green dragon

Janet Parshall in 2010 narrated a right-wing “documentary” about the “Green Dragon” menace, where Religious Right activists said that environmentalists do not believe in science but superstition, calling environmentalism its own anti-Christian religion. Yesterday, Parshall’s radio show was devoted to exposing the supposedly sinister origins of environmental science with guest Mark Musser, whose works include: “The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory”; “Green Lebensraum: The Nazi Roots of Sustainable Development”; “Enviro-Baalism-Fascism” and “Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrificial Offering of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust.”

Essentially, Musser’s main argument on Parshall’s program was that evolution, animal rights and environmentalism were the main forces behind Nazi thought and dehumanization of non-Aryan groups. He told Parshall that environmentalism inevitably leads to fascism and tyranny, and warns that the U.S. may be destroyed like ancient Israel if American society embraces environmentalism:

With environmentalism, especially the radical version of it—you know we used to have conservationism in America with Teddy Roosevelt and these people—but now environmentalism has taken over and nature is the most important thing. So you have to adjust everything to nature. Nature is viewed as a holistic tyrant, so to speak, and holism really teaches tyranny. Fascism is all connected here. You have to bow everything to nature’s holistic inter-relatedness and you can’t buck anything with regards to what nature does. This is the problem with environmentalism and why it’s so dangerous, because it becomes your tyrant.

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Israel would be the example of this originally, as they were commanded to go in and subdue the promise land and fill it and that’s what they did and for a while it was a good land, then these other things came in, environmentalism came in and destroyed their culture, what I call the Baalism, the nature worship, instead of worshiping the Creator they worshiped nature and this led to the destruction of their society. I think the same things are happening in our own country today too. We have this nature-worship now that is infiltrating our society, infiltrating Christianity too, and it is bringing us down and it is something that people need to be wary of. There is a dark path to this whole environmental discussion that people need to know.

Energy industry apologist Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance appeared on Janet Parshall’s radio show yesterday to once again do the bidding of polluters. As we’ve reported in The Green Dragon Slayers, Beisner has no scientific credentials but is closely tied to energy companies. During the interview, Beisner directed his animus as the Evangelical Environmental Network, which launched a pledge to combat mercury poisoning:

One in six babies, over 700,000 each year, are born with harmful levels of mercury in their blood, and coal-burning power plants are the largest source of domestic mercury pollution.

Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."

We believe this is an urgent and escalating moral crisis which calls for immediate action!

According to the National Institutes of Health, “For fetuses, infants and children, the primary health effects of mercury are on neurological development. Even low levels of mercury exposure such as result from mother’s consumption methylmercury in dietary sources can adversely affect the brain and nervous system.”

But Beisner said that it was more important to leave polluters unregulated. He insisted that regulations against pollution were actually going to kill people and that his pro-corporate view is the real “pro-life” position. He went on to say that advocates of environmental protection want to deliberately weaken the economy because “the environmental movement hates human prosperity”:

These were people who frankly didn’t know the science behind it, all they saw was that babies were endangered and they wanted to protect these babies. Well of course we would want to protect the babies but the science isn’t good and so consequently the EEN has succeeded, at least temporarily anyway, in fostering the notion that this is a pro-life cause. It's not a pro-life cause if anything the opposite is a pro-life cause because whereas the current levels of mercury admissions are not causing any deaths to anyone, the reduced economic output for this country will indeed increase premature deaths among the American population.

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The real aim is to try to get us to use less energy overall because energy fuels a prosperous economy and the environmental movement hates human prosperity because it sees it as a threat to the environment.

Wendy Wright may be out of a job at Concerned Women for America. Once President and CEO of the powerful Religious Right organization, she appears to have been eclipsed by the new CEO Penny Young Nance. Now, Wright has been completely removed from CWA’s leadership page and her bio was taken down (you can still see her cached page). In fact, she is listed as “Past President, Concerned Women for America” on this new social conservative petition opposing government social services programs.

