Gore’s God

In the office of Al Gore, a mammoth photograph of Planet Earth hangs resplendently as a reminder of the vice president’s global consciousness. After visiting his office last year, National Council of Churches chief Joan Brown Campbell hailed the photo as a “religious icon for our time that God intended for God’s people.” She said it symbolized the desire to live “at one with nature, with the divine, and with humankind.”

The liberal church leader’s perception of the earth photo as a window into the divine may well have been intended by the vice president. Since the 1992 publication of his Earth in the Balance, Gore has proclaimed his crusade to save the earth from an “ecological Kristallnacht” as a sacred calling. Conservatives, especially religious ones, have derided his holy rhetoric about the planet as New Age pantheism.

But while portraying the vice president as a modern Druid, Gore’s critics have failed to notice his key role in permeating America’s churches with the Gospel of green salvation. Gore’s Baptist earnestness in promoting the environmentalist cause has been indispensable in winning Catholics and evangelicals over to a cause previously reserved mainly for secularists, New Agers, and theologically ambiguous mainline Protestants.

Arguably, Gore’s enviro-theology has more strongly influenced the policies of America’s churches than it has the policies of the administration for which he works.

Besides his apocalyptic rhetoric, there is actually little that is recognizably Southern Baptist about Gore’s environmentalism. His world view and theology probably were shaped more by his attendance at St. Alban’s (Episcopal) Boy’s School in Washington, D.C., and at Vanderbilt (United Methodist) Divinity School in Nashville. “My religious faith has always been an important part of my life,” Gore told a reporter in 1991. There is no reason to doubt his claim. He writes and speaks about his faith and his prayer life with conviction.

Although he now belongs to Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in Arlington, Virginia, Gore attended a mainline Presbyterian Church before joining his wife’s congregation. According to some parishioners, Mt. Vernon Baptist Church belongs to the small “moderate” wing of its denomination and hardly represents the stalwartly conservative Southern Baptist Convention. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention has criticized Gore and President Clinton for their abortion-rights stance, even urging Baptists to pray for their misguided coreligionists in the White House. Gore returned the favor by labeling as “religious extremists” church groups, like the Southern Baptists, that opposed Henry Foster’s nomination as surgeon general.

Gore began writing Earth in the Balance several weeks after a car had knocked his six-year-old son thirty feet through the air within sight of his horrified father. The accident understandably threw the then-senator from Tennessee into a new epic of his “spiritual journey.” His son’s miraculous survival and recovery motivated Gore to address the earth’s impending environmental disaster as a religious rather than a political issue.

Quoting New Age men’s movement guru Robert Bly, Gore wrote that his son’s accident caused him to go “into the ashes” and to experience the “personal healing” and “deeper religious sensibility” that the “global environment” also desperately requires. Personal recovery allowed him to visualize global recovery.

“I am not a scientist,” explained Gore to a joint gathering of scientists and religious activists after his book’s debut. “I’m not a theologian. I am a person of faith who [is] convinced that it [the global ecological threat] is at bottom a spiritual crisis.”

In his book, Gore warns that our current consumptive and “arrogant” civilization resulted from a “heretical” mistake that Christians committed 350 years ago, under the influence of Bacon and Descartes, in separating the spirit from the body. Science was disconnected from religion. Society became “dysfunctional, consuming ever-larger quantities of the resources of the earth.”

“When giving us dominion over the Earth, did God choose an appropriate technology?” Gore asks in his book’s introduction. Gore’s answer after nearly four hundred pages of text is: probably not.

Healing the earth, writes Gore, demands reunion between religion and science by making “the environment the central organizing principle of our civilization.” He legitimately cites his own Baptist tradition in justifying his view that man is God’s caretaker of the planet. And he commends Pope John Paul II for welcoming “a new ecological awareness [that is] beginning to emerge.”

But in his quest for religious union with science, Gore strays into territory foreign to traditional Christians. He summons up teachings from Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Bahai texts, along with Native American prayers to the “Great Spirit.” More bizarrely, Gore waxes nostalgic about a “single earth goddess” who benevolently reigned in the hearts of prehistoric humans.

