Customer Reviews

Divine Destruction: Dominion Theology and American Environmental Policy (Melville Manifestos)

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Please read this horror story, made all the more horrible because it is actually happening. We owe it to our children to become informed about the machinations of some of our politicians and their corporate allies. It is painful to realize, but we must take action before the destruction is irremediable. We must unite in our protest.

"Divine Destruction" by Stephanie Hendricks discusses Christian extremism and the environment. Importantly, the author shows how misguided Christian ideologists play themselves into the hands of the anti-environmental agenda of big business. While the book is small and could benefit from additional research and historical context, its cogent message is timely, urgent and relevant.

Ms. Hendricks explains that Reconstructionists care little for preventing environmental destruction; rather, they seek to gain dominion over government in the belief that Biblical prophecy must be fulfilled in order to herald the end of time and the return of Jesus. The author profiles many of the prominent Republicans who belong to and/or support such extremist Christian organizations including some of the most powerful members of congress, the Supreme Court and of course, President George W. Bush. In that light, we learn that many of the anti-environmental policy decisions made by the current administration might be explained in part by the irrational religious ideologies adhered to by its leaders.

However, Ms. Hendricks' investigative reporting reveals that Christianity is also used to mask an agenda of greed. Recalling that the cry of Manifest Destiny cloaked the imperial ambitions of 1840s America with the sanctity of a religious calling, the author explains that timber, mining, off-road vehicle manufacturing, theme park tourism and other corporate interests are benefiting immensely from the roll back of environmental protections called for by self-identified Christian politicians. Nevertheless, she is hopeful that progressive Christians such as Fred Kreuger and Peter Ilyn might succeed in helping the faithful understand that stewardship of the planet is a core Christian value and that the skewing of the Bible to support short-sighted and unsustainable policies is inherently immoral.

I recommend this book to everyone but assign it only 4 stars due to its brevity.

This is a very timely book on a very important issue that is unfortunately somewhat marred by a lack of depth on some of the issues. The timeliness stems partly from the popular success of Al Gore's extremely fine documentary AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and partly from recent polls that indicate some fragmentation in the Religious Right, as some evangelicals have broken rank over environmental issues. Over the past several decades poll after poll has shown the vast majority of Americans to be avid supporters of a wide range of environmental issues. From the famous memo written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell the sixties when he was a corporate lawyer (Google it if you are unfamiliar with the memo--for the record Powell later regretted writing it), the Right has understood that the American people sided with the Left on nearly every issue. Their response was an attempt to cultivate a media that was more friendly to right wing viewpoints (the creation of the myth of the liberal media was one of their first initiatives) and the attempt to literally redefine the terms in the debate. In this light, "Wise Use" is the latest in a tradition of verbal distortion by the Right. As Hendricks explains, "Wise Use" really just means using land for whatever economic purposes people desire. The term is deceptive because "Wise" implies "Responsible," whereas the opposite is the case.

Hendricks does not delve much into the history of American or European attitudes towards nature. This lack of detail and depth severely limits the usefulness of the booklet. But the background is crucial. Until the late 18th century Europeans evaluated land and nature entirely in terms of its usefulness. The Alps, for instance, through most of history were literally considered a waste. You couldn't do anything with them. You couldn't farm on them. There were no trees at the upper reaches, so they didn't supply lumber. You couldn't fee sheep on much of them. They were simply useless. But gradually new aesthetic categories cultivated by people like Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Schelling enabled Europeans to view nature in a different light. Specifically, Kant's contrast between the "beautiful" and the "sublime" gave them new concepts for evaluating nature. A lovely garden, for instance, came to be considered "beautiful," while a raging waterfall was "sublime," partly for the feelings of awe and wonder that it engendered in the spectator. These ways of thinking were reflected in American attitudes and developed to new heights. The early Puritans and other settlers viewed the land primarily in terms of its usefulness. Even well into the 19th century, well after changing attitudes in Europe, Americans primarily viewed the landscape in terms of usefulness and cultivation. The landscape was beautiful only to the extent that something was done to it by humans. Things began to change first with artists, especially with Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School in the 1820s and with the development in America of Transcendentalism, which took over the concepts articulated by Kant and translated them into an American context. The writings of Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman provided an intellectual context for Americans as they ventured farther West and discovered many of the natural wonders there. As a result, in the United States even more than in Europe there arose a way of thinking about nature that conceived wilderness as beautiful and majestic and important in its own right.

But even as most Americans embraced this new way of thinking about Nature, there have always been a much smaller group of Americans who were anxious to exploit it for economic gain. But faced with the overwhelming resistance to the economic exploitation of wilderness areas, logging and mineral and recreational interests have had to resort to new and more subtle ways of manipulating public interests. One way has been to make "environmentalist" a dirty word, despite the fact that perhaps 75% of the American populace strongly support environmental causes. "Wise Use" is another such instance. Little of what I have mentioned here appears in Hendricks book. My complaint with the book is that it is completely fails to provide a historical context for the problems it addresses. I think this severely limits the usefulness of the book.

The book is much better at showing how the "Wise Use" advocates (which are nearly 100% business interests with little popular backing) have linked with Right Wing Christian Dominionist movements. On the actual discussion of the Dominionist or Christian Recontructionist movements, however, the book is once again somewhat lacking in depth. The various right wing religious movements were simply not discussed with the kind of precision and accuracy that they could have been. While the variations among Dominionists and Reconstructionists are analyzed with sharp distinctions by writers like Sara Diamond, Frederick Clarkson, Kevin Phillips, and Michelle Goldberg, Hendricks muddles some of the differences between them. For instance, especially on environmental issues whether one is premillenialist or postmillennialist has enormous consequences. But she makes very little distinction between the two.

Nonetheless, despite the overall lack of background and lack of specificity in writing about Christian right wing movements, this is a very important little book. It calls attention to the unnatural link between business groups that want to have free rein to use natural areas for whatever purposes they would like and religious groups who believe that consuming all of nature's resources will spark the return of Jesus. The strongest part of the book by far is in discussing the link between these groups and politicians in Washington with very strong links with either the business "Wise Use" factions or the right-wing religionists. This part of the book is extremely disturbing and really brings home the fact that too many of our political leaders really are in thrall to special interests that do not benefit the nation as a whole. The irony is that so many of these people talk of environmentalists as if they represented "special interests," whereas environmentalists unquestionably represent the general interests.

So I recommend this book, but with hesitation. Is this a good book if you have done no prior reading in environmental history or the Christian Recontructionist movement? I'm simply not sure. But if someone has read, say, Roderick Nash's WILDERNESS AND THE AMERICAN MIND and Michelle Goldberg's KINGDOM COMING: THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM or Kevin Phillip's AMERICAN THEOCRACY, it is likely to be useful in fleshing out the larger story. I view it largely as a niche book, most likely helpful only to those who are already familiar with most of the broader topics discussed.

I will say that I was grateful for the section dealing with Pope John Paul II's thinking about George W. Bush. I was, of course, aware that John Paul II did not care for Bush and was passionately opposed to many of his policies. He and Bush clashed frequently on a host of issues from capital punishment to social justice to almost everything touching foreign policy. But in reading that John Paul II regretted that his failing health left him incapable of fighting effectively Bush's influence and in fact thought that Bush might be the Anti-Christ or at least preached an anti-Gospel, I was struck by the irony that while Bush demonized his enemies the world's most famous Christian religious leader demonized Bush. This is especially delicious given the fact that John Paul II seems to be on the fast track towards being canonized.