An outspoken opponent of evolution science, reproductive freedom and LGBT rights, Wright had a long career marshalling the Religious Right.

She was a frequent visitor to the White House during the Bush administration, although wasn’t a fan of the Obama administration’s attempts to bring progressive and conservative groups together to reduce the need for abortion (she claims there is never a “need” for abortion). On LGBT rights issues, Wright lobbied hard against hate crimes laws, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. She flatly dismissed a comprehensive study that showed the fitness of gay and lesbian parents and said that she and her allies were victims of discrimination from “homosexual activists,” while doubting the existence of any discriminatory laws in the US. In 2008, Wright blasted Hallmark for allegedly trying to “destroy the family” by supposedly pushing “homosexual messages.”

“There is no evidence of evolution from one species to another,” she told evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, arguing that there is no substantiation for evolutionary theory. Wright also argued that evolution science was responsible for “horrific abuses against human beings.”

Wright even contends that environmental protection efforts are devastating for humanity, arguing in the Resisting the Green Dragon series: “the policies that environmental groups and even these evangelical groups got behind were ones that would consign the poorest people around the world to grinding poverty, to disease, to premature death.” During the debate over health care reform, Wright claimed that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act violated all of the Ten Commandments and mocked the law’s plans to combat racism in the health care sector.

We’ll miss you Wendy! Although I have a feeling you won’t be gone for long…

Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance is at the center of the Religious Right’s growing push against “the Green Dragon,” otherwise known as the environmental movement. As noted in the latest Right Wing Watch In-Focus, Beisner has his PhD. in Scottish history and absolutely no scientific credentials, however, he does have close ties to corporate-financed, anti-environmental groups such as the Acton Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Now, right-wing activists like David Barton, Wendy Wright, and Bryan Fischer are heavily promoting Beisner’s film (which they are also featured in).

According to Beisner, environmental protection is “anti-biblical” while heightened carbon dioxide emissions are good for the earth. Even though actual scientists have concluded that the rapidly increasing human emissions of carbon dioxide cause warming temperatures, drought, and rising sea levels.

While climate change threatens to reduce precipitation and produce devastating food shortages, Beisner wrongly claims that climate change will increase the food supply and, in fact, goes so far as to accuse the EPA of intentionally seeking to "hurt the poor":

Beisner: A lot of agricultural economists think that the increased crop yields that we've seen over the last forty to fifty years, something in the neighborhood of twelve to fifteen percent of that is attributable directly to increased carbon dioxide, which means that food gets more plentiful and that helps the poor.

Well, the EPA wants to hurt the poor [in] two ways: one, by raising energy prices by forcing us to switch from carbon-based fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas, to much more expensive and much less reliable fuels like wind, solar, and bio-fuels. And two, they want to hurt the poor by lowering the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would reduce plant growth efficiency, reducing crop yields, reducing food availability, raising food prices. So it's a double whammy on the poor.

Then David Barton, of all people, accuses scientists of ignoring anything that does support their worldview and manipulating data to support it, while complaining that it is all plot to increase government control and play God:

Barton: This is not about science, this has nothing to do with science. Science is a vehicle to give them more control over the lives of individuals.

Green: So there's no intellectual honesty then there?

Barton: No. There's no intellectual honesty. You find something that lines up with your worldview and you say "here it is, this is what I've always believed, I knew it was out there." And you find a fake science like the IPCC at the UN which has its own agenda ...

Green: And they're willing to put out supposed data, that's false ...

Barton: And the great proof that it's a philosophical worldview is when you refuse to listen to opposing data. When you get all these scientists on the other side ... who roll out all these studies that say "no, no, no that's wrong." When you won't listen to opposing data, science has nothing to do with it. You're into a worldview conflict at that point and your saying that my worldview demands that I have more control over your life, over what you do, that's why government does exist, you're hear to serve government, not vice versa, and this is the vehicle to do it. This really has nothing to do with science.

But what happens is, not understanding that, a lot of Americans buy into that this is science.