More environmentally sensitive than today’s religionists, this divine Earth Mother was swept aside by “distinctly masculine” religion, Gore laments. The last trace of goddess worship was “eliminated” by Christianity in the fifteenth century. He happily notes that Gaia, the ancient Greek earth deity, has revived in the form of a “hypothesis” that portrays the planet as a single, self-regulating superorganism.

The Gaia theory has “evoked a spiritual response in many of those who hear it,” Gore opines approvingly. “It cannot be accidental that the percentage of salt in our blood streams is roughly the same as the percentage of salt in the oceans of the world,” he notes as he praises the “complex interrelationship of all living and nonliving things.”

Gore wonders, “Why do our children believe that the Kingdom of God is up, somewhere in the ethereal reaches of space, far removed from this planet. . . . It is my own belief that the image of God can be seen in every corner of creation, even in us, but only faintly.” He enthuses further, “by experiencing nature in its fullest—our own and that of all creation— with our senses and with our spiritual imagination, we can glimpse, ‘bright shining as the sun,’ an infinite image of God.”

Gore’s book aroused praise from people like Jim Conlon of the Institute on Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California. “The Gaia hypothesis says that things are conscious and alive, and that this extends beyond the human,” he told Insight magazine in 1992. “Animism was one of the principles Christianity was founded on. Anything alive has a soul.”

More orthodox Christians were dismissive. “It’s paganism,” said Notre Dame philosophy professor Ralph Mclnerny about the Gaia theory. “It is a kind of Earth worship, with man as an evanescent manifestation of an eternal reality which is Earth.”

Gore himself usually has been careful to employ traditional language when directly describing his personal religious beliefs. “The foundation of all of my work on the environment is my faith in Jesus Christ,” he told Christianity Today during the 1992 campaign. “And my conviction [is] that the purpose of life is indeed as I learned in Baptist Sunday school so many years ago: to glorify God.”

But with audiences outside conservative Christian circles, Gore sometimes is less careful. In 1991, before publication of Earth in the Balance, he unveiled his enviro-theology at the “green” Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. On the annual feast day of St. Francis, the cathedral celebrates an earth mass, whose music has included the taped cry of a timber wolf and the aquatic grunts of a humpback whale. Prayers to Ra, the Egyptian sun god, and other ecologically safe deities are not uncommon.

Amid the “wonderful sights and sense and sounds” of the “environmental cathedral” on the feast day of St. Francis, Gore hailed St. John the Divine as a “think tank for restoration ecology.” As the senator spoke, an elephant, a camel, a vulture, a swarm of bees, dogs, cats, parakeets, plants, and other living creatures patiently awaited their annual blessing from the cathedral dean.

“This service is remarkable in part because it celebrates the re-awakening of a truer expression of what our relationship to the other living things of the earth really is,” Gore solemnly intoned. “The cause of environmental integrity and justice must occupy a position of utmost priority for people of faith.”

Curiously, Gore’s concern about living things has not in recent years included unborn humans, although he had opposed federal funding for abortions while a senator.

His views on abortion, and those of his wife, changed dramatically when he joined the Clinton ticket in 1992. As vice president, Gore’s defense of abortion rights as leader of the U.S. delegation to the 1995 United Nations population conference in Cairo drew especially harsh criticism from the Vatican.

“Jesus told us that the Kingdom of God is within,” Gore said in his cathedral sermon. “Why are so many uncomfortable with that notion? And if God is within us, is God not also within other living things? Is God not also in the rest of creation? We can receive a revelation from all of the world. We are not separate from the earth. God is not separate from the earth.”

Neither Joan Brown Campbell of the National Council of Churches nor the other church dignitaries present for Gore’s speech then or later protested his assertion that “God is not separate from the earth,” or that the earth is “God’s home.” They evidently had forgotten that for believers in the transcendent God of the Bible, the earth is but a footstool to the sovereign and very distinct Creator of all creation.

During his sermon, Gore mentioned a closed meeting held earlier in 1991 at the cathedral, in which he, along with denominational leaders and scientists, charted how they could strive together in defense of “God’s creation.” A year later, a more open version of the same gathering convened on Capitol Hill, with Gore as sponsor.

