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95 THESES UPDATED An Urgent Call for Christian Action against Global Warming & Wealth Concentration
Philip W. Marden
95 THESES UPDATED An Urgent Call for Christian Action against Global Warming & Wealth Concentration
Copyright Š 2011 by Philip W. Marden ISBN no. 978-0-615-64089-1
Dedicated to the memory of My mother, Freda Wobber Marden, educator and sixtime campaigner for Norman Thomas My father, Charles Frederick Marden, sociologist and ardent advocate for civil rights My mentor, Bayard Rustin, pacifist, civil rights leader, and organizer of the 1963 March on Washington My uncle, Gordon Berryman, with the keenest wit and twinkliest eyes I’ve ever seen My uncle and namesake, Dr. Philip A. Marden, my rescuer
Also dedicated to Dennis Kucinich, perhaps the most Christ-like person ever to run for the U. S. presidency Jimmy Carter, a president who put the well-being of his country above personal ambition Sister M. Farley, of whom St. Peter must be very proud Elizabeth Warren, an angel running for the U. S. Senate Pete Seeger, hero to all who care Elza and Leah, the apples of my eye
The goals: An Institutional Ark for Human Survival Churches to become Major Employers A “Christian Deal” to replace a “New Deal” A Code of Christian Environmental Action Uniting “Ninety-Nine Percenters” and Tea Partiers Church Congregations to Light the Path for the World to Follow
Thematic Outline Theses 1-16: What the Church is failing to do Theses 17-27: Contemporary evils and the angels trying to fight them Theses 28-31: The current political situation Theses 32-47: What the Church should be doing Theses 48-61: Why a Church employment program is necessary Theses 62-84: Institutional changes needed if life on earth is to continue Theses 85-94: Specific steps to save life on earth Thesis 95: What would Jesus do?
95 THESES UPDATED An Urgent Call for Christian Action against Global Warming & Wealth Concentration By Philip W. Marden
Introduction October 31, 2017 will be the 500th Anniversary of Martin Luther’s tacking of his 95 Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany. By this act he sought to make the Christian Church, and Christianity in general, more Christlike. This treatise is an attempt to honor Luther by once again attempting to make the “Church” more Christ-like, and to encourage Christians to abandon their sinful habits and walk in the footsteps of our Lord and Savior. In this disquisition the term “Church”, where spelled with a capital “C”, denotes the organization of Christianity as a whole, including all branches, denominations, sects, priests, ministers, other functionaries, congregations, individuals, values, norms, roles, role behaviors, buildings and other physical structures, and literary, musical, and artistic works.
Luther’s primary focus was on the sins committed by Church functionaries. Today, it is the sinfulness of all humankind that is at issue, sinfulness posing a serious threat to our species’ survival, and to the survival of all life on planet earth as well. The theses presented herein focus primarily on two serious problems, environmental degradation and wealth concentration, problems that are getting steadily worse with each passing day. Ralph Nader also has focused on these problems in his book Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us (Seven Stories Press, 2009). The book’s title suggests that the concentration of wealth in the United States has passed the point of no return. The lives of all humans are now in the hands of the “top one percent”. This social class essentially owns and controls the nation’s economic system, a system threatening life on earth because of “global warming”—a phenomenon caused by the burning of fossil fuels for energy. The implication is that, barring a “St. Paul on the road to Damascus” awakening on the part of the super-rich, the days of humankind may be numbered. Is religion so weak an institution that it cannot intervene in the destruction of God’s creation—life on our planet? Many Christians get intensely aroused over the issue of abortion. If they care so deeply about the life of one embryo, how is it that they take a pass when it comes to protecting all of life? The Christian Church is supposed to be the organizational setting in which those who love and revere God and His Son, Jesus Christ, can learn how to express their love. Protecting God’s handiwork would seem to be one of the best ways to demonstrate that love and
reverence. So much damage has already been done to this larger temple. There is not much time left to save life on earth. It is way past time for Christians to embark on a path to stop such ecocide. The following theses seek to illuminate one such path. I stopped regular attendance at church services over fifty years ago, after having been confirmed at the Emanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1947. My church and the Christian Church as a whole seemed irrelevant, not having answers to my questions about why there was so much violence, cruelty, exploitation, inequality, and injustice in the world. Accordingly, just as my idols, Norman Thomas and my father, left the ministry to embark on secular paths to try to make the world a better place, Thomas in the polity and my dad in academia, so did I essentially abandon the church, searching for roles more relevant to contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental problem-solving. My country, the United States, was founded largely on Christian principles. Even today, a sizeable majority of Americans identify themselves, even if only nominally, as Christian. Accordingly, the frame of reference for these theses is primarily the U. S. A., although it is hoped that the models herein presented will be emulated globally. True Christianity is not an “easy� religion. Although it has been turned, in large measure, into a comfortable, social, status-symbol kind of thing, being a true Christian is extremely hard. Obeying the norms of showing mercy, loving justice, caring for the poor, the golden rule, turning
the other cheek, and forgiving one’s enemies is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. I hope and pray there are Christians up to the challenge of helping to restore our religion to Christ’s intent. I believe Christianity has, deep within it, the fortitude and moral fibre to turn itself into a force capable of saving life on earth. Let’s get to work and make Jesus Christ and Martin Luther proud of us!
In the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ, Amen.
God’s Creation is in Jeopardy 1. In the beginning God created all things, space and time, the earth and the firmament, light and dark, day and night, the waters, land, and air, and all living things, including plants and animals. He created humans in His likeness and gave them stewardship over all other species of life on earth—a myriad species in a dynamically equilibratory state of mutual interdependence. It is the delicate balance of this system that has enabled humankind to survive. However, the balance is being destroyed, not by the Creator, not primarily by forces of nature, but by the very beings charged by the Creator to be the guardians of life. Yet the Christian Church stands by, apparently helpless, as evil forces, those of greed, arrogance, corruption, violence, and authoritarianism, undermine earth’s ecosystem, called the “biosphere”. Indeed, instead of directing parishioners’ attention to the evil, the Church has a tendency to direct their attention away from threats to life and toward
abstract theological concepts and either irrelevant causes or practical applications of faith that amount to nothing more than tokenism.
The Church is “Out to Lunch” 2. To Christians, the Church is supposed to be the leader in the social institution of religion, the institution responsible for the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of ultimate cultural values. The Creator gave humankind a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, to teach us these values, including the protection of His creation, life on earth. Allowing destruction of creation is not honoring and loving God, just the opposite. If we love Him, it must follow that we also love His handiwork. The Church is not only failing to counteract the evil, oftentimes it serves as an apologist for it. There are so many branches, denominations, and sects of Christianity, each with a nuanced interpretation of arbitrarily selected passages in the Bible. These groups compete for membership on the basis of subsidiary theological canons. Apparently few of them are focused on the “big picture that matters”, on the erosion of God’s creation—life and the planetary life-support system—and the imminent death of many species, at least not to the point that parishioners are moved to try to effectively counteract this malaise.
Life is a “Fringe Issue”? 3. The Church is not counteracting the effort by powerful forces in human society to relegate the issue of environmental
protection to the position of a fringe or side issue in the public mind. How is it possible for something that enables life to exist on planet earth to be a fringe issue? The public has been deliberately misled concerning priorities. Jobs, reducing the national debt, ending abortion, the sanctity of marriage, freedom from governmental regulations, reduced taxes, immigration reform, gun owners’ rights—these are the “big” issues of the day, along with national security. Overlooked is the fact that if there is a serious degradation of the global ecosystem, all of these issues may be moot, as human society may cease to exist. Conservatives in the United States complain about burdening future generations with the national debt; they seem much less concerned about the quality of life of their grandchildren and great grandchildren who will face an environmental holocaust caused by global warming! Floods, forest and field fires, hurricanes, and tornados are increasing in frequency. Soon they will be everyday occurrences, and the death rate will skyrocket! Talk about national security! Every nation’s effort to defend itself should be prioritizing the war against environmental degradation over wars to protect oil supplies! The Church is remiss in its responsibility to provide counsel in this regard, so that people and nations get their priorities straight. In the 1930s, the Church failed to stop fascism from achieving power in Europe. As a result, the world experienced both a genocidal holocaust and a second world war. Today the world faces another holocaust, one affecting all of humankind. We are facing the destruction of the very basis for life on earth, the biosphere-enabling climate, because of the warming of the planet’s atmosphere to dangerous levels. Once again the Church is failing to make a serious effort to avert a disaster, one that may be of catastrophic dimensions.
Greed, unchecked 4. Today the Christian Church is standing by, idly, as the forces of greed, manifest in an economic institution of “corporate socialism”, destroy the life-support system of the planet. The economic institution creates the products and provides the services we use, and indeed many of them are beneficial and do not cause environmental damage. Examples are windmills, solar panels, organically-grown foods, and many types of medicine. Unfortunately, many other products, while they may be beneficial to humans, are doing great harm to earth’s ecology. One example is carbon-based fuels, including oil, gas, and coal, which are burned for energy generation and transportation. The burning is causing both global warming and pollution. Furthermore, the processes involved in the extraction of some raw materials create by-products which are also harmful for the ecosystem. Examples are the strip-mining of coal and the hydraulic fracturing of geologic rock strata to release natural gas, both of which contaminate surface waters and underground water aquifers. As a result of global warming and pollution, many species of life are dying out. Other species are frantically migrating to higher latitudes to seek an environment with the temperature, humidity, and nutrient sources they need to survive. Earth’s surface is on a trajectory to become a desert. Such destruction of God’s handiwork is happening because many in the business world do not have life as their primary goal. Their main goal is financial profit, and the power and status that such wealth enables. To eliminate harmful products and by-products would require a degree of temporary inconvenience and financial sacrifice on their part. Financial profit in the short term might be less, and this is not
acceptable to them. To protect their freedom to make and distribute goods and provide services without controlling the direct or indirect harm involved, business and financial interests have essentially “bought” the institutions responsible for regulating or influencing them, including government, education, and even religion. Payments are made to leaders in these other institutions, whether by fees or salaries, political and other donations, commissions, or bribes. The business community is repaid many times over for this “largesse”. Government officials serve the interests of their patrons in several ways, including financially “bailing out” big banks and big corporations when they experience substantial losses, structuring tax policy to their benefit, discouraging any free market competition that might threaten entrenched corporate interests, and not enacting or enforcing governmental regulations to protect the environment and human life, health, and safety. When government acts in this manner and becomes the lackey of big business, the political economy can be labeled either “state capitalism” or “corporate socialism”. Educational and religious leaders also repay their corporate donors. They do not cry “Foul!” They do not effectively raise either moral or scientifically-based objections to harmful corporate practices. The one institution that should be the ultimate protector of life, the Christian Church, whether because of ignorance, indifference, low self-esteem, fear, or monetary gain, has been complicit in the erosion of God’s magnificent creation, life on earth. As was the case 500 years ago, when Martin Luther identified major shortcomings of the Church, that institution is still quite content to rake in both tithes from the poor and “payoffs” by the rich, while paying scant attention to the harm being done to both humans and the environment.
Live and Let Die 5. God gave humans free will. We are free to choose between good and evil. With our free will, many of us have opted to choose evil, to participate in a social system that is destroying God’s creation, the magnificent web of life on earth. We have many rationalizations or justifications for our behavior, including jobs, wealth or financial security, comfort or convenience, family well-being, and tradition or custom. Unfortunately, the Christian Church is not intervening in the socialization process in an effort to counteract environmentallyinsensitive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that have been programmed by those profiting from the status quo.
“Indulgences”—A Sin of the Church 6. In the year 1517 A. D., it was the failure of the Church to live up to its ideals that prompted Martin Luther to tack his 95 theses on the door of the castle church of Saxony in Wittenberg. Church officials were selling “indulgences” to their parishioners. Indulgences were certificates that assured church members of the remission of temporal punishment for sin. Their purchase was represented as an act of penance. However, the primary operative sin in this instance was not that of parishioners, but that of Church functionaries, namely their greed for the riches accruing from the mass sale of indulgences. Today, greed is once again the operative sin. However, this time the greed is primarily on the part of functionaries in the polity and economy.
A Sin of Omission 7. In 2012 A. D., the Church is not asking its members to purchase indulgences. Today the Church is guilty, not of a sin of commission, but one of omission, namely, failure to call out the corporate “powers that be” on their environmentallydestructive practices, and to rally parishioners throughout the nation and the world to fight this evil as Christian soldiers.
Jesus Christ vs. John Calvin 8. The Christian Church has been guilty of feeding the frenzy of greed. Half a millennium ago, one of Christianity’s influencial theologians, John Calvin, posited that success in accumulating financial and material wealth is one sign that God has predestined those who experience such success to be among the “saved”, chosen to enter Heaven and have eternal life. Unfortunately for the life-support system of planet earth, the motivation to prove that one is “saved” by means of accumulating greater and greater wealth has helped to foster a global economic and political system that is fast using up the limited resources of the planet, causing both wars and the death of one species of life after another because of global warming and the polluting of air, water, and land. Today the survival of the entirety of the global ecosystem is in jeopardy. Regarding the basic cause of the destruction of life on earth, the motivation to amass financial and material wealth, Calvin’s teaching is directly contrary to the teachings of our Lord and Savior. Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew
19:24). The Church today is remiss in its responsibility to teach parishioners that worship of material wealth is a sin, one that is now threatening all of life on earth.
The Gift of Life 9. The Church is failing in its mission to teach reverence for the Creator and appreciation for the life He created. Countless miraculous events resulted in life on planet earth. We Christians believe that the existence of this life is so improbable as to be impossible, impossible, that is, without God. Yet most people, including many Christians, do not stand in awe of this miracle, and lack a sense of wonder as to how the magnificent universe, including life on earth, could have happened. The Church has been remiss in its responsibility to open the eyes of its members to the miraculousness and beauty of existence and life, so that they are humbled by, and appreciative of, its magnificence. As a result, parishioners lack the motivation to do everything in their power to protect God’s precious and wondrous creation.
God’s Will 10. The Bible relates God’s Will. By creating, God has placed being as superior to nothingness. By creating life, God has made life supremely valuable. Jesus demonstrated God’s commitment to life by His own sacrifice to save all of humanity, and, in dramatic fashion, by raising Lazarus from the dead, both acts indicating the preciousness of life. Knowing
God’s Will, why is today’s Church so silent, so acquiescent, as greedy humans and their perverse institutions and cultural values destroy such a precious thing as life?
A Shield Against Evil, or Against Seeing It? 11. It should be acknowledged that the Christian Church today, following Christ’s example, indeed is engaged in ministering and teaching, healing, feeding, and giving to the poor. But it does so in a limited way, in order to avoid the appearance of posing a threat to business and financial interests that are “in control”. Essentially each Church functionary is saying, “I will minister to your needs today, even though it is obvious that sooner rather than later your life and all life on earth will end prematurely, because I refuse to try to stop the political, economic, and cultural forces that are destroying the biosphere. Rather than inform you about the ‘big picture that matters’, I am trying to shield you from seeing it, by diverting your attention to side issues, those not germane to the survival of life on earth. God’s permitting corporations and the super-rich to destroy the environment means that He wants His handiwork to be destroyed! God designed a “survival of the fittest” or “social Darwinist” system of life on earth. He wants this system to continue and prevail, even if it results in the ending of all life! Those with money have the power; liberals’ and progressives’ efforts to reverse environmental degradation and social injustice are an exercise in futility!”
Such functionaries may not use these exact words, however, judging from their inaction, this is their message. The message, however, is contrary to the ethos of the Bible!
Ark of Survival: Then and Now 12. A dramatic illustration of God’s commitment to life is the story of Noah’s ark (Exodus: 6-9). In Noah’s day, human evil was widespread. Selfishness, greed, sloth, corruption, violence, deceit, and apathy were dominant cultural themes. God did not abide such sinfulness. Yet He saw that goodness and purity existed in the life of Noah. Accordingly, He arranged for evil to perish and for goodness to survive. The ark He taught Noah how to build was not only for saving Noah and his family, but for saving the entire web of life on earth as well. Accordingly, when the rains came and drowned all evil on earth, goodness— the lives of Noah and his family and representatives of all living creatures—survived. Today, with evil destroying one species of life after another, why is the Church not leading the effort to build an ark of survival?
An Institutional Ark 13. Noah’s ark was made of wood. Wood was sufficient in those days, because life was much simpler. Today, human culture is so complex, intricate, technological, and widespread, that an ark capable of enabling life on earth to survive the cultural and technological tsunami of destruction must necessarily be institutional. To create an institutional ark of
survival is an enormous and challenging job, one which today’s Church apparently is not up to. This must change! In theses to follow, many recommendations are made for institutional changes on behalf of biosphere survival.
Might is Right? 14. A dominant theme of today’s global culture is “might is right”. This was clearly illustrated by a recent decision made by the supreme court of the most powerful nation on earth. The court decided that it is legal and right for people of great wealth to buy and thereby control government. The specific operative mechanism was “unlimited political campaign contributions”. Thereby did the court permit economic forces motivated by financial profit to control the mindset and behavior of the citizens of that nation, to propagandize them so that they vote into office governmental representatives who enact legislation to enhance the wealth of those who are already super-rich, regardless of the threats to life posed by the practices of corporations owned by that social class. Where was the outcry from the Church to this sellout of democracy, this judicial blessing given to vastly increased concentration of power in the hands of those destroying life on earth? A true Christian Church would have organized a peaceful mass demonstration of millions of citizens in the capital of that nation, citizens refusing to disperse until the court acknowledged that “right is might” and reversed its decision, or until lawmakers changed the laws permitting such contemptuousness of the right of the people to know the truth about where political candidates stand on the issues and not be blinded by propaganda, so that they can elect a
government that would fight, not condone, evil. As the Bible says, “Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). A decade earlier the same court sabotaged an election in that nation, and denied its citizens the right to democratically elect their leader. The defeated candidate has since become a leader in the battle to save life on earth. Had the court honored the will of the people, it might have made a huge difference in terms of tipping the scales in favor of environmental protection because of the enormous power of that high executive office.