Green: Oh, they've been indoctrinated with it in education for the last twenty years.

Barton: Are you kidding me, Earth Day in the schools? We've got to save the Earth? I mean, that's like a tick ... trying to save a whole heard of cattle. I mean, ticks go along for the ride, they don't manage the cattle, they don't tell them where to go. And that's our arrogance in thinking that we can do something to save the planet and control where the planet goes. You know, we're just along for the ride and we're insignificant peons on this thing

Green: Well, arrogance is the right word. I mean, it really does, we get to the point where we think - not that we shouldn't do the things we can do, of course you do the things that are responsible - but we think that we can control this whole thing. We think we're God.

In November Right Wing Watch highlighted a video by the Cornwall Alliance featuring prominent Religious Right leaders who lashed out at the environmentalist movement for trumpeting “exaggerations and myths,” and “seducing” and “scaring” children. Now, the Cornwall Alliance is pushing a book, “Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death,” about environmentalists’ “anti-human and anti-Christian ideas.” Focus on the Family has already endorsed the book. According to author James Wanliss of the Cornwall Alliance, environmentalists are attempting to “co-opt the church” and “harm the poor”:

"My book seeks to display the incompatibility of modern environmentalism with Western Civilization and suggests an alternative path that leads to godly dominion, not death," Wanliss says. "I also show how the Green movement seeks to co-opt the church, and why the church should resist by teaching the Biblical relationship between humanity and the rest of creation that leads to the flourishing of both nature and humanity."

"This book is both important and timely," says Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, Founder and National Spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance. "Today's environmentalism isn't a neutral set of ideas that can be tacked onto the Christian faith without theological compromise. Instead, it promotes its own worldview and its own doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation. And those doctrines aren't Biblical."

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1. Green Dragon: How Environmentalism Gets It Wrong and Endangers Society;

2. The Church Complicit: How Environmentalism Has Penetrated the Church with Anti-Human and Anti-Christian Ideas;

3. Created in the Image of God: Why Humans are More Special to God than Other Creatures;

4. Naked Ape: How Nature is Not Divine, and Humans are Spiritually Superior to All Other Creatures;

5. Dominion: How Humans' Filling and Subduing the Earth Can Release It from Bondage;

6. Death Wish: How the "Sustainability" Chimera is Harmful to the Environment and Politically Dangerous;

7. Dominion, Not Death: How Environmentalism Harms the Poor and Biblical Christianity Offers the True Hope for the Future.

Yesterday, a leader of the Religious Right declared that Episcopal Church should no longer be considered Christian because the church backs equality for gays and lesbians. Now, the Episcopal Church is under attack from the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a far-right organization with a history of vilifying mainline denominations, as a result of the church’s support for environmentalism and action to combat climate change. Writing for David Horowitz’s far-right Front Page Magazine, IRD president Mark Tooley assails Episcopalians for working to promote environmental protection and assistance for developing countries, stating that for Episcopalians, “‘the Earth’ displaces a higher authority whom believers better merits a ‘relationship.’”

Tooley’s criticism of the Episcopal Church reflects the growth of climate change denialism among Religious Right leaders. The Cornwall Alliance, joined by representatives of groups including Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council, and the American Family Association, recently announced a campaign against “The Green Dragon.” Members of the campaign attacked environmentalists’ “lust for political power” and accused them of “pointing people away from God,” “believing and promoting exaggerations and myths,” and “scaring little children to achieve [their] political ends,” among other charges.

Similarly, Tooley recycles bogus “Climategate” accusations and claims that the Episcopal Church’s efforts to protect the environment and work against climate change actually show that Episcopalians are “fear-mongers” who are replacing “the concept of divine judgment with apocalyptic environmental scare scenarios.” Tooley writes:

These particular Episcopal global warming fear-mongers came from the north and the south and the east and the west, as though in fulfillment of the biblical end times. Or more specifically, they came from South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the U.S., including the bishops of California, who no doubt would be piously loath to miss any global warming guilt-fest.