With pop scientist Carl Sagan presiding, the scientists and religionists strove to end their centuries of animosity. In his remarks, Gore quoted Teilhard de Chardin, Elie Wiesel, Saint Augustine, and the Dalai Lama as he examined aloud the fate of the earth through “the lens of faith and the analytical capacities of science.” Predictably, the scientists, clergy and Gore were unified in their opposition to the Bush administration, which, in Gore’s words, was “crafting a policy of photo opportunities and symbols instead of real commitments and effective policies to protect the global environment.”

After leading the assembled scientists and clergy word by word through a statement known as “The Joint Appeal by Science and Religion for the Environment,” Gore announced at a press conference that science and religion were once again reunited in defense of the planet.

The “Joint Appeal” laid the foundation for the “National Religious Partnership for the Environment,” whose first meeting was hosted by Gore at the White House’s Old Executive Office Building in October 1993. Members of the interfaith partnership include the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and the Evangelical Environmental Network.

With $4.5 million secured from groups like the Pew Charitable Trust, Gore predicted the unprecedented ecumenical thrust would “trigger the beginning of grassroots activity in tens of thousands of religious congregations across the country.” Catholic Bishop James Malone of Youngstown, Ohio, a former president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, attended the White House meeting and called the partnership “a critical contribution to bring together the struggle for justice with the protection of the environment.” He added, “We bring together our defense of the poor with our care of the earth.”

Appropriately, James Morton, dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, was also present and praised Gore for his crucial role in creating the partnership. The environment, he said, “is not just another issue but an inescapable challenge to what it means to be religious.” The partnership’s offices are now headquartered at Morton’s cathedral.

Present as well was Benjamin Chavis, a racial justice officer with the United Church of Christ. “There is a new movement taking shape in America: It’s called environmental justice,” said Chavis, who would later lose his directorship of the NAACP because of charges of sexual harassment. “It’s the one issue that can unite blacks and whites, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans.”

Ironically, Joan Campbell of the National Council of Churches, a group that is notorious for the uniformity of its political liberalism added, “The gift we bring to this partnership is the diversity of our membership.” More indicative of the partnership’s genuine outreach to religious groups not traditionally plugged into the environmental movement was the representation of numerous evangelical groups, such as the National Association of Evangelicals, World Vision, and the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.

The partnership, besides trying to “green” fifty-three thousand religious congregations, also established a consultative relationship with the Union of Concerned Scientists, regularly seeking advice from reliably left-leaning scientists like Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, Nobel laureate Dr. Henry Kendall of MIT, and Carl Sagan, who called the new relationship between science and religion “an extraordinary departure.”

The partnership’s first project was a Black Church Summit on Environmental Justice hosted by Gore in Washington in December 1993. The objective was to fight the “targeting” of poor and minority communities for environmental hazards. “Areas of the world suffering the worst environmental problems are areas of the world where people have had the least power to defend themselves,” Gore told the audience which responded with shouts of “Amen!”

“It is time for this nation to respond to this crisis. Whenever a crisis has confronted black communities in this nation, the black churches have led the effort to respond,” Gore preached as he tossed aside his prepared remarks to his audience’s delight. “What gives us the right to assume the earth is ours and not the Lord’s?”

Gore claimed that certain communities are targeted by polluters “because the people who do the dumping conceive of themselves as separate from those upon which [sic] they do the dumping.” One black pastor responded: “Our babies are choking. Our children are sick. Our people are dying”— because toxic plants and hazardous waste dumps are often constructed near black neighborhoods. Gore promised action. By early 1993, the White House had established a new Office on Environmental Policy, one of whose chief responsibilities was to act as a liaison with environmental religious groups.

Beginning in 1993, the partnership began annually distributing environmentalist tracts on Earth Day to fifty-three thousand religious congregations, including every Catholic parish. Four different kinds of kits were prepared—one each geared toward Catholics, mainliners, evangelicals, and Jews. The materials suggested prayers, sermon ideas, scriptural citations, religious-school lessons, community projects, and social justice issues of ecological concern.