David vs. Goliath 15. Today, the individual human is so frail and weak in comparison with gargantuan business and financial organizations. The contrast between David and Goliath has never been so stark. These organizations have the power to enlarge themselves and to stop any effort to restrict their selfaggrandizement. They trample on human rights. The trample on the sick and the elderly, seeking to cut back on their health care. They trample on the poor, seeking to restrict their income, security, educational opportunity, and life chances. They trample on educators, cutting back on their numbers and the tools they need to do their jobs effectively. They trample on those who try to protect others, such as policemen and firemen, cutting back on their numbers and equipment. They trample on those who do research, who try to find cures for illness or environmentally-safe forms of energy, manufacture, and transport, cutting back on their budgets. They trample on the free speech and peaceful assembly rights of demonstrators, such as those participating in the recent “Occupy Wall Street” or
“Ninety-Nine Percent” movement that is protesting the increasing concentration of wealth, by having police break up their demonstrations, even if by such violent means as tear gas, pepper spray, night sticks, fire hoses, tasers, and rubber bullets. They trample on the young, inducing them to fight in wars to protect the corporate elite’s selfish geopolitical interests, thereby cutting short the lives of many of them, and condemning many more to live in a reduced way because of severe physical or mental injuries incurred in those wars. For what purpose is such trampling? The purpose is to sweep away all obstacles to their goal-achievement, eliminate any opposition to an agenda to enable their ever-increasing wealth and power, an agenda including “reduced taxes on the rich” and “less governmental regulation”. If the Church is not willing to defend the poor, the sick, the elderly, the young, the fireman, the policeman, the teacher, the researcher, the peaceful demonstrator, then who will? Labor, civil rights, and environmental organizations try to stem this tide of evil, but they are no match for the huge corporations. The only entity with the potential moral and institutional power to stem the tide of destruction is the Christian Church. Yet that Church is giving a green light to evildoers by its essential inaction and silence.
A Maelstrom of Evil 16. Human culture is in the grips of a false religion, one placing financial gain highest on its list of values. This religion has led to a myriad manifestations of evil, which collectively are now threatening to bring about the final holocaust—the destruction
of the most magnificent and beautiful creation in the universe— the ecosystem of planet earth, including its enabling climate. The situation is dire, yet the Church is pretending to be powerless. What should the Church be doing? Because the destructive forces are so powerful, widespread, complex, and institutional, only an urgent calling of all Christians around the world to fight the enemies of life would have a chance to combat them. The Church must initiate this calling! Today, when a parishioner leaves a church service and enters the community outside of the church building, he or she invariably participates in a dysfunctional culture, one prescribing roles which are environmentally harmful, such as using carbon-based energy in the home or driving a car, using a polluting cleaning product, consuming foods transported to market by truck or plane, or working for an environmentally-irresponsible company. Today the global culture is like a straight-jacket. It is nearly impossible to survive unless one plays the culturallyprescribed roles. It seems the only alternative is to become a hermit, “living off the land” in the wilderness, but such retreatism will never solve the problem of ecosystem destruction. To use another metaphor, the global culture is also like a giant whirlpool, a maelstrom from which it is virtually impossible to extricate oneself. The only antedote to a lethal cultural vortex is a contra-cultural, life-oriented maelstrom with the power to sweep through the dysfunctional one of today, carrying people out of bondage and into the open sea of life and freedom. What is today’s Church doing to initiate the development of such a counter-force?
Life is Being Cooked 17. The Church should be providing specific guidelines to parishioners about how to avoid participating in an evil, destructive, culture. Let us consider some of the evils in greater detail. Perhaps the worst one is that which is causing “global warming�. Contrary to what powerful economic, political, and media forces are saying, this is a real phenomenon. There is a threshold point beyond which the warming process will be irreversible, and we are fast approaching that point. The complex web of life on earth today is being simplified by the warming, as one species after another die off. It is the very complexity of the ecosystem, including its large size and slowness in evolving, that has enabled the survival of all species of life. Eventually, many species will become extinct because of the warming, and earth increasingly will become a dead planet. Global warming is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and gas, which burning enables the generation of power used in manufacturing, construction, cooling, heating, lighting, communication, and transportation. It is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy to say that this burning is necessary for humankind to survive and flourish. Alternative, nonlethal ways to achieve heating, transportation, and all the other power-generated euphenomena exist, but are not being aggressively promoted and advocated. The magnates in the energy industry and their servants in government could restructure their operations and build an alternative energy infrastructure that does not harm the biosphere, and maintain full employment in the industry to boot, but apparently their mind-set is so rigid they have no tolerance for inconvenience and change. They are not willing to jeopardize tried and true
avenues to immediate profits by making such an investment. Unfortunately, the Church, for the most part, is silent about this issue.
Wars for Profit 18. A second evil was discussed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a speech given as he was about to leave office. He warned Americans about the danger of the influence of what he called the “military-industrial complex” on U. S. policy. It seems he was quite correct in this assessment of our political situation. The U. S. has been led into wars which were unnecessary, wars engineered because of ties of various political leaders to corporations that made huge profits from them. For example, in the 1960s and early 1970s even though North Vietnam was one of the greatest foes of communist China, at that time deemed our “enemy”, we were led into a war with that nation. As a result, tens of thousands of young Americans lost their lives, but arms manufacturers made enormous profits. After the turn of the century, we were led into another war. Even though Iraq was a foe of America’s enemies, al-Qaeda and Iran, our leaders lied to the public, saying we were in imminent danger from that nation’s preparation of weapons of mass destruction. This war not only helped arms manufacturers, but protected oil companies’ sources of supply and profits as well. To rally public support, the deceptive justification, “a war for democracy”, was employed. The Church has been remiss in its responsibility to highlight the connection between war, corporate profits, and such dysfunctional sources of energy as oil.
Atoms for Peace? 19. A third evil is generation of power by nuclear fission. This form of power entails sizeable concentrations of deadly radioactive material. If stored without extreme safeguards, if spilled during transporting, or if stolen by terrorists for the purpose of mass murder, it poses an intolerable risk for life on earth. The nuclear power industry was developed partly as a result of guilt on the part of scientists for having created a nuclear military weapon capable of destroying a large city with a single explosion. At first it was the atomic bomb, and later the much more destructive hydrogen bomb. Nuclear scientists wanted to put a positive face on this deadly form of power, perhaps as an act of atonement, by attempting to use nuclear technology for an ostensibly good purpose. Their slogan was “atoms for peace�, which referred to using nuclear fission as a source of power for electricity. A more recent reason for the promotion of this form of power-generation is, paradoxically, to maintain dependence on fossil fuels. Without nuclear power, global pressure to switch to nonlethal, alternative forms of energy, including solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal, would be much more intense. The use of nuclear power is going to result in substantial portions of the planet becoming uninhabitable for thousands of years, because eventually such natural disasters as hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, floods, and giant tidal waves, and such man-made disasters as terrorism and war, will overcome nuclear power’s fragile operating and storage systems and defense mechanisms, and expose large areas of the planet, including their ecosystems, food and water sources, and breathable air, to lethal radiation. In the mid 20th Century, when the first Norwegian fishermen got sick from the radioactivity
seeping out of fractured concrete storage containers dumped in the North Sea, containers filled with waste from nuclear power plants, it should have been obvious that this form of energy is too dangerous to use. The Church was remiss at the time in its responsibility to fight this kind of pollution, and it is still remiss today. With clean energy technology available, there is no need for humankind to continue to assuage its conscience for destroying two large cities with only two bombs by means of “atoms for peace� and to tolerate the exploitation of such guilt by the forces of greed. Humankind should continue to atone for these atrocities, but the Christian and moral way to do that is to press for an end to this lethal technology. The Church should be front and center on this path of atonement!
Raping the Earth 20. A fourth evil is the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture. Soils on earth, prior to such use, were complex ecosystems, with myriad forms of life in even one cubic foot. These ecosystems created the rich soil that enabled food crops to grow. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides also enable such growth, however they are artificial replacements for the complex ecosystems, which, throughout most of history, have enabled safe food-growing for humankind. As a result of such replacement, the only way to continue farming is to spread an increasing amount of these fertilizers and pesticides year after year—a blessing for the chemical agribusiness. The use of these substances prevents whatever complex soil ecosystems and natural fertilizer and pest control agents might otherwise reemerge. The run-off from farms using such products is
contaminating and destroying species of life in streams, ponds, rivers, and bays, thereby eliminating aquatic sources of food for higher-order species, including humans. The run-off is also contaminating huge, previously pristine, underground fresh water aquifers, and rendering clean drinking water increasingly scarce. Once again, the self-fulfilling prophecy is operative: the situation as powerful industrialists define it is real, but only because they say it is real and act in such a way as to make it become real. Such chemicals are not really necessary for agriculture. A restructuring of agri-business could be initiated that would create a healthy and viable organic agricultural system, while maintaining full employment of all farm workers subsequent to retraining. But the “powers that be” do not wish to define the situation in this constructive way. Once again, the Church is remiss in its responsibility to highlight a serious threat to life and to press for the needed changes.
A Matter of Social Character 21. A fifth evil involves “social character”. Children are being raised to define their lives, not as a part of an infinitely complex web of life, a web with countless mutually-dependent species, but rather as a part of a completely man-made universe, one consisting of plastic, concrete, chemicals, cars, trucks, motorcycles, planes, malls, computers, video games, television, guns, concert halls, loudspeakers, boomboxes, drugs, ”fast foods”, and so on. Walks through forests and fields, communing with nature, philosophizing about existence, gardening, tree planting, and bird-watching are becoming increasingly less prevalent. Children learn to identify with an
enormous, crass, noisy, technological machine. Thoughts about manufactured artifacts occupy the parameters of their consciousness to the point that they become oblivious to their essential nature, to the fact that God created an infinitely complex web of life on earth, one enabling human life to exist. They are largely blind to the fact that the probability of their existence is so close to zero that even supercomputers cannot calculate that probability, and instead of showing reverence and appreciation to God for their own lives and for the ecological basis of all of life, they participate in organizations and activities that continuously undermine the planetary life-support system. Children are being deprived of an awareness of the miracle of life, raised to be in wonder, not primarily of God and His creation, but of material things and financial wealth, which their culture places ahead of reverence for God in its value hierarchy. The Church has been complicit in the grand deception of the young that the machine in which they are being raised—material things and the economic system that produces and disseminates these artifacts—is the legitimate social order. The deception includes a perverted concept of “freedom”, namely that the myriad material things and their attendant services afford an endless series of choices regarding “what to buy” or “what to use”. That a life of enslavement to this process and this machine is in store for the young is something not effectively addressed by the Church, nor is the fact that this dysfunctional system does not include the freedom to opt for the continuance of life on earth. Obscured by the Church and most socialization agents is the big choice that matters—that between life and death. Capabilities of considering the consequences of one’s actions and of deferring gratification are in short supply. The materialistic mentality encourages people to give in to their
immediate desires, just as the serpent in the Garden of Eden goaded Eve into tempting Adam (Genesis 3:4-5 and 3:22). In both cases, God’s commands are disobeyed. Corporate elites thrive on this mentality of immediate gratification, because it is the sale of material goods and the services these wares entail that feeds their wealth-accumulation process. The long-range costs to society as a whole, including those of the eventual medical care necessitated by using harmful products and of mitigating the environmental damage they cause, are conveniently overlooked, as were the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve. Absent socialization that inculcates a character trait of responsibility to take care of the environment as well as one’s own health, a person has little or no resistance of conscience to ads or peer pressure encouraging “jumping in the car” at a moment’s notice to go to a mall to buy an item striking one’s fancy, perhaps driving at 60 miles per hour, boom box ablare. No second thoughts about using toxic substances for cleaning, using a power mower on a lawn, consuming sugary foods raised on fertilizer from sludge farms or meat raised on grazing land that replaced rainforests, not to speak of snorting illegal substances, or playing video games on the computer that foster a violent, destructive, and militaristic social character. There is probably no more potent symbol of our culture’s disrespect for life than the racing down a highway of a muffler-less motorcycle, rider absent a helmet. In one fell swoop, it is an act risking both one’s own life and the lives of others, polluting the air, contributing to global warming, and destroying the peace and serenity of the surrounding community. Shame on the Church for its failure to correct this defective socialization process! If Christians truly love God, it must follow as night follows day that they also love that which
He created, including their own bodies and our beautiful earth’s ecosystem, and accordingly do everything humanly possible to protect that creation from the dangers posed by a destructive social system and culture.
Greed is Good? 22. The egoistic social character molded by contemporary culture prevails in the world of work just as much as in private life. The dominant norm of many employers is financial success for their companies regardless of the long-range consequences. The phrases “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” and “greed is good” symbolize this occupational subculture. Frequently, an individual employee’s financial success and chances for promotion are directly related to the degree of unscrupulousness with which that employee is willing to do his or her job. It is easy for companies to recruit young workers who are receptive to, and compliant with, this norm of success in achieving profit and power at any cost and in the shortest period of time, because they have already been socialized into an egoistic mind-set. Such employees willingly make or apply harmful products, or invent new ones, with little or no consideration of the consequences for human health or the environment. The Church is doing little to instill a norm of social and environmental responsibility in the occupational subculture, to provide workers with a countervailing, lifeoriented frame of reference. Accordingly, workers accept the values, norms, and roles of corporations and industries as legitimate.
No Man Can Serve Two Masters 23. The Church essentially indulges this worship of mammon. But our Lord and Master said, “No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Today the Church winks at those who worship God during Sunday services, but who worship at the altar of material wealth the rest of the week. The Church is guilty of hypocrisy!
Green Idolatry? 24. The forces of greed and financial profit have succeeded in capturing the minds of some Church leaders, who, as a result, do their bidding. For example, as directed by corporate mentors and their lackeys in the mass media, these functionaries condemn the children of God who are trying to save earth’s lifesupport system, calling them idolators who turn the biosphere into an object of worship, who replace God with “Mother Earth”. Indeed, nothing could be more insidious, false, and perverse. The ideological masters of these leaders have themselves committed idolatry, turning money and power into objects of worship, often using such concepts as “freedom” as masks over their misdeeds. It is in the interests of these mentors to condemn the Godly, because to protect the environment might mean less financial profit and power for their class, the corporate elite. Environmentalists do not worship the biosphere or “mother earth”. Whether they call themselves deists or not, by their deeds of protecting earth’s biosphere they demonstrate
a worship of God, the Creator of the infinitesimally complex and beautiful global ecosystem. To label those waging an heroic battle to protect God’s creation “idolators” is to slander the children of God! People in this movement are as close to angels as beings can be on earth. They include not only those who self-identify as environmentalists, but also “greens”, conservationists, organic farmers, “back-to-the-earthers”, and advocates of alternative energy, population control, and “slow money”. These idealists constitute a large contingent of the de facto Christian Church. The de jure Church should be defending these soldiers in the battle for life!
Earth Angels 25. The financial profiteers dress up the sacrilege of degrading the global ecosystem as exercising God-given freedoms, overlooking the fact that one freedom God does not allow is the freedom to destroy that which He has created. Yet the Church, while occasionally acknowledging the existence of such destruction, is mostly silent about how to stop it, even though it has the moral and institutional power and responsibility to do so. The Church may have magnificently beautiful cathedrals, but much too often these structures are without heart and soul, deaf to God’s Word and Will, and surely in God’s eyes many of these buildings are not places of beauty, but of hypocrisy. His Church resides in the hearts and minds of men, women, and children, who, often outside of the official Church, daily struggle to obey God’s commandments, including protecting His magnificent creation, the biosphere of planet earth, by waging a courageous battle against pollution and global
warming. It is time for Church functionaries to do less pontificating about abstractions and more “rolling up the sleeves” to work alongside these “earth-angels”!
Beware of False Prophets 26. Jesus said, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15). Today false prophets employ propaganda in the mass media, contending that government is the enemy of God and God-given freedoms whenever it stands in the way of industry exploiting people or the environment for financial profit and political power. The term “freedom” is used as a cloak to mask this exploitation and destruction. Indeed these prophets are idolators, because they worship mammon. In contrast, those who seek to protect the environment, viewing it as a reflection of the beauty and majesty of the Creator, are the true servants of God. Today the Church tends to give a green light to the forces of evil and to ignore the forces of goodness.
Inheritance for Life 27. Jesus said, “he that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). The Church seems acquiescent as those who play the wealth-accumulation game, including many of its members, amass great financial wealth for the inheritance of their sons and daughters, despite such accumulation being based on investments in industries which
pollute air, water, and land, thereby destroying God’s carefully constructed life-support system on earth. Indeed the Church seems pleased that some of its members become financially wealthy. As noted above, theologian Calvin even contended that financial success is a sign that these members are among the “saved”. Has the Church completely forgotten Jesus’ words that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God? The Church must stop its hypocrisy and urge its members to give their children an inheritance, not of financial or material wealth and the power and status accompanying wealth—achieved by exploiting the environment and trampling on human rights—but of love for God’s creation and skill in protecting it. When our Creator looks down from Heaven and sees a human-made “island” of pollution the size of the State of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or when He observes the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef—His largest and most beautiful edifice of biodiversity in the world, one which took Him almost 10,000 years to create, what opinion do you think He has about humankind’s character?
A Matter of Balance 28. Jesus evicted money changers from the temple in Jerusalem (Matthew 21:12). This is a clear message that avarice in money-making, on the one hand, and worshipping God, on the other hand, are a bad mix. The temple is sacred, but so too is the larger temple—planet earth and its life-support system. By standing by, watching as corporations commit sin after sin, including pollution, fraud, wealth concentration, corruption, and
undermining democracy and just law, the Church is complicit in these evils. When will it stand up with courage and say, “Stop this desecration of God’s creation!”? When will it tell its members to say “No!”—not just to illegal drugs or unhealthy diets—but also to oil, gas, coal, toxic fertilizers and pesticides, nuclear power, wealth concentration, financial malfeasance, and corruption? Let not only the house of worship but the temple that is the biosphere be places of life, purity, and Christ-like perfection and service! Today the forces of greed are attempting to coopt benevolent law, such as the Constitution of the United States, turning it into a tool to promote their selfish agenda. The ethos of such good law is not only freedom and human and civil rights, but more importantly the backbone of those freedoms and rights—a balance of power! Only in the dialectic discourse of groups with roughly equal power can secular truth become known and justice done! Today there is little power balance. The forces of greed now control government. In the United States, they control even the ultimate judicial authority, which, as noted above, recently allowed unlimited political contributions so that the candidates these forces support could overwhelm the public mind with propaganda and be elected, and once elected be obligated to do their bidding! Furthermore, legitimate voters who are predisposed to vote against power concentration are being systematically disenfranchised by means of cynical laws by state legislatures, ostensibly against “voter fraud”, laws requiring documentation many of them lack, or voting at times inconvenient for their schedules or at poll sites difficult for them to reach. These legislatures are also “gerrymandering” congressional districts to further disenfranchise voters who might vote against their interests, voters such as the poor, the
young, the elderly, minorities, even large segments of the working and middle classes. The real fraud is being committed by the political hacks of the power elite. There is no more perfect illustration of government of, by, and for the rich! Governmental regulations to safeguard civil rights, the health and safety of individuals, and the well-being of the environment are weak and everyday are made weaker by the governmental servants of this social class! Power elites use the “scapegoat” strategy to divert attention from their machinations. In the 1930s, the Nazi party in Germany did the same thing, using Jews as scapegoats and turning them into “enemies” so that it could divert attention from the real cause of the economic depression, the burdensome post-World War 1 reparations, rally the German people to their authoritarian social movement, and thereby attain absolute power. The U. S. power-elite also has used the scapegoat strategy, perversely creating a “tea party” movement to propagandize voters into scapegoating “liberal” or “progressive” government as their oppressor, so that they elect candidates who, while professing to be on the side of the common people, actually have voted to reduce governmental regulations and environmental and social protection programs, reduce taxes on the rich, and increase taxes on, and the cost of living of, everyone else. If U. S. voters are not careful, “it can happen here”, as Sinclair Lewis warned (It Can’t Happen Here, Doubleday, Doran, 1935), by which he meant America is vulnerable to fascism. What has the Church done to stop this deception? Our democracy cannot survive without “power pluralism”.