“We have lost a sense of connection with the world, and have become dominators rather than ‘good gardeners;’ over-developed countries have given themselves over to the sin of consumerism,” a fretful statement by the group intoned. “This sin, as sin always does, has clouded and distorted all our relationships: between people, with the Earth, and with our creator God.” The Religious Left sometimes, a little pantheistically, likes to speak of “relationships” with inanimate objects, like “the Earth.” For them, sometimes “the Earth” displaces a higher authority whom believers better merits a “relationship.”

The Episcopal group met around the theme of “climate justice” December 7 – 10, 2010 in San Pedro de Macorís, Dominican Republic at the Bishop Kellogg Retreat Center, intentionally overlapping with the United Nations’ climate change meeting in Mexico. For the Religious Left, the UN carries almost transcendent authority, though perhaps not so much as “the Earth.”

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The Anglican global warming group also committed to “recruit and empower a core of missionaries from the global south” to come to the United States, “in a ministry of accompaniment and consciousness-raising about the effects of climate change.” Traditional Christians understand missionaries as proclaimers of the Gospel. But the Religious Left has mostly reinterpreted redemption to mean conformity to its own political agenda. Its “missionaries” declare the Good News of reduced political and economic liberty in service to statism and international regulation.

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According to the Episcopal News Service, about 30 attended the Anglican global warming jamboree, including seminarians from Berkeley Divinity School, Yale Divinity School and several Latin American institutions. No doubt all were suitably enraged when told about repeated instances of “climate injustice” such as the consumption of resources “at such a frantic rate that we are stealing from the future generations of the Earth.” Participants complained about rising water levels “displacing entire island populations,” deforestation, the “decimation” of indigenous peoples, and degraded rivers affected by toxic runoff and human waste. All are the sinister products of global warming, the organizers insisted, having largely replaced the concept of divine judgment with apocalyptic environmental scare scenarios.

“Our hope is in God … who does not forget the covenants made with the Earth, and our hope is in our capacity to love,” the Anglican/Episcopal statement decreed, without citing a Scriptural reference for where the Almighty ever made agreements with “the Earth.” But as devoted servants of “the Earth,” the Episcopal Church segment of the Religious Left no doubt will persevere in its increasingly dubious global warming crusade, perhaps relating to a lonely Noah when he built the ark, and no doubt hoping for eventual vindication.

Remember that "Resisting the Green Dragon" video we posted last week featuring a who's who of Religious Right leaders explaining how the environmental movement is out to control the world and destroy Christianity?

Well, it turns out that, once again, Glenn Beck beat us to the punch because I just came across this Media Matters post reporting that Beck had Calvin Beisner and David Barton on his program back in October to promote it:

Glenn Beck doesn't want the Tides Foundation talking to your kids. That would be "indoctrination." How about people who call gay relationships "an abomination" and Islam a "devious religion"? Beck gives them his stamp of approval.

During a recent broadcast of his Fox News show, Beck attacked the Tides Foundation for sponsoring a 6-part curriculum that encourages Christian teens to "explore the relationship between their consumption, their faith, and the health of the planet." Beck claimed that the curriculum -- which is free for churches to download and was released 6 months ago -- was "propaganda" and "indoctrination," and told his viewers to "run for your life" if they "see anything like this" in their churches.

Beck went on to promote a 12-DVD anti-environmentalist series called Resisting the Green Dragon as an alternative to the Tides curriculum. The DVD's are sponsored by the Cornwall Alliance, a coalition of religious figures opposed to policies designed to fight "alleged man-made global warming." According to Beck's guest Calvin Beisner, who is selling the just-released DVDs for $50, Resisting the Green Dragon "examines the world view, the theology, the ethics, the politics, the economics, the science, the history, everything about the environmentalist movement and how it is intentionally infiltrating churches and intentionally targeting especially children."

I don't know how I missed this when Media Matters first posted it, so I just wanted to call attention to it now as further evidence that there is literally no right-wing conspiracy theory that Beck won't eagerly embrace and promote.