“There has been significant engagement in the mainline Protestant denominations,” observed Paul Gorman, the executive director of the partnership. “But this is an entirely new level of commitment by the Catholic community, Jewish community, and evangelical community.” Echoing his mentor, Vice President Gore, he affirmed that, “If we’re not in the right relationship with the creation, then we’re not in the right relationship with the Creator.”

Sister Patricia Sigler, a Dominican nun, agreed. Her order transformed a 130-acre property near Cleveland into an “environmental center” where suburban adults and inner city children could learn ecological awareness together. “Our goal is to witness to the fact that the earth in itself has value and [we must] use it in a responsible way.” Such an attitude, said Sigler—whose project is a model for the partnership—is “very much tied-in with any religious faith.”

“Care for the poor and the earth go together,” chimed Walt Grazer, who manages the Environmental Justice Program of the U.S. Catholic Conference. “Ecology is a moral issue.” Grazer’s office was founded in 1993 to coordinate with the partnership, through which it channels “environmental justice” grants to local Catholic groups. “If you have toxic water, what kind of baptism do you have?” asked Janiver Badillo, an environmentalist with the Commission on Catholic Community Action of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese.

Inspired in part by the partnership, the U.S. Catholic Bishops opposed an article of the “Contract With America” that required the federal government to compensate landowners for environmental regulation that reduced their land values. “This is the first time we’ve seen a crossover between religious movements and environmental movements,” noted a Senate staffer from a western state not normally sensitive to ecological concerns. “It’s so new it’s hard to know how to respond.”

But Gorman stresses that the partnership’s emphasis is not strictly political. “Our focus is not on legislation, but rather the integration of this issue permanently into religious life.”

Other partnership leaders agree that their work is for spiritual renewal. “My own Christian faith, knowledge of God, and understanding of God has been transformed by this study,” said Paul Thompson of World Vision. “This has born more spiritual fruit for me in the last couple of years than anything else I have worked on in my faith walk.”

Not all responses to the partnership have been so positive. “The religious environmental movement takes away from traditional religious values,” says John Shanahan, a Roman Catholic who is an environmental policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. He points to the Catholic environmental booklet, which claims minorities are victims of “environmental racism” because a disproportionate number reside near polluted areas, as overly conspiratorial.

The churches support environmental regulations that would drive away “the very jobs and industries which employ minorities in these areas,” Shanahan pointed out to the Detroit News in 1994. Father. John Sirico of the Acton Institute similarly warned in the Wall Street Journal that, “There is no [biblical] commandment against littering, but there is a very straightforward one about worshipping false gods.”

America’s largest Protestant denomination has no affiliation with the partnership. “We make it very clear we do not worship creation, we worship the God of creation,” Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission told the New York Times in 1994. “For us to join with other groups that don’t speak expressly in biblical terms dilutes our message.”

Still, the partnership has been enormously successful in channeling its green message through religious institutions comprising over one hundred million Americans. It claims direct knowledge of two thousand congregations involved directly in environmental justice work. Many, if not most, of its active participants probably accept at face value the traditional Christian language that the partnership publishes to justify its agenda.

The partnership repeats Vice President Gore’s claim that it merely seeks to exercise biblical stewardship and to preserve God’s “very good” earth. But who exactly is their god? At a January 1994 ceremony in Richmond, Virginia, to honor “Religious Freedom Day,” Gore likened his religious beliefs to Thomas Jefferson’s. “Like Jefferson, I believe that God is too powerful and too mysterious to be contained within the rigid orthodoxy of any religious faith,” Gore pronounced. Like the vice president, many of his religious environmentalist devotees seem loathe to “confine” God to any “rigid” definition. Unlike Gore, Jefferson did not confuse the Supreme Being with his creation. Although skeptical about much of the New Testament’s super-naturalism, Jefferson was a rationalist who accepted the Judeo-Christian concept of God as the sustainer of the universe, not a part of it.

Gore and the National Religious Partnership for the Environment speak of humanity’s “relationship” with the earth. But are not relationships reserved to persons, not inanimate objects? Orthodox Christians of all denominations believe in good stewardship of the earth. But more importantly, they believe in right relations with their fellow man, and, supremely, with God’s one Incarnation within humanity.

Author

  • Mark Tooley

    Mark Tooley works for the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C.

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