Socialistic Capitalism—An Oxymoron? 29. Today the world’s economic system is a form of socialism that protects the so-called “capitalist class” when it experiences financial losses. This class has invested in governmental representatives and administrators who force all people in a society to pay for the mistakes made by bankers and businesspersons. This is socialistic or state capitalism, and it enables those with the most wealth and power to increasingly concentrate that wealth and power. Every day, most members of society have less and less ability to afford food, adequate medical care, home mortgages, education, even access to clean air and clean water. Every day the rich become richer. In the United States, the top one percent of the population now has about three times more of the nation’s wealth than the bottom eighty per cent! The super-rich now control the dominant socialization mechanisms, in particular, the mass media, and make certain that institution employs propaganda to justify curtailing Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, job training programs, and educational grants, privatizing Social Security, and reducing taxes and governmental regulations on themselves and their corporations. The top “one percent”, accordingly, are not true capitalists at all, but rich and powerful socialists! Their position in the United States is similar to the position of the top communists in the former Soviet Union, who likewise engineered a plush social security system for themselves! “Democracy”, that is, rule by the people as a whole, increasingly is becoming a sham. The elite-controlled media now define the political situation, deceiving electorates by using popular shibboleths, and inducing them to vote against their economic interests and support the political henchmen of
the rich. Instead of counteracting this trend, the Church tends to justify it. Calvin’s pronouncement that financial success is a sign that its achievers are “the saved” is deeply embedded in Church mentality.
Too Big to Fail? 30. Corporate socialism has two major components. The first is freedom to acquire wealth, and the power and status accompanying wealth, with minimal interference from other institutions, including religion, education, media, and, sadly, government. The second component is noninterference by government in business or banking practices unless the companies or banks run into financial trouble. Then it is the job of government to “bail them out”, at taxpayer expense. In a word, a system of privatized gain and socialized loss! The rationale for this belief in “unfettered but government-supported capitalism” is that if everyone is free to seek wealth in almost any manner, barring blatantly obvious killing of other humans, then all humankind will profit from the inventions and organizations created in that unrestrained pursuit. This belief is consistent with Calvin’s blessing of those who accumulate wealth. Indeed the “capitalist system” and its technology have succeeded in reducing morbidity and mortality rates, extending life-expectancy, and enabling many people to luxuriate in interesting and comfortable material things of all kinds. But this relatively unrestrained capitalism has also brought the planet to its current dire situation. Saturation of the atmosphere with carbon, rising temperature, climatic catastrophes, pollution, overpopulation, species extinction, viral and bacterial
epidemics, and genetic mutation and imperialism—all are increasing at an accelerating rate. Already, agricultural productivity is decreasing in many part of the world, and famine and water shortages are on the rise. Yet many Church leaders, judging from their relative silence, continue to demonstrate approval of uncontrolled-yet-supported, “Fountainhead”-style capitalism, the animus behind it—greed—and government’s role as cheerleader and financial underwriter. How a system in which large corporations use government not only to bail them out but also to squash potential competition that might pose a threat to them, as alternative energy enterprises apparently are to the dominant power companies of today, can be labeled “capitalist free enterprise” is a mystery!
The Last Ones to Die? 31. Paradoxically, it is mankind’s efforts to “progress”, to “create a better life”, that has brought us to the dire situation of today. History is replete with the invention of new products and services designed to effect that better life and new and more elaborate forms of social organization to disseminate those products and services. The motivation behind such invention and organization is the societal reward system, which accords greater wealth, status, and power to the most successful inventors and organizers. As a result there indeed has been temporary progress, including better health care, lower morbidity and mortality rates, and higher educational achievement by an increasing proportion of populations, and, of course, a plethora of material “things”. This temporary progress is due in large measure to the fact that until recently
western governments did in fact serve as a countervailing force against excesses of corporations. They made an attempt to reduce or mitigate environmental damage and did a fair job of providing a social safety net for people who were “left behind”. Today, however, the situation is changing. As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, access to such blessings is becoming increasingly restricted. The future will witness increasing morbidity and mortality rates, not only because of the accelerating impoverishment of the masses, but also because of increasing climatic and other environmental disasters due to global warming and pollution. Furthermore, the temporary progress of the past two hundred years has been oriented primarily to human beings, not to the collectivity of all living organisms on earth. Today, the use of many products and services represented as progress is simplifying the ecosystem, killing off one species of life after another, and warming the planet to the point that all life on earth is in serious jeopardy. Apparently the guiding maxim is “eat, drink and be merry today, for tomorrow we die”. The super-rich, in “Dr. Strangelove” fashion, may be the last humans to become extinct on planet earth, but eventually people in that class will die prematurely as well. The Creator is not pleased with this mindset of immediate gratification and exploitation that is destroying His handiwork. Yet, the Church seems paralyzed in the face of the looming disaster.
Churches: Unlock your Doors! 32. To seek to change the course of the dysfunctional global “socialist-capitalist” ship, how would a true Christian Church
begin? It would begin by doing a very simple thing. It would open its doors 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Religion should not be a part-time institution. Christianity is not dilettantism. It is not just a nice thing to do on Sundays. It is not a status symbol. It is not a game. It is a total commitment, a commitment to seek Christ-like perfection in everything we do. If the world outside of the church building is replete with sin and destruction, then the church building should be devoted to the teaching of pure and clean living. Everything occurring in that building should be Godly, and when parishioners leave the building, they should have been armed with knowledge about how to avoid participating in the culture of evil in the outside world. Given the magnitude and power of that evil culture, the church should be open 24/7 for such instruction and arming. Is any church doing this?
Aedificatory Power 33. What should the Church be doing? It should offer an operational definition of the character, nature, and will of the Supreme Being. Jesus’ life and teachings point to that operational definition. Everything Jesus did in his sojourn on earth points to life—healing, feeding, guiding, opposing injustice, even raising from the dead. By feeding masses of people, healing the sick, and showing utmost concern for the poor, He addressed humans’ physical needs. In His teaching He addressed our spiritual needs, in particular the need for God’s forgiveness of our sins, so that we may be eligible to be with Him in Heaven for eternity. Using Jesus’ life as the criterion, goodness is that which promotes, enhances, enables, champions
life; that which denigrates, diminishes, prohibits, and ends life is evil. Goodness is aedificatory power, that is, the power to enhance life. Jesus taught that life is not a zero-sum game in which one person’s well-being is enhanced by diminishing that of another. The game of life is “win-win”, or aedificatory locomotion. Behavior is good when the life of all is enhanced, including the survival of the maximum number of species of life on earth, all species playing a role in the planet’s relatively homeostatic ecosystem. Even certain bacteria and viruses contribute to maintaining the global web of life. The phrase, “the greatest good for the greatest number” is perhaps not too far afield of being a universal code of life. Today the Church, instead of institutionalizing this ethos, and urging us to at least attempt Christ-like perfection in our daily lives, is redirecting attention away from the operational prerequisites for life on earth and toward theological abstractions and a plethora of rituals that have little relationship to those prerequisites. Today’s indulgences are not certificates of redemption but promises that if one goes to church, pays dues, recites church liturgy, sings hymns, and gives lip service to Biblical behavioral prescriptions, then one’s soul will be saved. Indeed it is time for a new reformation!
Sorrows of Young Werther 34. Today, the forces of evil are so powerful, their manifestations so widespread, so complex, so embedded in every institution, career, and indeed almost every role, that, in the absence of a calling by the Church for Christ-like perfection and an overarching and comprehensive conceptual orientation
as to how to lead a truly Christian life, it will be nearly impossible to overcome those evil influences. A German poet, Goethe, has provided an example of how to begin thinking about leading a good life. One of his literary characters, Werther, hesitated to take even a single step in the forest for fear of trampling on a myriad species of life (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774). Like this character, a true Christian should ask, “If I take this step, what are the consequences for earth’s life-support system”? Today the Church is remiss in its responsibility to insist that we consider the myriad consequences of our behaviors for life on earth. Unfortunately, it only meekly and occasionally suggests to parishioners certain isolated and compartmentalized acts of good behavior. Recycle a bit of paper, glass, or metal? Car pool whenever it’s convenient? Use an “earth-safe” shopping bag? Donate five dollars to a good cause? As a result, parishioners engage in small acts of goodness, and give lip service to general norms of Christian behavior on Sunday, but aside from such tokenism, continue to serve the institutions destroying life on earth in their vocational and avocational roles. This hypocrisy must cease!
The Truth Shall Set You Free 35. The Church is remiss in its responsibility to raise the question: How do we start to conceptualize a Christian lifestyle? The Biblical directive “Know the truth and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32), referred to above in regard to enlightened voting behavior, is also a good point of reference for a moral lifestyle in general. So how can we know the truth? The social institution that is primarily responsible for
determining physical and psychological, as opposed to spiritual, truth is science. It has the mandate to describe the cultural and physical world in as much detail and with as much accuracy and specificity as possible, and to determine existential causes and effects. Many Church leaders today contend that science is making false statements. An example of what they call a false statement is that man evolved from other primates rather than being made whole cloth by God on the sixth day of creation. These “true believers” contend that they know the meaning of the words “day” and “created”, and superimpose a rigid creationist construct on phenomena they apparently know little about. Likewise, rejecting most scientists’ efforts to describe reality in a disciplined way, these zealots seem most willing to accept the pronouncements of pseudo-scientists, those hired by the forces of greed, that industry poses no threat to the planet’s life-support system. The Church is making little effort to help parishioners distinguish between a type of science that is employed by, and serving the interests of, the financial profiteers, on the one hand, and both “pure science” and “aedificatory science,” on the other hand. Pure science seeks to “know the truth” for its own sake. Aedificatory science seeks to apply the findings of pure science in the service of human and environmental well-being. It is pure science and constructively applied science that offer meaningful guidelines for leading a good life and provide workable solutions to life-threatening problems on our planet. Indeed, there no conflict between such science and religion; science is indispensible if one is to live a moral life. This topic should be the subject of Church sermons to much greater extent than is true today.
Moral Science 36. The Bible provides support for science as an honorable and moral profession, aside from the prescription to “know the truth”, including Jesus’ parable about our obligation to make use our talents and not bury them (Matthew 25:14-30), and God’s engineering advice to Noah concerning how to build an ark of survival (Exodus, 6-9). The Church should be using all of its moral force to support life-oriented science and urge its parishioners to be skeptical of science serving the interests of a corporate elite class that seems indifferent to the environmental harm it is causing. The Church should urge parishioners to follow the guidance offered by objective science regarding personal behavior, including how to protect God’s creation, the ecosystem of planet earth. It is failing to perform this important work. In this disquisition, the recommendations for Christian action to address environmental problems and wealth concentration are based on both Biblical prescriptions and the findings of moral science.
Doomsday Scenarios 37. Scientists who are not under the thumb of corporate interests are telling us there are a number of both short to medium range, and long-range threats to life on earth. In the near term the threats include thermo-nuclear terrorism and war, floods, simplification of ecosystems caused by global warming and pollution, viral and bacterial epidemics, water shortages, and overpopulation, that is, excessive pressure of population numbers on the earth’s ability to sustain such numbers. Among
the long-term or indeterminate-term threats is the possibility of the collision of planet earth with asteroids. Which churches today are addressing how God wants us to confront and deal with such threats in their sermons?
Sin Goes Global 38. When the churches of today sermonize about sin and threats to life, usually they refer to the violation of the Ten Commandments, including the proscriptions against killing, theft, adultery, and bearing false witness. They also sermonize about the “seven deadly sins”—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Such sins are couched primarily in the context of interpersonal relations in relatively small communities. In the agrarian societies of old, these were the primary types of sin. However, the conceptualizing of sin in the context of interpersonal relations in agrarian societies is a dysfunctional frame of reference in a society that is industrial, urban, corporate, and globally-organized. Today, a sinful act in one small part of the world can have a deleterious impact on all of life on earth, not just to life in a local area, as was the case long ago. In the current situation, human behavior is largely prescribed by corporations which are global in scope, and the majority of those behaviors, taken together, are destroying life on earth. A person who believes he or she is faithfully obeying the Ten Commandments may be completely unaware of the destructive impact of a specific act. Everyday acts may seem perfectly harmless and normal—driving a car to work, depositing one’s paycheck in a bank, flying by plane to a resort or a university, using a chemical to clean in the home or to
control pests, using a power mower on a lawn, buying food raised by means of chemical fertilizers and pesticides or on farms that replaced rainforests, voting for candidates for governmental office who promise freedom from both taxation and governmental regulations, teaching technical subjects in schools without reference to the side effects of the technologies involved—all such acts are culturally prescribed, and by and large the Church approves of them, thus rubber-stamping norms and roles which collectively are destroying life on earth. Indeed it is time to reconceptualize sin, but the Church is not effectively doing so.
Don’t Drive Gas-powered Cars to Church! 39. Consider one simple act, that of driving a car to attend church service. What church today is condemning this act? The operation of a vehicle powered by fossil fuel releases carbon in the atmosphere. Scientists tell us that the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is increasing to the point that carbon sinks—oceans and forests—can no longer absorb these particles. The excess, unabsorbed carbon is building up so that the earth’s surface is increasingly becoming like a hothouse. As a result, the food chain is being disrupted. Forms of animal and plant life which have adapted over thousands or even millions of years to cooler climates are dying off. Species dependent on endangered species for food are also becoming extinct. The “big and slow” global ecosystem—a myriad interdependent species that have taken thousands of years or more to reach the “dynamic homeostasis” of today—is being simplified. As a result, life on earth is on a trajectory to
extinction. Yet the Church is largely mute. It is not exhorting its members to stop their personal contributions to this apocalypse, this final holocaust. The Church should begin its mission to save life on earth by discouraging driving gaspowered cars to church! There is perhaps no greater symbol of the Church’s subservience to corporate interests and acquiescence in the face of the looming environmental disaster than the expansive macadam or concrete church parking lots! If transport by rail is not available, and if walking or bicycling to church services are not feasible for reasons of distance or safety, the least a Christian church could do would be to provide transport in church electric vans.
Don’t Drive Gas-powered Cars Anywhere! 40. The act of driving to church produces but a tiny fraction of the carbon released by the acts of “driving to work” and “driving to the store” in vehicles powered by gasoline. Is there a church today raising the question: How can we get to work and shop without releasing amounts of carbon in excess of the capacity of trees and the oceans to absorb these particles?
Don’t Fly! 41. Air travel today is taken for granted as the optimal way to establish business connections across a wide geographic area, get to a distant college or university, visit distant relatives and friends on holidays, travel to distant vacation spots, or give one’s children the experience of a lifetime by taking them to a
unique place of adventure. Is there a church today raising the question: Which is better in God’s eyes—to have such pleasurable experiences and such meaningful educational and vocational opportunities regardless of their environmental consequences, or to reduce the threats to the lives of future generations and to life on earth as a whole by avoiding contributing to the excess carbon build-up caused by air travel in jet planes, and by planning personal lives around slower and more “earth-safe” transport modes?
What’s Wrong with Free Power? 42. Many of the products we buy today, and the raw materials for these products, come from great distances, from the other side of the nation, or from distant lands, often transported by ocean liners, including “super-tankers” and cargo ships— transport modes using carbon-releasing fossil fuels. Yet our Creator has provided us with a form of energy for transport that does not cause carbon build-up and global warming. That form of energy is wind! Wind was a predominant source of energy for transport of goods and personnel until recent times. Sailing ships were efficient, and were among humankind’s most beautiful creations to boot! In addition to their economic utility, such craft have been found to be effective socialization milieux, for example, enabling more successful rehabilitation of drug users, delinquents, and criminal offenders than land-based custodial or treatment centers. Were sail craft to be employed today as a primary means of transporting goods and personnel, the cost-savings from using such free energy would help to offset whatever expense may be involved in the longer transport
time. Furthermore, this form of transportation is more laborintensive, affording opportunity to reduce unemployment and increase the tax base because of the higher employment rate. Is there a church today raising the question: Which is better in God’s eyes—to structure economies so that they are dependent on the speed with which raw materials and finished products are transported regardless of the environmental destruction and eventual cost to society involved in such speedy delivery, or by using slower means of transport, protect the planetary ecosystem so future generations will have a chance to engage not only in economic exchange but in all other human interaction as well?
Green Power 43. Peoples’ lives today are much more comfortable and efficient because of heating, cooling, and lighting equipment. Today the power sources for such equipment are primarily fossil fuel burning and nuclear power. Yet our Creator has made available to us energy sources which do no harm to life— the sun, wind, tides, waterfalls, and underground heat sources. No church in the world should fail to convert its buildings to energy sources that do no harm to the ecosystem, and to counsel parishioners on converting their homes and workplaces as well. Today’s churches are failing to rally Christians around the world to employ only “earth-safe” power.
Christians: Lobby! Boycott! Demonstrate! 44. The Church should be urging its members to lobby government to promote the use of clean energy and facilitate by means of tax policy both research in this field and the construction of a new alternative energy infrastructure, including the necessary power grids. The Church also should be urging parishioners to publicize efforts for alternative energy conversion, to organize boycotts against products made or transported by means of harmful forms of energy, and to engage in peaceful mass demonstrations on behalf of more responsible energy practices by industry. Where are the churches effectively doing this today?
