The Anti-Progress Coalition

Last January I wrote:

One realignment I fear is that the religious right will make a deal with the environmentalist left. They both oppose freedom and want to take society back -- the right wants to take us to the middle ages and the left wants to take us to the Pleistocene. I fear they will make a deal saying, essentially, “The right can have its way on abortion if the left can have its way on the economy. The right can enchain man’s spirit, whereas the left enchains his body.” Such a realignment would put America into two clear-cut camps, individualists and collectivists.

Secular Foxhole posts on evangelicals signing onto global warming.

Also of interest is a story from the February 6, 2005, washingtonpost.com called “The Greening of Evangelicals.” If the religious right accepts environmentalism, then the Republicans in power will follow. Republican politicians would be able to please both the MSM and a huge part of their base. How many of them could resist that?

The coming together of religion and environmentalism is an important trend to watch. It makes sense that the two would unite because they are both, fundamentally, anti-science and anti-progress in this world. The two movements strengthen each other: environmentalism gives religion a veneer of practicality in this world (however specious); religion gives environmentalism moral justification (however wrong). Furthermore, with faith religion gives environmentalism an alternative epistemology to reason, which can be unkind to the woozy, emotionalist thinking of environmentalists.

UPDATE: Also see Edward Cline’s God Goes Green.

And the word is that George Bush will make an environmentalist proposal in his State of the Union Speech, something about global warming. We’ll have to wait for the speech to hear exactly what he says, but I will speculate now that this could be an ominous development.