
Beisner, however, equipped with his PhD in Scottish religious history, is confidently able to use the bible to predict future environmental trends. After all, as he argues, “The findings of science are shifting and temporary. The Word of the Lord endures forever.”
Man may have fallen in the Garden of Eden and, again, when God wiped humanity (Noah and his ark, excepted) from the face of the earth. But Jesus has since put the earth definitively onto an upward trajectory. Population growth is thus to be embraced, because with more people, come more Christians – and thus, more righteousness.
While environmentalists fear that human population growth will strip the earth of its resources and strangle it with pollution, Biblical Christians—particularly those who are aware of the continuing growth of Christian faith around the world, with the positive transformation of culture that it can bring—can have confidence that, by the grace of God through the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ and His resent reign over all things, continued population growth will result not in the depletion but in the increased abundance of resources, and not in increased pollution of the earth but in its increased cleansing and transformation from wilderness to garden, “from its bondage to decay . . . into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).
Beisner is a leading light in “We Get It”, a campaign that aims to enlist an army of a million Christians to fight the “alleged problem of global warming.”
These troops are being rallied not to fight for America’s use of fossil fuels (though that’s important, of course), but for the rights of the world’s poor, whose right to economic development, and ultimately to life, is being removed.
These messages seem certain to go down well with values voters in Washington today. Beisner provides them with enemies (Satan, Al Gore), victims (billions of poor people), and a comforting conclusion (business as usual – God likes it that way).
His session also shows how neatly the fight against Obama’s health care (“death panels” for Americans) will segue into a struggle against his climate legislation (death camps for the poor, as it were).
The world may still be hoping that American negotiators arrive in Copenhagen with a Senate-endorsed bill. But it’s increasingly hard to see that happening. Beisner and friends have spent a decade making preparations. I see a long fight ahead.