The Entire Industrial Process 45. The Church should be urging its members to investigate the entire process involved in a particular material product, including extraction of raw materials, transport, manufacture, and use, from the standpoint of carbon build-up. Investigation should also be done on products’ chemical or radioactive pollution. This would make an ideal project for church youth, enabling them to apply the knowledge and skills learned in school to assess the functionality or dysfunctionality of specific material goods and their by-products. The Church should be urging schools to incorporate such investigation in their curricula. Development of these skills might qualify youth for careers in working for companies that are making an effort to be socially and environmentally responsible. In addition to urging boycotts of goods involving pollution, the Church should
encourage parishioners to be advocates for companies making earth-safe products in responsible ways. Is any church doing this?
Want Social Change? Start with Love! 46. What would a true Christian Church do? It would act on the recognition that social and cultural change begins with intense social interaction between people. The greater the threat to human life or its enabling system, the greater must be that mutual support. It is axiomatic that if “the world is to be saved”, the needs of individual people must be addressed first. The norm to “save the world” must begin with a norm to protect the individual. If a person believes that his or her life is of little value, how can that person be expected to value all of life on earth? Only through loving interaction can new norms and roles be developed. Individuals will commit to these new standards because the group has the power to reward compliant behavior. Christianity was able to generate the power to resist the culture of evil in Roman times because of the power of the group to fulfill the emotional and physical, as well as spiritual, needs of its members. This is another reason why the Church must be open 24/7—to provide the haven in which new norms and roles can be taught and where parishioners can be rewarded for compliance with them by means of love, respect, and appreciation from their peers. Every Christian church building in the world should become a loving incubator of social, cultural, and technological designs for living which counter the threats to life on earth. Isolated individuals and families cannot effect social change. It can only be done by groups. It would
be a wonderful thing if the groups seeking constructive change were nations, or even states or cities, because such large communities would have both the “division of labor” and the necessary political power to effect change quickly. Unfortunately, such large groups are “under the thumb” of the corporate power-elite. Probably the smallest group with any capability of at least initiating social change is the church congregation. It would have just enough of a division of labor to possibly enable its members to change their behavior in most institutional areas of life without unduly suffering financial and material loss. In other words, a typical congregation may be large enough to arrange for the basic necessities of life for its members—food, transportation, employment, etc.—so that parishioners can survive, and by surviving, perhaps even thriving, demonstrate to society that “it can be done”! People can actually survive if they join together and develop a community with a socio-cultural organization that does no environmental harm! Thereby would each church congregation become a demonstration of a new social and cultural order for the surrounding community, an order providing for the needs of the “personality system” of the individual in a manner consistent with the needs, not of a destructive social system, but of one protective of the life-support system of the planet. The greater the number of congregations committed to displaying such possibilities for change, the greater impact on the larger society.
Just Say “No!” 47. The new “survivalist” norms and roles include “just saying NO!” to participating in an evil culture: not working for any employer if any threat to the environment or human health is involved in the work process; not purchasing any product which is damaging in any way or which involves harmful extraction, transportation, or manufacturing; never using energy and transportation which contribute to carbon build-up or pollution; consuming no food grown by means of polluting fertilizers or pesticides or on farms that replaced rainforests; never putting money in any bank unless there is assurance those funds will not be loaned to, or invested in, any enterprise which has harmful practices. On the positive side, the new norms and roles involve “clean”, environmentally-responsible alternatives. In theses to follow, many such alternatives are described.
Churches: Employ! 48. As of this writing, political conservatives in the U. S. Congress will not permit government to invest in a “jobs program”, because a healthy economy would probably result in the re-election of a liberal president. Because government is paralyzed by politics, probably only Christian Church congregations are in a position to reduce unemployment. They should be creating jobs right within the church buildings, that is, in addition to the roles of minister or priest, church secretary, custodian, and choir director. An effort should be made to hire unemployed members of the congregation or the local community. Ideally one job would be created for every twenty
church members. In the United States, millions of unemployed could be put to work if the nation’s approximately 300,000 churches adopted this policy. The jobs a church would offer include social services that address both environmental protection and basic human necessities, such as organicallygrown food. The church employment program would be operated on a nonprofit basis, financially supported in three ways: raising the church tithe to a church quint; donations from the users of the services to the extent they are able to make them; any available grants from private foundations or governmental agencies. Consider some of the following proposed church social service jobs. First, several church members could cook and serve meals to the other parishioners and members of the surrounding community. A second job could be that of “survivalist counselor”, who would offer advice on such matters as how to find local jobs that do no harm to the environment or how to create a completely clean home environment by switching from toxic cleaning and other products to environmentally-safe ones. A third job: Operating a recycling center. A fourth: Operating a child day care facility. Fifth: Operating a day care facility for the elderly. Sixth: Teaching in an “after-school school”, one enabling students to share what they have learned in public or private school that day, in an attempt to show them how to place the new knowledge in the context of environmental protection. Seventh: Patient advocacy. Eighth: Managing a transport center, one that would arrange for shared transportation to jobs, stores, and schools for both church and local community members, using church electric vans and as much ride sharing as possible. The center would urge parishioners to stop driving gas-powered cars. It would encourage the use of available
public transportation services and safe walking and bicycling paths between homes, stores and workplaces. Ninth: Constructing and managing living quarters inside the church building for the homeless. Tenth: In cooperation with the nationwide “Free Clinic” movement, arrange for and manage periodic free medical clinics in the church building, if space permits, otherwise in a cooperating local civic center. These clinics provide free medical and dental care by volunteer professionals. A church “free clinic” would offer this program to members of the community living in the vicinity of the church building who cannot afford medical and/or dental care, as well as to church members facing hard economic times. Eleventh: Establishing and operating an organic farm, provided that unpolluted land is accessible. Twelfth, being a “grantsperson”—applying for grants from private foundations or governmental agencies for some of these church services. For all church-provided services except the free clinic, parishioners or members of the surrounding community should be invited to make a donation, but only to the extent that it poses no financial hardship. No service would be denied because of an inability to make a donation. All of the above listed services, described in greater detail in theses to follow, address meeting the needs of individuals in a manner consistent with environmental protection. It is axiomatic that the movement to protect earth’s ecosystem cannot succeed if it does not also address meeting basic human necessities, including the need for meaningful and rewarding employment. As mentioned above, the U. S. Congress is paralyzed by politics and unable to pass the President’s “jobs program”. Another factor in Congressional inaction is the myth that reducing taxes on the wealthy creates jobs for the rest of the population. If churches
do not step up to the plate and create jobs, the recovery from the current deep recession will be very slow.
A Window of Opportunity 49. Before discussing church jobs in detail, a word is in order about why a focus on employment is essential if Christian churches are to “save life on earth”. Productive employment in rewarding jobs is a major backbone of an individual’s selfconception, his or her sense of self-worth, the foundation for that person to be able to provide sustenance for a family. The self-pride attending having a meaningful job is seriously diminished in times of economic depressions and recessions, as jobs are lost. The Church should define these times as outstanding opportunities for Christian social change. By becoming an employer during hard times, the Church could address three serious social problems in one fell swoop: unemployment, public pessimism and loss of morale, and environmental degradation. It would provide meaningful jobs which are environmentally-responsible. Each church’s program would serve as a demonstration to the surrounding community of how people can conduct their lives in ways that do not harm earth’s ecosystem. Hopefully, by addressing the critical need for employment in the current recession, congregations could get public attention, and once people are listening, the opportunity would be created to educate them concerning the kind of society we must become if the biosphere is to be protected. Much environmental damage occurs in the world of “work,” and the employment program would demonstrate how this institution can be “cleaned up”. The sacrifice required of
twenty church members to employ one person or of one hundred parishioners to hire five people would not be exhorbitant, even if church members had to double the customary “tithe�. The employment program would probably be affordable for parishioners because there might be some donations from the users of the services provided, at least from those church members or local community clients who can afford to donate, and because many of the services, including communal meals, reduced need for operating private cars, and less expensive counseling and day care services, might enable church families to save a considerable amount of money. Furthermore, foundation or governmental grants may be available for some of the services. The Church would be an ideal employer because the jobs it would offer are those which are environmentally and socially responsible. By contrast, most employers offer jobs which in one way or another are harmful, requiring such things as the burning of fossil fuels for power or transportation, or using toxic chemicals in the manufacturing process or in applications of many kinds. In addition to hiring its own employees, the church should seek out local businesspeople interested in creating jobs in a clean economy, such as home insulation, installation of solar panels on homes and buildings, creating wind farms, reviving rail transportation, and organic farming, and establish cooperative and mutuallysupportive relationships with them. Churches in communities fronting on the ocean could seek to revive transport of personnel and goods by wind-powered vessels. Skills in constructing large sail craft still exist in some maritime cities, such as Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. In an economic recession or depression, a Christian nation would encourage government to create such temporary jobs as these, to the extent that
governmental investment or tax incentives are inadequate to the task of inducing private businesses to expand their labor force. This is what the United States Government did in the 1930s. In the United States today the political will to create full employment is taking second place to politics. The party “out of executive power” is refusing to help create jobs because it wants the electorate to blame the party “in power” for the recession and vote it out of office in the next election. This illustrates the sickness of the U. S. polity, one deeming party power to be more important than societal well-being. In this moral vacuum, the Church should step up to the plate.
New Deal or Christian Deal? 50. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the U. S. government put millions of the unemployed to work. The purpose of such hiring was not to replace the “free enterprise” system, but to strengthen the economy by enabling people to have more purchasing power. That power, in turn, enabled private business to revive or expand because of increased consumption. This “New Deal” program, or “socialism for the poor”, was a prerequisite for the revival of private business. However, even such an idealistic program as the New Deal failed to take into account the well-being of the national and global ecosystem. While the tree planting it sponsored was environmentally-beneficial, the creation of roads and bridges for automobile and truck traffic was environmentally harmful. Instead, had the science of ecology been well established at the time, the focus could have been on expanding the rail system, because the carbon emitted by rail transport was, and still is
even today, absorbable by forests and the oceans. Even in agriculture, the frame of reference of the New Deal was not the ecosystem as a whole, because the use of harmful chemical fertilizers and pesticides was routine. The current global recession would have been an ideal opportunity for government to underwrite job creation while at the same time protecting the environment, especially jobs in the fields already mentioned— insulation, alternative energy, recycling, rail transport, and organic farming. Governmental rescue of both the economy and the biosphere is not possible today, because corporations control government, and their main goal is not to protect life, but the highest financial bottom line in the next three months, regardless of the consequences for life. A “Christian Deal” would have been an ideal substitute for the Roosevelt-type “New Deal” in the 1930s, and would be most helpful in today’s recession. Have the forces of greed disarmed the institution of religion to the extent that such a vision is impossible to implement? Are Christians as brainwashed as Tea Partiers, unable to break out of the cultural mold designed by the corporate elite, unable to create an earth-safe economy? Christian churches in the U. S. and around the world should collaborate in creating a “Christian Deal” to provide employment in earth-safe jobs!
Job 1: Food for Life 51. To outline some of the proposed “church jobs” listed in Thesis 48 in detail, consider meal service. While occasional “church suppers” afford pleasant “get together” opportunities for both eating and socializing, churches should offer this
service routinely, because healthy food is a basic human necessity. There should be no hunger among church membership, nor in the immediate geographical area surrounding the church building. To illustrate what a meal program that addresses both individual needs and those of the ecosystem might be like, consider the following proposed church meal service. Meals would be served three times a day, seven days a week. They would be based on the latest nutritional guidelines, with as much emphasis as possible on fresh, organic, locally-grown fruits and vegetables, transported by “human power”, or by electric van or truck. Food supplies coming from long distances, such as brown rice and dried beans, would be transported by rail, because, as noted above, the carbon released by such transport is absorbable by oceans and the remaining forests. If supplies come from distant lands, they would have been transported by wind-powered commercial shipping. The facility furnishings would be as locally-made as possible. The menu would also include organic whole grains, nuts and seeds, and of course such disease-fighting foods as blueberries, garlic, onions, and mushrooms. There would be a de-emphasis on fats, salt, and sugar and other simple carbohydrates. No foods would be purchased from any supplier failing to meet certain ethical standards, including not destroying rainforests or other endangered ecosystems for grazing or crop land, sanitary and safe working conditions for farm workers, and fair employment and compensation practices, as well as meeting the criteria for organic farming. The energy used for cooking and refrigeration and for heating and cooling the facility, as well as for the electric vehicles used to transport supplies, would be “alternative” energy, whether solar, wind, geothermal, or tidal-based, based on both solar panels and
contracts with energy companies providing assurance that such safe sources are used. Pest control operations would be “natural”. Use of dinnerware, cookware, and utensils with aluminum, lead, and other toxic components would be avoided. Water used in food preparation and in such drinks as herb teas would be spring water. Those using this service would be invited to make donations, but only if it posed no financial hardship. If the donations raised should exceed the cost of labor, utilities, and supplies, the surplus would be donated to food banks. Jobs in such a meal service would be lifeenhancing not only for church members and the local community, but also for the global ecosystem, because emphasis would be put on locally-grown organic foods, which can be transported by more environmentally-friendly means of transportation, and because of the use of alternative energy. All Christian churches should be providing such environmentallyresponsible meal service. Doesn’t Jesus’ feeding of masses of people mean anything to Church leaders today? (See Matthew 14:13-21) What act can be more Christian, more life-affirming, than providing this basic human necessity in a manner protective of earth’s life-support system?
Jobs 2 and 3: Child and Elder Daycare 52. Churches should also provide both child and adult day care, two more basic human necessities. As in the case of meal service, clients would be invited to make donations for the care received, but only to the extent that they can do so without financial hardship. Some churches already are providing such services, however, no church should be remiss in this respect.
The advantage of the Church performing such functions, rather than governmental or private service agencies, is that it would seek to structure its programs to minimize harm to the ecosystem from transporting clients by gas-powered cars, vans, or busses, and from the use of electricity from harmful sources. Furthermore, church programs would provide opportunity for clients and/or their families to learn about an environmentallysound lifestyle, so that they have the knowledge and tools to practice that lifestyle in their homes.
Job 4: “Survivalist” Counseling 53. Regarding the provision of counseling services to both parishioners and residents of the local community, the Church should have a somewhat different perspective than that of current governmental or private service agencies. It would seek to address the needs of the individual in ways that also address the needs of the earth’s life-support system. Contemporary profit and nonprofit organizations offering counseling services seek to address the needs of the individual in the context of the predominant social system, a system that is environmentallyinsensitive. For example, most job counselors today would be delighted to find a job for a client, even if that job involved working in a nuclear power plant, mining coal, operating a power mower, manufacturing or applying pesticides, driving a tractor trailer, spreading chemical fertilizers on farm fields, being a “pump jockey”, or serving “fast foods”. By contrast, Christian job counseling would involve helping unemployed clients find jobs that enhance the well-being of the biosphere, such as insulating homes, installing solar panels, organic
farming, and transporting goods in earth-safe ways. Psychological counseling also should address environmental concerns. Helping a client move toward inner peace or social adjustment should not include recommending a lifestyle that does environmental harm.
Job 5: “After-School School” 54. To accelerate the revolution for an earth-safe culture and lifestyle, the church should hire a teacher to operate an “afterschool school”. This educational service would not be agegraded, but available to all students from the kindergarten level through high school (K to 12). It would be available to church youth, and space permitting, to youth residing in the local community. In a classroom setting, the teacher would invite students to share the most salient facts or ideas they have learned in public or private school that day. After a student has spoken, the teacher would ask him or her to try to place that idea or fact in the context of environmental protection and ecosystem survival. This life-oriented socialization process would be assisted by all students in the class. Thereby each noteworthy idea or fact a student has learned that day could be assessed regarding its being “positive” or life-enhancing; “negative” or life-diminishing; or “neutral” regarding biosphere survival. It is doubtful that any other educational program could be more effective in environmental consciousness-raising.
Current Events Analysis 55. Another proposed church function is related to the “afterschool school” for youth. The church should offer adults a similar program. The program would consist of frequent current events discussion sessions for the purpose of identifying the myriad threats to the environment and devising ways to counteract them. As in the case of an after-school school for youth, church members would share what they are learning about current events and try to place the new information in the context of ecosystem survival. When a life-threatening event has occurred, or is about to occur, participants would discuss what action the church might be capable of taking. For example, when the United States Supreme Court decided to permit wealthy corporations and individuals to essentially buy members of Congress, the congregation could have invited other congregations to participate jointly in a mass demonstration against this sell-out of democracy, this gratuitous grant of near-absolute power to those who are responsible for the environmental malaise. If fighting the acquisition of greater power by corporate interests that are destroying life on earth is not a Christian mission, then what is?
Job 6: Managing a Free Clinic 56. While the connection between the Church’s participation in the Free Clinic movement and environmental protection may not seem obvious, there can be no doubt that helping the nation solve its most costly social problem, health care, would help reduce the national debt. Free clinics help to reduce the cost of
Medicaid and Medicare programs by educating their clients about a disease-prevention lifestyle, and by nipping emergent illnesses in the bud, thereby reducing the need for eventual far more expensive treatments in hospitals. By helping to reduce this cost to government, the program would help the nation solve its debt problem, allowing more financial breathing room, and thereby enabling more national assets to be devoted to “saving the earth”, such as preventive and remedial environmental programs, and tax incentives for such responsible business as alternative energy and rail transport. Healing the sick was one of Jesus’ primary missions on earth. Church participation in the Free Clinic movement would be walking in Christ’s footsteps, as it would not only assist in healing the sick, but also contribute to the healing of the biosphere because of its financial implications—facilitating more investment in environmental programs. This service would be available not only to church families facing hard times, but also to all in the local community who cannot afford health insurance and/or health care.
Job 7: Patient Advocacy 57. Many patients in hospitals or nursing homes, in particular those lacking family members willing or able to oversee their care, need an advocate. The job of patient advocacy requires a degree of attention and diligence that is too much to expect of volunteers. Its duties would include researching potential negative interactions between prescribed medications; preventing “mistaken identity”; making sure the patient has easy and rapid access to toilet facilities; helping facility staff
create an uplifting environment for the patient, including pleasant room colors, attractive decorations, and freedom from loud or otherwise unpleasant noise. This role is consistent with the principle that one of the best indices of a society’s morality is its treatment of its weakest and most vulnerable members. As noted above, if the individual is not loved and cared for, what hope is there for the totality of life on earth? The patient advocate would seek to assist not only church members, but all members of the local community in need of this type of care.
Job 8: Transport Center 58. The Church transport center would seek to maximize earthfriendly movement through space. The goal is to enable every parishioner to get to work, school, store, or recreational center in environmentally-harmless ways. In some urban communities, rail service is available. In some villages and towns there may be walking or bicycling paths. In other communities a combination of public transit modes may be available, such as rail and bus. Although most busses today are powered by carbon-based fuels, the amount of carbon released per person is a small fraction of the amount released by all the private cars that might otherwise be used by the bus passengers. Public bus service is not ideal, from the environmental standpoint, and should be used only if no completely “earthsafe” transport is available. The Church should reduce parishioners’ needs for bus service by having its own electric vans for their use, so they can get to their destinations in a noncarbon-releasing way. Ride-sharing could be maximized by coordinating parishioners’ schedules. The recharge of van
batteries should be done by recharge centers offering assurance the energy used is from alternative energy sources.
Job 9: Recycling Center 59. An ideal church recycling center would differ from most of those in existence today. The material to be recycled would be brought to the center by electric vehicles “making the rounds” of parishioners’ homes, thus avoiding separate trips by each household. It would seek to educate parishioners about how to recycle as much material as possible at their own residences, including composting. It would discourage the use of paper or plastic bags. Its goal: virtually total recycling!
Job 10: Homeless Shelter 60. With the problem of homelessness growing in today’s recession, as millions of people lose their homes because they cannot afford to make their mortgage payments, it is outrageous that the 300,000-odd churches in the United States should have buildings which are empty most of the week. How can such churches possibly be classified as “Christian”? Most church buildings have a substantial amount of gratuitous unused space which could, without exhorbitant remodeling expense, be used for small quarters for homeless families. Only a tiny bedroom or two, and a tiny living room, would be needed per family. Less than 250 square feet per unit! Because of the church meal service, separate kitchen facilities would not be necessary. The church should remodel its common bathroom facilities to
include one or two more toilets and sinks, and a shower or two, so that separate bathrooms for residence units are not needed. Some private foundations or governmental agencies might offer grants to cover the cost of remodeling for such a worthy program. Probably no other potential Church social service could be more effective in bringing the spirit of Jesus back into these “temples” than the provision of shelter for the homeless! Jesus said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (See Matthew 25:31-46).
A Mandate to Destroy 61. In light of the fact that government, to a significant degree, is “missing in action” regarding the protection of its citizens and the natural environment, in all probability only the institution of religion can fill in the gap. The Church employment program would be an outstanding beginning in the war against the destructive forces at work in human society. However, if life on earth is to be preserved, changes are needed in all institutions, not only the types of jobs that are “earth-safe”. If the Church does not inform its members and the society of which it is a part that humankind is on a precipice, about to plunge not only itself but all of life on earth into perdition, what institution will? Because we are getting close to solving the mystery of life, understanding how God enabled life to occur, how the aging process can be slowed down, how to cure diseases of all kinds, and how human life is dependent in a myriad ways on the survival of countless other species, it is astonishing that the global power structure should have a mandate to destroy the biosphere, the foundation for human life. Jesus would not have
told us to use our talents if God did not want us to continuously grow in knowledge and understanding of all things. God “made us this way” and provided us with a role-model in our Lord and Savior. We are the intelligent beings God wants to explore the limits of time and space, and enhance life and spread Christian love throughout the universe. We cannot perform these functions nor continue to grow intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually if the basis for life on earth, the biosphere and its enabling climate, are destroyed, if all human resources have to focus on surviving environmental calamities and their attendant infections, diseases, and epidemics. Despite the fact that humankind, in its brief span of existence on planet earth, has learned only a fraction of knowledge about the universe—its structure, functions, and laws—the rate of acquiring additional knowledge is accelerating in a geometric ratio. There is so much to learn and so much work to do! Learning how to reduce carbon in the atmosphere; clean up the oceans and all bodies of water; make air breathable again; protect endangered species and ecosystems; create an international structure for world peace that really works; cure cancer; reduce infant, early childhood and maternal mortality rates in underdeveloped countries; develop a universal health care system while reducing medical costs; innoculate people against propaganda that seeks to make them vote against their own economic interests; explore the furthest reaches of space! It would be infinitely tragic if a few people at the top of the income pyramid should be allowed to sabotage human progress and undermine humankind’s “calling”. Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the corporate elite class is showing contempt for our Creator, and in the process is bringing about a holocaust! Christians: Unite! Do not let this happen!
Institutional Change 62. A Church jobs program would be just the beginning of a social movement to demonstrate how humankind can live in harmony with the environment. As noted above,, social change is needed in all institutional areas, not only in the world of work, if our culture is to be transformed from one that is destroying life to one which protects it. The Church should be spearheading the effort to operationalize a new “survivalist” culture by means of making all institutions more “earthfriendly”, with norms and roles that address the long-term survival of life on earth as well as the short-term needs of human society. This is a proper function of the Church. If the institution of religion, which is responsible for the creation and maintenance of ultimate cultural values, fails to address the prerequisites for the survival of life on planet earth, then what other institution will? Certainly not the economy! Nor even the polity! Long ago, the family, in particular the extended family structure, or clan, might have played a role in this regard, at least on the local level. However in today’s globally-organized social structure, the extended family is no match for the polity and economy, nor are other institutions, including health care, education, media, and science. If social change is to occur, it must be done on the institutional level. What is an institution? It is a collection of norms, roles, and statuses which together perform an essential function in a “total social system”, that is, a socio-cultural system which has all the social structures necessary for a particular society to survive through time. For example, the family institution produces children, so that when the old die, the younger members can take their place. The economic institution arranges for the allocation of goods and
services; the polity manages the power situation, preventing a “war of all against all”. Religion, as noted above, is responsible for creating and maintaining the ideals by which a society’s members live. It is unfortunate that all institutions have had a conservative bias, defining whatever form they take as “right”. Leaders in most institutions profit from the status quo, and have had little motivation to “step outside the box” to see if the institutional norms and roles are pointing in the direction of life or death, in the global sense. Just as political conservatives deny that institutions, as they are structured today, pose a threat to the biosphere, so have social scientists had a conservative bias, assuming that total social systems would exist “forever”, so long as people reproduced and had their needs for food, water, safety, warmth, clothing, and residence met. Environmentalists and political progressives and liberals, on the other hand, believe natural scientists when they say that global warming is real, and that barring drastic institutional change, human life, and all of life on earth, is in jeopardy. Progressives prefer to imbue the concept of institution with more “survivalism” and less “inertia”. If an institution is something that enables a society or total social system to survive across time, then it must be defined not just in terms of social cooperation, in the near-term, but also in terms of ecological viability, in the long-term. Consider the example of one institution, the norms and roles dealing with residence. Social scientists do not usually label residence as an institution and tend to miss the relationship between residence and ecosystem survival. For example, they miss the devastating effect the significant separation across space of home, work, school, and store attending suburban and exurban communities have had on the environment, requiring, as they do, the use of
transportation modes causing both global warming and pollution. In the absence of such progressive thinking in academia and government, every church congregation in the nation and the world should have the project of developing a “Master Plan” to present to the political jurisdiction in which the church is located, a plan to “zone for life”. Such a plan would allocate geographic space in the jurisdiction to social structures in a way that would enable every resident to have access to jobs, stores, schools, and parks and other recreational areas by means of earth-safe forms of transportation, including walking and bicycle paths and, in more densely populated areas, rail or at least some form of public transit. The plan would also promote, by means of tax and other incentives, conversion from carbon-releasing types of energy in housing and industry to alternative energy sources. In the following theses, and at the risk of repetition, an attempt is made to imbue not just residence, but all social institutions with a stronger dose of survivalism, in an effort to bring their norms and roles more in line with the prerequisites for the continuance of life on earth.
Institution 1: The Family 63. Consider what a life-oriented family institution would be like. A major function of this institution is “biological recruitment”, that is, producing the society’s future “members”. If helping to preserve the myriad forms of life on earth is a primary way to show adoration and respect for the Creator, then a life-oriented family is one in which couples would have no more than one child, or at most two children, because the global ecosystem is being severely stressed by human overpopulation
and in particular by the environmentally-destructive technology necessary to sustain that population. Negative—or at least zero—population growth is necessary at this point in human history. In the future, if the global culture and social system ever becomes environmentally-enlightened, it may be possible to have population increase again. Some churches have a tendency to condemn birth control, and in so doing, they are promoting overpopulation and environmental damage, as well as, in many instances, the exploitation of women. A coursecorrection is necessary!
How Do I Love Thee? 64. A life-oriented family is one which uses the need for restricting fertility as an opportunity for married couples to be creative in demonstrating affection for each other, and achieving physical and emotional intimacy. There are countless ways for couples to achieve such fulfillment other than by means of behavior that runs the risk of unplanned pregnancy. Lest one say that the sexual impulse is too strong to place moral obstacles to immediate gratification, a Christian is a person who puts God and Jesus before such self-indulgence. If a Christian couple puts God first, their mutual physical and emotional gratification, including the intensity of sexual feeling, probably would be greater, not least because of the absence of conscious or unconscious guilt, and because of the innovative thought required to meet their own needs in ways that do not jeopardize life on earth. By putting God first, each partner would also be much more likely to prioritize the other partner’s needs over
one’s own, an essential ingredient not only in sexual satisfaction, but in a happy marital and family life in general.
Pro-Life—Really? 65. Many Church leaders are “pro-life,” or “anti-abortion”. Ostensibly these leaders value human life, including human life in the form of a fertilized egg. But the lie is put to their opposition to abortion because they tend to reject the single most effective means of prevention, namely sex education. Do these leaders believe that if parishioners irresponsibly breed and overpopulate the earth, thereby causing its finite resources to be depleted, wars over the remaining resources, and the destruction of the ecosystem’s carrying capacity, God will forgive this desecration of His handiwork and put a halt to threats to life? Not likely! Irresponsible human reproduction and rapid population growth are causing the acceleration of global warming and pollution, making the preservation of the basis of life—the global ecosystem—increasingly more difficult. If Church leaders truly valued human life, they would do everything in their power to support family planning services and sex education, thereby setting the stage for their members to make decisions about family size consistent with the survival of the biosphere, so that life on earth would have a chance to continue for thousands, perhaps even millions of years. Apparently these Church functionaries do not care about the possibility for human life to exist in the future. They would deny women the right to decide for themselves whether or not to have an abortion. This position is morally suspect because many of these leaders do not seem so committed to the value of
human life when it comes to such issues as war, capital punishment, cutbacks of funding for Medicare and Medicaid, and, what will be the greatest threat to life in the future, environmental degradation. God did not create woman for the purpose of physical rape by a man, nor did He create her for emotional or spiritual rape by a government or a religion. Of course abortion should be eliminated! Each human life, including a fertilized egg or embryo, is infinitely precious! But to protect an embryo at the expense of the health of the mother is morally questionable, especially because the kind of “protection� involved is an exercise of religious and political totalitarianism so alien to the concept a genuinely free society, a concept political conservatives profess to cherish. Instead of punishing a woman or her physician, a Christian response to abortion is collective mourning and prayer, mourning for the loss of a physical person, and prayer for the soul of that embryonic person. Instead of condemnation, the woman should receive love and support from her Christian community. The elimination of abortion should be done in a Christian and loving way, and until we reach that level of moral perfection, women should be the boss of their own bodies! They suffer enough from having undesired pregnancies! It is unconscionable that the Church should be adding to their suffering. Long ago my grandmother recited a poem to me that seems relevant to policies seeking to control women’s bodies (author unknown): Love and religion, know no restraint And force makes many sinners, not one saint Till, free as air, the unfettered mind doth rove And searches proper objects for its love
At least let us attempt to be “intellectually honest” about this issue. If all abortion is banned, population numbers will skyrocket, and because of polluting technology, environmental degradation will accelerate, reducing the chance for humankind to survive in the future. We must make a decision as to whether, by banning abortion and thus saving the lives of possibly billions of humans, we may be sacrificing the lives of possibly trillions of humans who might have a chance to live in the next million years or so if global warming and pollution can be arrested or reversed.
The Population Bomb 66. Lord God made man and woman the stewards of all life on earth, the guardians of the delicate biosphere. It is most certainly not God’s Will that humans destroy the species of life with which they are interdependent by breeding irresponsibly. Up to recent times, the bearing of many children was functional, because the rates of infant, childhood, and maternal mortality were so high, and life expectancy was so short, that a high birth rate was necessary to keep population numbers from falling drastically. Today the situation is completely different. Earth is overpopulated with humans because of an economic system that has continuously improved living standards and increased longevity, despite the fact that the planet’s life-support system is not capable of providing for such a large population without the “carrying capacity” of that system being put in jeopardy. Every day, major facets of the planetary ecosystem are injured and destroyed—rainforests, pond ecosystems, salt marshes, coral reefs, and the capacity of forests and oceans to absorb
carbon. If humans are to be true stewards of God’s creation, they must curtail irresponsible reproductive behavior and stabilize population numbers by means of family planning and sex education in homes, schools, and churches. The Church should be blessing the woman and man who choose to have only one child, or at most two children. This sacrifice is on behalf of enabling human life, and all of life, to continue on planet earth. Today’s churches tend to bless the woman and man who do the opposite.
Institution 2: Healthcare 67. The institution of health care, including medicine, is, like the family, one that also addresses the need for “biological recruitment”. The remarkable successes of this institution in curing illnesses tend to obscure some of its shortcomings. One is a failure to effectively educate the public about diseaseprevention, in particular, the role of good nutrition. The poor nutritional quality of school lunch programs and the addiction to “soft drinks” are abominations! A second is a failure to effectively press for single-payer, universal health insurance coverage, or “medicare for all”, the best way to bring medical costs under control while at the same time making quality care universally-available. Opponents of universal medicare base their opposition on the ground that government should not interfere with the free enterprise system. In their view, health insurance companies should be free to make money in any way they can, even if people die because they deem them ineligible for coverage, or because premiums put coverage out of reach for many. It is ironic that opponents of “Obamacare” contend
that this plan will involve “death panels”—governmental experts determining which procedures are to be covered, and which are “too expensive” to cover. Insurance companies to a not insignificant degree are themselves “death panels”, denying coverage to millions. The ideal of “free enterprise” should not include the freedom to essentially kill people. It should be reserved for products and services that do not have such lifethreatening consequences. Not being able to afford the premiums of private health insurance, many people tend to postpone seeing a doctor until they are in serious trouble and require expensive hospital care, which more often than not must be subsidized by taxpayers. A third is a failure to advocate home medical care. There are numerous medical tests and treatments which do not have to be performed in a hospital setting. They can be safely performed in the home, thereby avoiding the risk of infection from hospital sources, while at the same time being cost-effective. A fourth is the failure to inform the public about the health consequences of ostensibly “normal” cultural roles, such as certain psychological consequences— anxiety, stress, and nervousness—involved in driving a car, walking alongside, or even living alongside, a busy highway, or being subjected to loud noises of all kinds, including mufflerless cars and motorcycles, boom boxes, power mowers, rock concerts, and jack hammers. A fifth is a failure to effectively educate the public about the health effects of exposure to harmful chemicals or types of radiation, whether from products, contaminated drinking water, or polluted air in the home or workplace. However, from the standpoint of the global ecosystem, the most serious failure of this institution is the failure to press for an immediate cessation of activities involving the burning of the carbon-based fuels causing global
warming, and the consumption of fast foods such as hamburgers, the beef for which is often produced on grazing lands that replaced rainforests, the destruction of which is another major factor in the warming of the planet. These activities pose a serious threat to the well-being of all species of life, including humans. A health care institution failing to educate the public about such dangers and to press government to use both regulation and tax policy on behalf of preventive measures is not a health care institution in the full sense of the term. A Christian, life-oriented health care institution could be a powerful ally in the war against both disease and environmental degradation. It would promote the maxim “the body is a temple”, a God-given blessing, and urge all parishioners to conduct their lives in a way that shows utmost respect for their “temples”. The “holistic health movement” so defines the body, and its emphases on good nutrition, exercise, avoidance of pollutants, and stress-reducing activities should be adopted by the Church. Christians should be urged to donate much more than they are currently doing to this institution, and to press for greater governmental support for groups doing research on disease-prevention measures, treatments of all kinds, and environmental causes of disease. In a truly Christian society, the medical and health care institution would be even more well-funded an enterprise in the global social system than the coal, oil, gas, and nuclear energy institution is today! If war and dysfunctional power generation can stimulate economies, why can’t such an aedificatory enterprise as health care do the same? Every purchase of a product or service should include a tax earmarked for healthcare—it would be an outstanding investment in a higher quality of life. The tax would underwrite not only research, but also the anticipated future cost of medical
treatment and hospitalization necessitated by the use of a product that, statistically speaking, will entail a health consequence later in life. Analysts of the health care system are able to make fairly accurate estimates of such costs. Furthermore, the costs of environmental mitigation that must be borne in the future because of the use of a harmful product also should be determined, so they can be incorporated into product pricing as well. The Church should be an advocate for much greater financial investment in this institution, and a champion for all those playing a role in it—doctors, researchers, hospital and nursing home administrators, nurses, aides, hospice caregivers, pharmacists, technicians, nutritionists, and advocates of an alternative, “holistic and earth-friendly” lifestyle. The health-care institution is a major way by which a society demonstrates love of its individual members. As indicated above, the guardianship of all of life on earth must begin with good care of the individual human being.
Latter-Day Lazarus? 68. There is an emergent practice relevant to a discussion of the institutions of “biological recruitment”. Called “cryonic preservation”, it is a mortuary practice involving the suspension of the remains of the “deceased” in liquid nitrogen or burial in the permafrost, in the hope of eventual “reanimation”. Some scientists, including nanotechnologists, contend that just as sperm and fertilized eggs can be safely stored for long periods of time in liquid nitrogen, so can the human body. To be successful, the cryonic process must begin the instant that death is pronounced by a physician, in order to maximally preserve
cell structure. It involves maintaining oxygenation of brain cells until “death” and keeping the heart going “post-mortem” by means of CPR and injecting heparin, thereby enabling the body to be treated with “cryoprotectants”. Subsequent to vitrification perfusion with a medical-grade anti-freeze solution, the body temperature is gradually lowered to that of liquid nitrogen, at which temperature the person can be stored indefinitely, in fact virtually “forever”. Permafrost burial is a less-effective alternative to suspension in liquid nitrogen. Cryonic practice assumes that human civilization will continue to exist, a prerequisite for the necessary continued progress in medical technology. If and when in the future medicine finds a cure for the illness or illnesses that took a person’s life, cryonicists believe, that person can be unfrozen, and both the ischemic or freezing damage and the disease or diseases that caused “death” can be treated and reversed, so that reanimation can occur. This procedure is an extreme manifestation of heroic medicine—doing everything possible to heal and extend a person’s life. Such extremism seems consistent with the ideal of Christ-like perfection, because Jesus provided a model for this practice by raising Lazarus from the dead. Cryonic preservation constitutes a powerful “grief coping mechanism”, enabling surviving family members to feel that they have done everything possible to give their loved one at least a chance to continue living on this beautiful earth. Cryonics would also be a positive thing from the standpoint of environmental protection. If people believe that, in a hundred or a thousand years from now, reanimation is possible, it would give them a powerful incentive to take better care of the life-support system of the planet! If global warming and pollution destroy this system, neither medical progress nor even human life itself will
be possible. One question that must be answered if cryonics is to be a viable alternative mortuary practice: How does it mesh with the necessity of limiting human population numbers so that there is less stress on the ecosystem sustaining all of life on earth? There are several answers to this question. First of all, the space required to store even billions of human bodies would be rather minimal. Second, properly stored, “dead” bodies pose no threat to the viability of the biosphere. Third, if people increasingly opt for cryonics, its institutionalization might help to stabilize earth’s ecosystem. Because of the potentially large number of people involved, it would necessitate a greatly expanded space program, one including searches for other planets in the universe with the conditions enabling human life to exist. If earth’s humans can move to other planets, or to man-made biospheric satellites, it would relieve some of the pressure now being placed on earth’s fragile ecosystem because of overpopulation and polluting technology. Search for other livable milieux is critical, given the overpopulation of the world today, and if the cryonics movement adds a sense of urgency in this regard, it would perform a most valuable service. The greater the number of people opting for cryonics, the greater will be public pressure to invest in and expand the space program. It is most unfortunate that cryonics seems so alien to the thinking of today’s religious leaders, because when our Lord and Savior raised Lazarus from the dead, He provided a powerful lesson about the meaning and implications of love, not just the love of family members for their departed kin, as in the case of Lazarus’ sisters who asked Jesus for help (See John 11:1-45), but love for God and His magnificent creation. If cryonics “catches on”, Church involvement will be necessary for several reasons. First, a powerful institution will be
necessary to help the nonprofit organizations currently engaged in this practice prevent future abuse. Second, the Church has “been around” for over two thousand years and hopefully, if the biosphere survives, it will be around “forever”, and therefore be in a position to help provide the financial resources necessary to enable those who may be reanimated in the future to have a decent standard of living at that time. Third, today only the “super-rich” can afford to have the cryonic preservation process done in an optimal way—having a physician on “standby” as a person is dying so that death can be pronounced the moment it occurs and the perfusion and freezing processes done immediately. If cryonics is a morally-valid thing, it must be made available to any human who desires it, and this will require a “cryonic nursing home and mortuary”, that is, a center bringing the best pre-suspension care and post-suspension storage within the financial reach of people in all social classes. The Church would be a most appropriate institution to assist in providing these services, and it is time for it to address this profound way of expressing Christian love.
Institution 3: Socialization 69. The institution of “socialization,” also known as the institution of “social recruitment”, imparts the vocabulary, skills, facts, theories, norms, roles, and values by which “raw human material” is turned into functioning, role-playing, contributing members of society. It includes schools, or formal education, but also includes socialization by parents, grandparents, older siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, teammates and other peers, coaches, bosses, superiors in the military, work
colleagues, billboards and other ads, and media of all kinds, including television, movies, internet, video games, radio, newspapers and magazines, and comics. What would a truly Christian socialization process be like? It would involve, in addition to the Gospel, teaching a person how to place every single thing being imparted, whether it is a specific skill needed for playing a role or a total philosophical or theological Weltanschauung, in the context of the well-being of the individual himself or herself, the family, the peer group, the community, the society, and most particularly, the life-support system of the planet. Consider just one example out of thousands, “driver education”. Who is teaching the student about the deleterious impact driving gas-powered cars is having on earth’s life-support system because of its contribution to global warming? Who is teaching the skills needed to survive in today’s world without the use of such a harmful machine? Today, there are few socializers performing such a role. Until a survivalistic educational philosophy becomes routinely embedded in family practice, school curricula, the media, and all other socializing agencies, the religious institution should serve in this capacity. The Church “after-school school”, described in Thesis 54, is one program for accomplishing this.
Control by Oversaturation 70. Today, much socialization is being done by the mass media. Unfortunately, much of the messaging from this institution is propaganda, designed to induce the target populations to play the roles desired by the corporate power elite, roles regarding both consuming and voting behavior.
There is an insidious mechanism at work in the media to help keep people “in line”, keep them from becoming aware of the dangers of corporate practices and of taking action on the basis of such awareness. That mechanism is “oversaturation”, that is, the bombarding of viewers’, listeners’, and readers’ minds with a tidal wave of information from countless sources—TV, internet, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, ad nauseum. When the human mind is so overwhelmed, and when there is no ideological framework for analyzing information regarding what is important and what is true, then mental paralysis occurs, and a person, quite naturally, follows the path of least resistance. That path is to play the roles the corporate elite class assigns, roles designed to increase the elite’s wealth, but which are destroying the life-support system of the planet in the process. The Church should fight such oversaturation by providing a moral framework for the analysis of information and current events in sermons, discussion groups, and afterschool schools, thereby freeing parishioners from mental paralysis and behavioral servitude, and empowering them to act in their own and the environment’s best interests.
Control by Addiction 71. The mass media are largely responsible for another socialization mechanism by which the corporate elite class disarms potential public opposition to its practices and obtains obedience to its norms. That mechanism is addiction. The corporate elite-engineered culture portrayed in the media has people addicted not just to alcoholic beverages, caffeine, soft drinks, high sugar foods, and nicotine, but also to a militaristic
mind set, gas-powered cars, “big-time” spectator sports, shopping malls, and material goods of an infinite variety. Such products and activities can be as addictive as drugs. Try to disengage a middle-aged man from his Sunday ball game and beer, or a teenage girl from her rock concert or shopping mall, or a teenage boy from his violent videogame or movie, or a “red neck” from his rifle and pick-up truck, or a neo-conservative from “Big Oil” and war, and nervous breakdowns could be the result. People are caught up in a social system whirlpool, addicted to countless culturally-prescribed goods and activities. As is the case with oversaturation, addiction spells moral paralysis for the public. As noted above, the only antedote to a dysfunctional cultural whirlpool is a more powerful eufunctional one. If the Christian Church is not willing or able to establish moral incubators—think tanks and brain trusts—to devise techniques for creating a contracultural whirlpool and disengaging its members from a harmful lifestyle, then there is probably no other institution on earth with that capability. Every church building in the world should be a beehive of frenetic ideational struggle to free mankind from bondage to the pharaoh of greed and authoritarianism.
Institution 4: Mass Media 72. What would be a truly Christian approach to the institution of mass media? Christian media would focus public attention on the multiplicity of threats to life on earth, in contrast to the dominant media of today, which tend to be mouthpieces of the power elite. For example, one TV channel in the United States almost never fails to propagandize on behalf of lower taxes on
big business and the super-rich, and fewer governmental regulations of big financial institutions and corporations, as well as their lobbyists. This medium is serving to increase wealth, power, and status inequality. In contrast, another TV channel does have a “balance of power” perspective, seeking to increase the influence of the working and middle classes so they can effectively serve as a mechanism of countervailing power. However, to improve the position of the less powerful groups, the latter station is advocating certain policies that have environmentally-destructive implications, such as support for the gas-powered automobile and trucking industry. Although certain “liberal” magazines, newspapers, and TV programs are attempting a more “holistic” approach, there is no powerful voice for a multifaceted and comprehensive attack on all of the dangers to life on earth. A eufunctional medium would focus not only on jobs but also on reducing carbon, not only on human and civil rights but also on the dangers of nuclear power, not only on world peace but also on protecting rainforests, not only on the disenfranchisement of the poor and minorities but also on keeping the scientific community independent of corporate control, not only on effective schools but also on overfishing, not only on Social Security and Medicare but also on the contamination of ground water. For example, the federal government’s current consideration of the construction of an oil pipeline from the tar-sands of Canada to U. S. refineries in Texas would be a good opportunity for the media to use a multidimensional focus. This project is portrayed as one that would contribute to “energy independence”, and by providing employment for thousands of workers help reduce the high unemployment rate. There is less focus on the project’s environmental damage, including the contamination of huge
fresh water aquifers and its contribution to the continuing dependence on carbon-based, global warming-exacerbating energy. The media are not serving as a voice for a holistic and comprehensive approach to projects and programs such as this boondoggle that threaten the ecosystem. The Church should act with all deliberate speed to call for the filling of that void, and urge Christians to develop socially and environmentally responsible media.
Institution 5: Political Economy 73. Social scientists treat the polity, or government, and the economy as two distinct institutions. In the United States today, they are essentially the same entity. In the past three decades, the “capital” of the nation has essentially moved from Washington to Manhattan, specifically, to Wall Street. Congress, the Supreme Court, and even the Presidency have become, to a large extent, branches of this governing entity. Accordingly, these two institutions are treated here as one. To understand the impact of this institution on the chances for life to continue on the planet, consider two of its major forms. History has demonstrated that two predominant types of political economy, Soviet-style “communism” and western “free enterprise”, are both dysfunctional from the standpoint of the survival of life on earth. Both forms are essentially “state capitalism” or “corporate socialism.” There has been greater personal freedom in the societies with so-called free enterprise, however, neither form of polity has focused on the prerequisites for the survival of life on earth. Experimentation by both the United States and the former Soviet Union with nuclear power
has had disasterous health effects on people living in the vicinity of those projects. Both political systems, furthermore, promote dependence on power from fossil fuel sources, and as a result we face a global warming crisis and massive pollution. The corporate elite’s greatest fear is “democratic socialism”, because that form of polity involves a focus on the needs of all people in a society, a focus which would entail a concern about the health consequences of, and environmental damage being done by, corporate practices. Democratic socialism would involve higher taxes on the super-rich and big business and more governmental regulation. The elite class wants to retain the current corporate socialist system that minimizes its taxes, and curtails governmental regulations to protect consumers, workers, and the environment. Although socialism as practiced in Scandinavian countries may come closest to a life-centered political-economic model, it too is remiss in moving society in the direction of a social system in which all human institutions contribute to the well-being of both humans and the biosphere. Such a system would require a maximum balance of power between all groups in a society—labor, industry, consumers, men, women, racial and ethnic groups, the old, the young, urban, rural, and, of course, environmentalists. The truth about threats to life cannot be known in the context of an authoritarian polity, because no authoritarian system has ever failed to serve the wealth, power, and status interests of those in control by preventing a free exchange of ideas, however much political debate is “staged” to mollify restive publics. In an authoritarian system there is no countervailing perspective, the essential factor in determining the truth. The United States Constitution is a remarkable document in its recognition of the fact that such authoritarianism will always ultimately prevail unless there is a
balance of power in a society. The U. S. today is getting dangerously close to an authoritarian polity, the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision greatly accelerating this drift. While many political systems claim to be “democracies”, in fact there is only one foundation for true democracy, and that foundation is not just “one man, one vote”. The essential thing undergirding democracy is a balance of power. Only when two or more groups in a society have roughly equal power can there be a genuine dialogue or dialectic. The groups will usually have different ideas about what is true. An individual observing this dialogue is thus able to have a “third party perspective”, that is, he or she has the opportunity to weigh all the evidence presented by two or more groups and come up with a judgment as to which group is “right” and which idea is “correct”. Corporate interests in the United States have a vested interest in preventing the public from knowing the truth about their efforts to increasingly concentrate wealth in their hands and the damage their extraction, transporting, and manufacturing processes are doing to both individuals and the environment. This is why these interests have worked so hard to undermine the nation’s Constitution, most particularly its carefullyconstructed provisions for a balance of power, by essentially “buying” all the groups which could conceivably be able to serve as a counterforce, one able to provide an alternative perspective. These include Congress, the Supreme Court, state legislatures, local courts, and the media. As indicated above in Thesis 28, state legislatures are systematically disenfranchising voters who might vote against corporate interests and gerrymandering electoral districts to maximize representation by those interests. Accordingly, unless in the unlikely event the Supreme Court decides that voting rights are more important
than states rights, it is possible that the remaining semblance of democracy in the U. S. may soon come to an end. It is ironic that the U. S. Department of State constantly criticizes China for its violations of human rights when about one-half of the American electorate supports a political party which is in the process of denying thousands of citizens a most essential human right—the right to vote! The corporate elite-engineered “tea party” movement is the flagship of the campaign to advance its agenda at all levels of government. “Tea partiers” are the voters corporate interests are programming to vote for their candidates. They have been led by propaganda to believe that a program of dismantling governmental regulation and reducing taxes on the wealthy is actually in defense of “freedom” and the Constitution, when in fact it is undermining freedom and destroying the utility of that precious document for preventing power concentration. The United States is fast approaching the form of government of the former Soviet Union, that is, a polity in which a few at the top run the entire economic “show”. In contrast, the form of government that structures a balance of power between many groups, democratic socialism, is the only one enabling a dynamic free enterprise system, largely because of its financial and intellectual empowerment of the “little people”. Only when the masses of people have both purchasing power and the freedom and resources to invent, create, and organize, can a genuine and competitive free enterprise system flourish. It is a grotesque irony, and a testament to the propaganda power of the super-rich, that Americans equate democratic socialism with Soviet-style “communism”. In fact democratic socialism is the polar opposite of both that form of communism and Nazi-style “fascism”. Despite the severe threats to life on earth posed by the increasing concentration of
political and economic power in fewer and fewer hands, the Church today either tends to avoid the topic of power concentration or to actually support the dominant corporate ideology. Many people who call themselves Christian today are supportive of the Tea Party movement. If such Christians and Tea Partiers ever wake up and realize their enemy is not government per se but rather “Wall Street”—the corporate manipulator of “government”—and that their goals are essentially the same as those of the “Occupy Wall Street” or “Ninety-Nine Percent” movement, corporate think tanks may rue the day they initiated this deceptive campaign. Every Christian church in the United States should be attempting to inform Tea Partiers that they are being propagandized to believe “government” is the oppressive enemy and urging them to cooperate with the Occupy Wall Streeters to achieve their common goal—stopping tyranny. One of the most important things for all churches to do is to urge parishioners to get every qualified person registered to vote, no matter what it costs to obtain the so-called “proof” that the corporate elite’s puppets in government are demanding. Furthermore, churches should work with such organizations as Common Cause and the League of Women Voters to arrange for independent counts of voters and/or ballots, as a precaution against the “rigging” of voting machines. American political history has demonstrated that, despite propaganda, the higher the voter turn-out in an election, the more likely it is that candidates who represent the interests of all people, not only those of the super-rich, will be elected. Such true democracy and power pluralism are prerequisites for protecting earth’s life support system.
Public-private Partnerships and American Exceptionalism 74. One of the major challenges faced by government is how to reverse economic downturns and restore high employment. If we apply Christian beliefs and values to the serious problem of economic depressions and recessions, and to the high rate of unemployment accompanying such slow-downs, what would be the Christian approach to these problems, and how does that approach compare with the way in which the United States government has attempted to deal with the current recession? In his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised change. Yet, in the midst of a recession largely caused by the depreciation of bank and investment firm assets because of worthless real estate mortgages, President Obama did not offer change. He rewarded the very institutions that made such misguided investments and caused the recession by continuing the policy of the previous administration to “bail them out”, on the ground that they are “too big to fail”, i. e., their collapse would “destroy the economy”. Having regained their financial strength, these institutions “rewarded” the society rescuing them at taxpayer expense by restricting loans to businesses, loans which might have effected more hiring of the army of unemployed and partially-employed, which hiring, in turn, would have created more consumer demand and spurred economic recovery. Today, while the middle and working classes are financially sinking, the elite groups are making money hand over fist, partly by outsourcing jobs to nations with lower labor costs. The disparity in wealth between the top one percent and all other classes is accelerating. The corporate elite class is fighting furiously to maintain its privileged position, to restrict opportunity for the less fortunate, and to deceive the
public into believing that their chosen political candidates and governmental officials are the ones championing “freedom” and the “Constitution”. In fact they are violating the ethos of the Constitution by destroying the nation’s balance of power. In the absence of checks and balances, the Supreme Court having sided with the rich, the elite class has been free to continue the nation’s dependence on those things that enrich it, but which are destroying the life support system of the planet. This is especially the case with the coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power industries. If President Obama had reacted to this problem in a more enlightened way, he would have followed in the steps of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, putting millions of unemployed to work in ways that would strengthen the nation, but unlike Roosevelt, he would have created jobs that are not destructive of the global ecosystem. If the government had used the trillion-plus dollars it spent bailing out failing banks and industries to make loans through small, more responsible banks to small businesses for such projects as insulating and converting houses and buildings to alternative energy, building a power grid compatible with alternative power sources, promoting organic farming, expanding the nation’s rail system, and constructing wind-powered, ocean-going vessels, it could have solved the problem of unemployment virtually overnight, and made a huge start in solving the problems of global warming and environmental degradation. If such a loan policy failed to effect a quick employment recovery, the government could have become the employer of last resort, creating temporary jobs in the fields listed above, making this work a requirement for any worker seeking unemployment benefits, so that salaries could have taken the place of those benefits. Subsequent to economic recovery and at the first opportunity,
the government could have turned these programs over to private enterprise, in “public-private partnership” style! In one fell swoop, such a policy would have reduced unemployment, stimulated consumer demand and business investment, made the nation less dependent on resources from nations that sponsor global terrorism, and arrested environmental degradation. Partnerships between the federal government and private enterprise have worked well in the past. Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority project, built in the 1930s, and the space program in the past half-century, demonstrate that America can do almost anything, given such a partnership and a national will to accomplish great things. Public-private partnerships are a major factor in “American exceptionalism”. Why didn’t the Church urge the new president to push for such a policy? . A Precious Document 75. The Constitution of the United States would be a good starting point in a discussion of the type of government best able to preserve God’s magnificent creation, life on planet earth. That document recognizes the frailty of human nature, namely, that in the absence of social control, an individual automatically seeks self-aggrandisement, that is, more power, status, and wealth. The greater the wealth, status, and power an individual or group has, the greater the ability to accumulate more, until the point is reached at which no one can match the power of that individual or group. If there is a lack of countervailing power, the only truth the public is permitted to have is the truth according to “absolute power”. While it is theoretically
possible for dictators to manipulate discourse and science on behalf of human survival, that possibility is belied by most of history. Today, the corporate elite is denying that human activities are causing global warming, despite ninety-five percent of the world’s scientists contending that they are. (Incredibly, most of the scientific community is still relatively independent of the control by the power elite!) The Constitution’s genius lies in its structuring a balance of power. The power elite today is working to undermine that balance, using that very document as a tool to do so. As noted above, a recent decision by the Supreme Court accelerated the process by which power balance is being destroyed. In a Christian polity, lobbyists would be regulated, their practices exposed to the sunshine of public scrutiny, and they could not be the agents by which Congressmen are bought and thereby controlled. Furthermore, there would be limits on contributions to political campaigns, to make it more difficult to “buy” favorable votes. A Christian polity would have a true balance of power, with progressive taxation and a tax on inequality to help maintain that balance. It would offer tax incentives to businesses conducting their activities in an environmentally-friendly way, and would quickly translate the findings of pure and applied science into social action programs on behalf of human health and environmental protection. The polities of the Scandinavian nations probably approximate the ideal, although the U. S. government under presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, seems a close second. President Carter tried in vain to revive a balance of power in the polity. For lack of a better term, “democratic socialism”, as versus the “state socialism” of both the former USSR and the USA over the past thirty years, seems an appropriate designation.
Is Jesus a Socialist? 76. “Rich” people in America say liberals are waging “class warfare”. Furthermore, they have contempt for those who contend that “Jesus is a socialist”. Their fear is that if Christians believe this, they will tend to support liberal or progressive candidates for political office, and this will lead to an increasingly democratic socialist government, one which involves controls over, and curtails on, its effort to attain absolute power and virtually all of the nation’s wealth, while minimizing governmental regulations and taxes on corporations and their social class. The rich are obviously not cowed by Jesus’ saying that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus is definitely not an advocate of the kind of corporate socialism practiced in the United States today, a system which privatizes gains and socializes losses of the super-rich and big corporations and banks. He would approve of legislation designed to help the poor and the working class, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, educational grants, and job training programs. However, He would disapprove of the misuse of governmental assistance. He would condemn such fraudulent practices as the use of several names by a welfare recipient to collect social or financial assistance multiple times, and the deliberate, slothful avoidance of seeking work while on unemployment insurance. In fact, if we had a truly Christian government, there would be no need for unemployment insurance, because, in the event that the private sector is unable to find a job for a “laid-off” worker, that government would put the unemployed person to work immediately in projects designed to improve the nation’s
environment or infrastructure, until he or she is rehired by the private sector.
Nonviolent Social Control 77. One major function of government is “social control”, that is, preventing people from harming or exploiting each other, and dealing with those who have committed such acts. What would a genuinely Christian social control system system be like? First, it would include nonviolent methods of control in police work and national defense, including psychology— understanding the motivation of those who would do others or the environment harm, on the assumption that such knowledge would indicate methods to prevent that motivation from being acted out. It would include negotiation, whether that negotiation is with a nation seeking to destroy another nations, or with a criminal threatening violence on a more local level. For example, as soon as global terrorism raised its ugly head, the Peace Corps should have developed a division devoted to learning about Islamic culture and mind-set, including what motivates Muslims to join terrorist cells. Thousands of young Americans, versed in an understanding of Islamic culture, could have been assigned the task of seeking every opportunity to engage members of that faith in discussion, in order to discover possible avenues toward peaceful coexistence. Had this been done decades ago, the wars in the mid-east might have been avoided. It would have been a truly Christian form of social control. Gandhi’s revolution against the British occupation of India was a demonstration that such nonviolence “works”. More recently, Greg Mortensen’s work in establishing schools
for girls in Pakistan is another example of the successful use of proactive nonviolence, earning the approval of Muslim leaders and even the acceptance of the Taliban! Another less violent way to stop people from harming each other is the use of nonlethal weapons in both the military and police work, such as tranquillizer bullets and ray guns. Research on even less harmful weapons is called for. Police currently employ some nonlethal weapons which, while they seem relatively harmless, actually can do considerable harm, such as tear gas, water hoses, tasers, and pepper spray. Unfortunately, some police officers become more “trigger happy” when they have such weapons, perhaps believing no permanent damage is done; they tend to rely on them rather than using such control methods as negotiation or “talking a person down”, which take more effort and are more time-consuming. Better police training is needed to prevent such overuse. Second, a Christian approach to social control would include a much greater focus on rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes than prevails today. Greater financial support for rehabilitation would be a good investment in human capital. Often those who have been rehabilitated have subsequently made outstanding contributions to society, Michael Millkin and Jack Abramoff being noted cases in point. Third, truly Christian social control would not include capital punishment, not only because the taking of a human life is against God’s Commandments, but also because too often those convicted subsequently have been discovered by new evidence to be innocent, and because such punishment in general has been administered unfairly across racial and ethnic groups. The recent execution of Troy Davis by the State of Georgia was a national tragedy, given some evidence of his innocence. Once again, the Supreme Court did not stop a potentially gross
injustice, allowing a punishment to be carried out only because it deemed the legitimacy of the judicial process to be more important than its competence and fairness. This execution is a symbol of callous disregard for both social justice and the sanctity of human life. The Church should take a firm stand against this barbaric practice. If the Church cannot comply with God’s Commandment proscribing killing and defend the life of one human being, how can it possibly tackle the much larger task of defending the totality of life on earth?
A Christian Economy 78. What would a truly Christian economy be like? It would be a system of extraction, transportation, manufacturing, servicing, and consumption that involves no harm to human health, no pollution, and no carbon buildup in the atmosphere. The Church should be encouraging the development of business models that are socially and environmentally responsible, are both “human-safe” and “earth-safe”. Consider just one example—the restaurant business. It affords a model of business responsibility that is easy to visualize. A responsible restaurant would follow the outline presented in Thesis 51 for a church meal service, including the use of local suppliers, organic foods, and earth-friendly means of transport and energy. Its menu would include fare that has been demonstrated to help prevent or cure illness, such as “macrobiotic” food. In addition, an ideal commercial restaurant would operationalize the values of equality and Christian compassion by setting the stage for “rich” and “poor” people to dine together. A less affluent family would be introduced to a more affluent one
interested in this opportunity, and the two families would be seated at the same table. The families would pay in accordance with their respective financial abilities. The restaurant should include the “sharing” policy in its advertising, and that ten percent of the net profit is routinely donated to food banks. As our Lord and Savior said, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise” (Luke 3:10-11). This restaurant model involves principles of social and environmental responsibility that can be applied to any business. No matter the product or service, the same principles would apply: the entire system in which a business is situated, from extraction to product use would pose no harm to either individuals or the environment and would be consistent with the Christian ideal of sharing. Is any church today being an advocate for such responsible business? In a Christian economy, there would not be a constant stream of trainloads of coal headed for the bowels of power plants, nor unending supertanker deliveries of oil headed for refineries and the gas tanks of America’s primary addiction, nor truckload after truckload of simple carbohydrates headed for supermarkets, convenience stores, and the bellies of children and an obese nation.
Christian Banking 79. Key to a Christian economy would be banks and investment firms that value life more than profit. Church members should be able to deposit their paychecks and other financial assets in banks that neither lend to, nor invest in, any
business or corporation that harms the environment or human health in any way. Likewise, if a church family is financially strong enough to have investments, the investment firms should be able to offer the same assurance that the money will be kept “completely clean”. The Church did a good job in divesting in the economy of the Union of South Africa during the apartheid years. Today it should be urging divestment in corporations that are destroying the planet’s life-support system. It might be possible to establish an environmental bank when there are as few as a dozen or so congregations or several thousand parishioners willing to become patrons. Ideally, a life-centered investment firm would also have thousands of clients. The legality of such institutions depends on the answers to several questions: Is it legal to discriminate against businesses which are technically legal but which are doing serious harm to health and the environment? Can banks and investment firms legally discriminate, not for base motives, but on behalf of higher and nobler social and environmental objectives? Banks and corporations today have the public brainwashed into believing that human “progress” is dependent on the current economic system which works to the corporate elite’s advantage. They maintain that their “regulation-free, low-tax, trickle-down economic system” alone can generate full employment and the surplus of capital enabling sufficient taxation to support governmental services and sufficient donation to nonprofits fighting disease and famine and doing research on all scientific fronts. It seems no one, not even the Church, is raising such questions as: Can a global economy consisting of smaller, more environmentally-sound systems of production and distribution be just as dynamic and inventive as those of today, equally capable of generating the same capital surplus to sustain
government, social welfare, national defense, and medical research, and to continue “human progress”? Can tax policy be structured to enable the success of businesses which have not only a financial bottom line, but a social and environmental one as well? Can there be a moral substitute for each and every dysfunctional business product or practice, a human-friendly, environment-friendly alternative? Can a socially and environmentally-responsible job be substituted for every one that is harmful? Today’s corporate elite contends that their “business-as-usual,” and “trickle-down” economic model is the only one capable of creating jobs and enabling mankind to continue making progress. This is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy, that is, what they say is true and real, but only because they have defined the situation as real and act in such a way as to make it become real. It is unbelievable that the superrich are not cognizant of the dangers to life on earth from their activities. They could afford to restructure their businesses, to switch from dirty products to clean ones, from strictly selfserving financial practices to those of benefit to the public at large, and still make money “hand over fist”. Given enough patronage, an environmental or survivalist bank could, by confining loans and investment capital to completely “clean” enterprises, raise the cost of doing business the “dirty” way, to the point that banking and business tycoons are forced by a growing market of patrons with a strict moral sense to switch to earth-safe alternatives. The greater the financial resources of environmentally-friendly banks and investment firms, the greater the leverage on behalf of life on earth. The Church should be encouraging the development of such institutions as environmental banks and investment groups, which would offer a very powerful weapon in the war against environmental
degradation—the redirection of capital and investment away from polluting businesses and toward completely clean ones.
Institution 6: Transportation 80. What would a truly Christian transportation system be like? It would have modes of transport that do no harm to God’s green earth, including walking, backpacking, bicycling, bicycle cars and trucks, rickshaws, sailboats, boats powered by oar, and balloons and dirigibles. Transportation by electric car can be considered, provided the electric power for battery recharging is from alternative energy sources. Another form of transport which does not add more carbon to the atmosphere than today’s existing trees and oceans are able to absorb is transport by rail, including trains and streetcars. However, unless a drastic turnaround in energy policy is forthcoming in the near future, it is doubtful that the required massive investment in rebuilding a rail system capable of replacing the car and truck as the primary form of transport will be profitable, because the environmental calamities in store for mankind are going to be so severe that civilization as we know it today will cease. Accordingly, it is doubtful there can be a financial return on such investment because of the incapacitation of the current large-scale system of production and distribution, more primitive and local systems taking their place until heat and disease decimate human populations, and along with them, much of life on earth. Sometime in the next hundred years, global warming-induced climatic disasters, including hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis, floods, and forest and field fires, and the resultant ecosystem simplification with its attendant viral and bacterial epidemics,
will probably be so severe that large-scale systems of production and distribution processes will cease. We can only hope and pray that mankind will wake up in time. Unless the Christian Church creates a sense of urgency not only among its parishioners, but across the entire human race, and leads by example, we are probably in for a final Malthusian holocaust. In essence, humankind is committing suicide. It is imperative that the Church urge the planning, business, engineering, and architectural professions to design models for the movement of personnel and goods that are environmentally safe, and encourage parishioners to plan their lives around slower means of transport. A slower transport system would not lower the standard of living, just the reverse. The transition to the alternative transport model would require socializing people to appreciate a slower pace of life and more locally-grown foods and locally-made products, and to forsake the addiction to the automobile. The automobile today is such a powerful addiction because it performs so many functions—womb-substitute and comfort and privacy zone, depression-coping mechanism, aggression substitute, libido-enhancer, “thrill-by-speed” provider, and a way to achieve “immediate gratification”. Forsaking such self-indulgence would most assuredly enhance individual health, and lower morbidity and mortality rates. Slower means of transport would enable people to avoid the tension, anxiety, and nervousness involved in speedy transport, and accident rates would surely decline. Exceptions to a transportation system less dependent on automobiles and trucks would include police cars, fire trucks, and other emergency vehicles, however eventually these vehicles could be “electric”, provided alternative energy is used for battery-recharge. Paradoxically, it was the most brutal dictatorship in human
history, that of Nazi Germany, that devised more earth-safe transport vehicles, namely the dirigible and the mini-car. Today, many people have forgotten the joy of slower transport—a train, trolley, or cable car ride; walking to stores; bicycling; sailing. It is sickening to see students taken to school in gas-powered school busses or private cars! This component of their educational experience is a lesson in how to accelerate the destruction of life on earth! Education is supposed to impart more noble goals than that! Among mankind’s most beautiful creations are the “clipper ship” and other large sailing craft. If the need for oil is reduced, such vessels could easily handle the volume of goods involved in international trade. The cost of longer travel time could be offset by the use of free energy. These vessels, as mentioned in Thesis 42, have been discovered to have rehabilitative potential, not only for those with neurological or psychiatric conditions, but also for criminals and delinquents, probably because of the greater need for cooperative interaction and the exhilaration and self-pride attending the successful coping with powerful forces of nature. Companies transporting goods in this way might be able to increase their profits by means of contracts with governments for rehabilitative services. For the Church to fail to be an advocate for such environmentally-sound means of transport as rail and sail craft seems a significant dereliction of duty.
Institution 7: Energy 81. What would a genuinely Christian energy institution be like? It would employ only clean sources of power, including wind farms, solar panels, ocean tides, and geothermal sources.
It is one involving the designing of homes and buildings to minimize the need for electric power. It puts an emphasis on human power. A life-centered energy institution would involve no carbon-releasing power-generating plants, cars, trucks, jetplanes, motorcycles, ocean liners, motorboats, jackhammers, and power mowers. It would have no need for power from nuclear fission. No Christian church building in the world should be dependent on harmful sources of energy. Today, most are. No Christian church in the world should fail to advise its parishioners to switch to safe, alternative energy sources in all of their activities.
Institution 8: Social Stratification 82. Social stratification is the system by which individuals and families are rewarded or penalized by means of placement in “social classes”. Placement is on the basis of such ranking systems as wealth, power, prestige, lifestyle, and esteem. How does a society determine which people deserve to be in the “upper-class”? The “middle- class”? The “lower-class”? What would a Christian social stratification system be like? Jesus provided criteria for placing people in higher or lower social ranking in his Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12). He said that the blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, try to make peace, show mercy, and are meek, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. One way in which the Church could teach parishioners, and hopefully society in general, regarding which people are worthy of higher social position is by praising “heroes” who have fulfilled one or more of Christ’s criteria. The list might include, in addition to Jesus, such people as Saint
Francis of Assisi, George Fox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, John Muir, Louis D. Brandeis, Norman Thomas, Mahatma Gandhi, Ignaz Semmelweis, Jonas Salk, William O. Douglas, Jacques Cousteau, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Pete Seeger, Jimmy Carter, and Nelson Mandella. Theodore Roosevelt might also merit such praise, but only during his years as President. Each of these individuals made an outstanding contribution to one aedificatory cause or another, including environmental protection, human health, human and civil rights, housing for the poor, world peace, democracy and a balance of power, and equality of opportunity. In a Christian social stratification system, the term “upper class” would refer, not to big bankers or investors, billionaires, captains of industry, and the super-rich, but rather to individuals making the most outstanding contributions to the survival of the biosphere. The term should refer to people with character, vision, and social concern. Al Gore, Dennis Kucinich, Elizabeth Warren, Bill Moyers, Chris Hedges, Josh Fox, and Rachel Maddow are among those who today should merit high social rank. They are in the vanguard of the movement to resist tyranny and save life on earth. In fact, Dennis Kucinich may be the most Christ-like person ever to run for the presidency of the United States. Unfortunately, given American ideology, in which the aggressive, tough guy or “machismo”, “bomb the enemy”, ethnocentrically-patriotic theme is dominant, he has had no chance. Likewise, if our Lord and Savior were to return and run for the U. S. presidency, he would not be elected, especially given a Supreme Court which nullifies the will of the people and hands that high office on a silver platter to a servant of a power elite class indifferent to the human suffering and
environmental harm it is causing. The Christian Church has the potential moral and institutional power to reverse a system that rewards the most successful money-makers with high social rank and enormous power, and replace it with a social stratification system that rewards service in the cause of life. But the Church seems unable or unwilling to do so.
Institution 9: Creative Arts 83. What would a genuinely Christian institution of creative arts be like? It would judge any musical composition, artistic painting, sculpture, or literary work on its aedificatory potential. Does it evoke life-enhancing thoughts and feelings or the opposite? Because freedom of speech is so critical to a free society, and to the balance of power undergirding freedom, works that glorify killing, war, abuse, exploitation, injustice, and inequality should not be banned, unless it can be demonstrated that they constitute the equivalent of falsely shouting “Fire” in a crowded theatre. Christian creative arts consist of works that move people in the direction of greater love for their Creator, His Son, each other, and all of life, works involving such themes as environmental appreciation and protection, healing, peace, equal opportunity, freedom, and social justice. Another “art” is the field of architecture. In the past sixty years, the primary themes of this discipline have been functionalism and power, and as a result the designs of many buildings, homes, roadways, and other structures have been stark, minimalistic, and devoid of environmental accommodation or feeling for either human history or sense of community. This architectural drift was very apparent in one
small city in New Jersey, New Brunswick, located “on the banks of the old Raritan”, as the Rutgers song goes. Before 1950, the view of this city from the hill across the river in Highland Park was like a beautiful painting! Quaint, charming homes of wood, including those of 17th Century Dutch sea captains and 18th Century colonials, were interspersed with 19th Century brick homes, factories and warehouses along the Raritan River. Adjacent to the river lay the Delaware and Raritan Canal, completed in 1835, and for almost 80 years an environmentally-sound conduit for commerce between Pennsylvania and New York City, a mule-powered transportation system, complete with towpaths. Ascending the hill one could see the business district along the main artery, George Street, replete with relatively small brick or wood buildings housing businesses of a seemingly infinite variety. There were six movie theatres, each with its own architectural uniqueness. Further up the hill churches were situated, their spires casting auras of guardianship and peace over the city below. To the right of the spires rose the towers of Rutgers University, each atop stone, brick, or wood buildings of diverse historic yet compatible designs. In one view, 300 years of American history and social, economic, cultural, and architectural diversity! George Street was the business hub, and people from all social classes and many walks of life— Hungarians, Blacks, Italians, Jews, Dutch, Irish, Germans, Greeks, English, and others—mingled and interacted with comraderie! A city with a warmth and social complexity isomorphic with our Creator’s ecological design! Even the Rockefeller family recognized what an artistic gem this quaint city was, suggesting that it arrange for its architectural preservation, for New Brunswick to become a commercial
counterpart to Williamsburg. Of course the city fathers rejected this offer, opting instead for “rateables�. Where are the superrich with such heart today? Why were the churches so silent as this magnificent urban gem was destroyed on the altar of political and corporate greed? Today, because of the razing of the old structures, buildings with functional architecture and a depressing superhighway along the river taking their place, the view of this city has but two major themes: money and power. It projects the prioritizing of corporations over people, power over community. Ironically, in the early to mid-20th Century, the medical giant Johnson & Johnson, based in New Brunswick, accommodated the historic architectural motif of Rutgers University, designing its buildings in colonial style. Then Rutgers changed its architectural theme to a functionalism devoid of historic sensibility, and J & J subsequently followed suit. Accordingly, aside from various ethnic enclaves, the city is now a cold place, devoid of any redeeming aesthetic value. Where was the Church while this architectural devastation was occurring? Is it possible for Christianity to regain the artistic and historic sensibility of the Popes of olden times?
Institution 10: Recreation 84. The institution of recreation serves many functions, including physical and mental exercise, and character development. Another major function is to provide relief from the monotony and boredom of occupational roles, and from the frustrations and stresses of everyday life. Two thousand years ago, a major recreational pastime was attending gladiatorial sports events in arenas, such as the Roman Colisseum. These
events, involving men killing each other in armed combat, provided an opportunity not only for thrilling spectacles, but also for vicarious expression of anger and thereby relief from frustration. Another popular event was watching wild animals tear defenseless human beings apart limb by limb. Such opportunities for mass catharsis made public rebellion against oppressive government much less likely. While the alleviation of frustration-induced stress and tension may be healthy, to achieve it at the expense of the suffering and loss of life of other human beings is immoral. Today, sports stadia have taken the place of the arenas of old. Instead of armed combat, the events include such sports as soccer, football, and boxing. However, the events perform many of the same functions as did gladiatorial violence, including relief from tension, stress, and the frustrations of everyday life. Unlike gladiatorial event spectators, today’s sports fans usually do not take delight in seeing physical injury. Rather, they relish witnessing the execution by “their team” of more skillful strategy and tactics than is the case with their opponents. While physical injury of the players in today’s sports events is less prevalent than in the arenas of olden times, nevertheless it does occur quite regularly. What effects do such professional, college, and high school sports have on the environment and social character? Are these effects constructive or destructive? There can be no question about the fact that attendance at these events does serious environmental harm. The carbon released from the use of cars and busses bringing fans to the stadia is enormous, and constitutes a significant factor in global warming. Unfortunately, a policy of limiting attendance to those who can get to the arenas by walking, bicycling, or taking public transportation will not be acceptable to the public, because
many communities lack such benign access modes, and accordingly such a policy would be discriminatory. Furthermore, while limiting fan observation to electronic media would solve the carbon-release problem, to deny observers the thrill of physically being part of a “rousing crowd” would limit the psychological function of stress relief. The effects of sports events on social character are also questionable. Is it moral to achieve alleviation of tension and stress from everyday frustrations by observing events entailing significant risk of injury of the players? Studies have shown that the ability of soccer players to perform certain intellectual tasks is inversely related to the number of “headings”—blows to the head by the ball. How can a sport be a good builder of character when it diminishes intelligence? It seems so self-defeating for schools to develop a student’s intellect in the classroom, only to diminish it on the playing field! Football is noted for knee, shoulder, ankle, and other body part injuries, as well as concussions. Sports are considered incubators of good character because they contribute to team-playing skills. Is the development of skills to be put to use in a cut-throat, competitive business world, one doing great damage to the lifesupport system of the planet, really a good thing? On the other hand, if such sports were eliminated, what would take their place? In a society replete with feelings of “relative deprivation” and the scapegoating of “government” as the cause of mass frustration, would people turn to alcohol? Illegal drugs or other crimes? Physical or psychological abuse of family members? Conducting business in a meaner and more vicious manner? There can be no doubt that “big-time” sporting events do constitute, along with some types of religion, an “opiate of the masses”. What would be a more moral, a more Christian,
substitute for them? From the standpoints of environmental protection and social justice, an ideal replacement for big-time sports would be peaceful mass demonstrations against tyranny, wealth concentration, pollution, and global warming. It would be interesting to know if the mass demonstrations organized by Mahatma Gandhi in India against British rule in the first half of the 20th Century performed an indirect recreational function, and if the demonstrations today by the “Occupy Wall Streeters” or “Ninety-nine Percenters” also have this function for their participants. If such mass demonstrations are to replace bigtime sports as alleviators of stress to any significant degree, a much greater proportion of the population would have to be well-informed about the nature of our form of government— corporate socialism—and its evils. However, until that day comes, such sports will continue to hinder efforts for a more socially and environmentally just society by diverting public attention from the cause of frustrations and stress—the control of government and all institutions by a self-serving corporate oligarchy. Meanwhile, there are countless sports and other forms of recreation that seem relatively benign, even healthy (or at least healthier), including basketball, baseball, tennis, modest weight-lifting, track, fencing, bowling, volleyball, ping pong, swimming, crew, golf, and “college-style” wrestling. Furthermore, some recreational activities are conducive to nature appreciation, such as hiking, sailing, canoeing, kayaking, and camping. Those who would label safer recreational activities “unmanly” are only demonstrating their commitment to the social character model of aggressiveness so useful for an “economy of violence”, and their disdain of one that is more life-affirming. The nexus of recreation and culture in general could be enhanced by means of hiking trails—thousands of
them criss-crossing our beautiful land, from Mexico to Canada, from sea to shining sea. In one fell swoop these trails would offer opportunities for the healthiest exercize, walking, and those for interaction between people from all walks of life, from every area of the nation, from every age, ethnic, and racial group! If such a recreational model were to be emulated globally, what a difference it might make for international understanding! Wouldn’t advocacy for such a project be appropriate for the Church?
Can Church Congregations Save Life on Earth? Steps
Specific
Step 1 85. Church congregation to vote on adopting the code of Christian action to save life on earth presented in these 95 theses. If a majority votes in the affirmative, continue to Step 2. If a minority votes in the affirmative, have a second vote on whether the majority will permit the minority to use church premises for the programs and purposes outlined in the code. If the majority gives permission, continue to Step 2.
Step 2 86. All members of the congregation voting in favor of implementing the code of Christian action presented herein to agree to raise their own personal church tithes to church quints, that is, from ten percent of a family’s income to twenty percent. The extra ten percent to provide a substantial part of the funding
for code implementation. In the event there is such agreement, continue to Step 3.
Step 3 87. Invite volunteers to take turns as watchmen for church premises. Aim to oversee the premises 24/7. Then unlock the church doors!
Step 4 88. Organize an Employment Committee. The goal: Create as many of the jobs described in Thesis 48 as church space and the budget will allow. Hire unemployed members of the congregation or local community qualified to do the jobs. Some of the jobs could be full-time, others part-time. Some might require more than one employee, such as meal service. Some of the jobs can be combined to create one full-time position. Seek to create the equivalent of one full-time job for every twenty members of the congregation voting in favor of implementing the code of Christian action. In the event that the budget is insufficient to create a paying position for one or more of the jobs listed, ask for volunteers to fill the position. The jobs of “grantsperson” and “survivalist counselor” are of particular importance. The grantsperson’s importance is in obtaining any available supplemental funding for the church jobs and services from private foundations or governmental agencies. The counselor position is important because it seeks to enable church members to plan their lives in ways that reduce
dependence on electrical power, home heating, and modes of transportation using carbon-releasing fuel, and eventually to be independent of that fuel source. Planning should include the changing of jobs, in cases where the employing company contributes to global warming or pollution. It should also include the assessment of products and services on the market, and boycotting in the event that either the products or the processes by which they were made or transported harm the environment.
Step 5 89. Organize a Voter Registration Committee. The goal: Each member of the congregation voting in favor of code implementation should seek to get one person in the local community registered to vote who is qualified, but who has been effectively disenfranchised by an act of the state legislature for the purpose of voter suppression. The preservation of what is left of democracy in the U. S. depends on this job being done, no matter the cost or inconvenience involved in the process. Once every such voter in the local community has been registered, each code participant should seek to get one qualified person who has never voted registered to vote. In the event the congregation is sued for violating the Constitutional principle of the separation of church and state, the lawsuit should be welcomed: it would provide an outstanding opportunity to further inform the American public that the U. S. Supreme Court itself, in its “Citizens United� decision, has violated the fundamental premise of the
Constitution: Democracy cannot survive in the absence of a balance of power.
Step 6 90. Organize an Energy Committee. The goals: Insulate the church buildings as completely as possible; Install solar panels for heat and hot water; Contract with local utility company to obtain electricity from alternative energy sources, including solar, wind, geothermal, and waterfalls; Assist the Survivalist Counselor in advising parishioner families how to convert their homes to alternative energy sources. If cost prohibitive for a family, explore the possibility of that family temporarily living with another church family in order to reduce living expenses enough to enable the conversion’s affordability. Home-sharing also has the benefit of enabling the family on whose home improvements are being made to avoid the inconvenience and noise of the work process. Ideally, within one or two years, all church families will have converted their homes to alternative energy. Another function of this committee is to purchase a church electric van for transport of church members to their destinations, in communities where earth-safe transport is unavailable, a vehicle to be of service for the church meal program as well. The church transport center would schedule trips made by this vehicle to maximize ride-sharing by parishioners.
Step 7 91. Organize a Current Events Discussion Committee. The goals: Provide opportunity for parishioners to share information about current events and to place those events in the contexts of environmental protection, more equitable allocation of the nation’s wealth, and human health; reach out to other congregations to explore such joint actions as letterwriting, boycotts, and demonstrations on behalf of a more survivalistic social structure and culture.
Step 8 92. Organize a Master Plan Committee. The goals: Evaluate the master plan of the local jurisdiction in which the church is located from the standpoint of environmental protection; Develop a master plan to correct the deficiencies of the jurisdiction’s plan and present it to the local governing body; Attend meetings of the local planning board and zoning board, as well as the governing body. Questions to serve as guides: Does local zoning allocate space to homes, industries, stores, schools, and recreational opportunities in such a way as to minimize the need for private cars to get residents to their destinations? Does it promote safe walking and bicycling paths and public transportation? What are the possibilities of transport by rail? Does it protect not only open spaces but critical ecosystems and endangered species as well? Does it promote the use of solar and other alternative energy in building codes? Does it make reducing air, water, and land pollution a
priority and does it have strong enough ordinances to accomplish that goal?
Step 9 93. When a sufficient number of churches demonstrate a commitment to fight global warming, pollution, and the concentration of power in the hands of those who are harming earth’s ecosystem, leverage Church power in numbers of members by encouraging the establishment of an environmental bank, i. e., a bank that neither lends money to, nor invests in, any business or enterprise which harms the environment in any way. Such a life-oriented bank would base loans and investments on a social and environmental bottom line as well as a financial one. No Christian should have accounts in any bank that violates this principle. Given sufficient deposits, the bank would have the financial wherewithal to invest in large, “save-the-earth” projects, including alternative energy, expanding the nation’s rail system, construction of large windpowered vessels for international trade and tourism, and construction of residential communities that do not depend on energy from fossil fuels or nuclear power and provide walking or bicycling paths, rail service, or a combination of public transportation modes enabling residents to get to their destinations in earth-safe ways.
Step 10 94. If at least 10 million Christians in America declare a commitment to “save life on the earth”, they will have the leveraging power to become a political force. The “separation of church and state” should not be construed to mean that religious people can not express their religious beliefs through political dialogue and action, especially in the event the polity is contributing to the destruction of life on earth! If Christian “evangelicals” can do it, so can Christian “greens”! This political force would support candidates for every federal, state, and local political office who combine the ideals of the two major parties in the United States today. These include the conservative ideals of independence, self-reliance, hard work, and elimination of waste, fraud, and inefficiency, and the progressive ideals of world peace, social justice, full employment, equal opportunity, and a social safety net for people, who, despite their best efforts, cannot “make it” financially. The tragedy of the U. S. polity is that the stated or official goals of both major political parties have scant relationship to their agendas. The political platforms are nothing but bait, lures for relatively uninformed voters. The hidden agendas are to serve the interests of the corporate elite, regardless of the consequences for the other social classes and the nation as a whole. In contrast, candidates supported by Christian greens would seek to represent the interests of all Americans—consumers, labor, business, elderly, young, rural, urban, men, women, straight, gay, and all racial and ethnic groups. Christian greens would support a “Draft Al Gore for President” campaign. The Supreme Court, completely misinterpreting its constitutional mandate, and in service to a
corporate elite class, robbed the United States of its chosen president in the year 2000. Nothing would symbolize the conversion of contemporary culture away from war, violence, corruption, deceit, and exploitation and toward the restoration of a balance of power and democracy more than the election of this man, who today is one of the leading champions against the forces of darkness. He is doing God’s work, as are every pacifist, environmental, conservation, “slow money”, local selfreliance, population control, sex education, organic farming, and civil rights organization. These groups today constitute the “de facto” Church, whether their members identify themselves as Christians or not. It is way past time for the “de jure” Church to catch up! A Christian Platform While the Church will not be able to create a political party without violating the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, it is certainly legal for it to adopt a political platform. The platform Christian greens would support: campaign finance reform; public voting facilitation; a more progressive income tax and a tax on inequality; substituting temporary government jobs in such fields as ecosystem protection and rail transportation for unemployment insurance benefits; single-payer, universal health insurance; a national master plan to create communities that are not dependent on carbon-releasing energy-generation or transport, but rather on clean, alternative energy; whistleblower support, “sunshine laws”, and an expanded budget to eliminate governmental waste, fraud and corruption; monopoly-busting; banning insider trading; open space preservation and conservation of ecosystems and endangered species; foreign aid to focus on
protecting rainforests, coral reefs, and other critical ecosystems as well as on fighting famine and disease; an expanded budget for medical research; increased grants to “poor” school districts; increasing the budgets of federal, state, and local governmental agencies dealing with protection of consumers, workers, the environment, and intellectual property; expanding the Peace Corps to include an Arab and Islamic understanding division; ending capital punishment. The platform would also include rewards for those citizens who help the nation achieve certain goals, including the invention of technology helpful in reducing carbon emissions or reducing medical costs by means of a healthy lifestyle. It would include a tax on goods and services which are harmful, a tax sufficient to cover the future costs of medical care, hospitalization, and mitigation of environmental damage entailed in the use of such wares and services.
What Would Jesus Do? 95. Across the past 2000 years, the Church has tended to side with absolutes and authority as opposed to relativity and freedom. For many centuries the Church supported landowners or “feudal lords” against peasants, contending the former had an absolute, even divine, right to exploit the serfs and operate an authoritarian social control system. In recent times the Church has done relatively little to combat corporate dominance over, and exploitation of, workers and consumers. Missing from the Church’s thinking has been the principle of Christian relativity. This principle is that no social structure and no goal is valid in God’s eyes if that structure or goal is not relative to, and ensconced in, a moral context. For example, if landowners or
the corporate elite use peasants or workers for their own selfish purposes at the expense of the quality of life of the latter, then their behavior is evil. Both privileged classes could have employed structures and values with aedificatory potential, that is, the potential to increase freedom, justice, opportunity, and well-being of the “masses”. However such benevolent dictatorships or oligarchies are rare in history. That is why a balance of power is so necessary to prevent exploitation. Today, given the complexity of the global social system, the only effective mechanism to achieve a balance of power is democratic socialism, that is, a political structure in which business, labor, consumers, racial and ethnic groups, and nonprofit organizations all have enough power in the polity to check the excesses of each other and maintain the good things of life, including social justice, equal opportunity, and access to truth. The media serving corporate interests seek to propagandize the public to equate democratic socialism with “communism”, when in fact they are opposites. Soviet-style communism is actually somewhat structurally isomorphic with the corporate socialism of the U. S. today. Christian relativity should also be applied to cultural values and themes. To talk about values without moral context is dangerous. A person or society that glorifies speed, for example, could portend a calamity. Speed in ending a war by means of the atomic bomb would most assuredly be self-defeating, not only because of the retaliation it would engender, but also because of sickness from the ensuing radiation poisoning that would be spread around the world. Likewise an individual speeding down a highway in a car is at risk of ending his or her life. On the other hand, speed in medical research to find cures for cancer and other diseases, and speed in research and innovation to fight global warming
are a good use of this value. All values “have value” only with reference to their moral context. This is true of the values of size, power, and free enterprise, as well as speed. True Christians view each social structure and each value as relative to the context of its application, and are skeptical of any deified structure or value, such a free enterprise, nationalism, and even patriotism, because absent moral context, they could be dangerous, even idolatrous. The only absolutes to Christians are to love God, obedience to His Commandments, and following in the steps of Jesus. Today, there are movements to use the wrong kind of absolutist thinking in regard to such issues as abortion, capital punishment, homosexuality, immigration, and gun control. On such issues “Christian relativity” is in short supply. Every Christian in the world should be asking: What would Jesus do? He would not kill an abortionist, nor condemn the tormented woman who asked for an abortion. The issue of abortion was discussed at length in Thesis 65. Regarding another “hot issue”, that of homosexuality, Jesus would not discriminate against a homosexual man or woman, nor prevent a homosexual couple from adopting a child. When our Lord said God made male and female, and that a man should leave his parents and be joined to his wife (Matthew 19:4), He was just stating the obvious, namely that most men and women are heterosexual. However, the Creator built infinite variability into the DNA not only of humans, but of other mammals as well, a variability including attraction to the same sex. Science has shown that roughly about five percent of many mammalian species are homosexual. Regarding other social issues foremost in the public mind, Jesus would not deport an “illegal alien” family that is law-abiding and hard-working. He would not resist background checks on
gun purchasers at gun shows. He would not pull the switch to execute a condemned prisoner. He would not cover up physical or sexual abuse by priests, coaches, scoutmasters, bosses, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, or anyone else. He would not be a soldier in an army fighting to protect oil supplies, nor teach children to admire those who make or engineer war. He would not pay a woman less than a man, nor a “minority” person less than a “dominant”, for the same work. He would not accept a salary a thousand times greater than that of the average worker in an industry. His tax rate would not be lower than that of his secretary. He would not engage in “insider trading”. He would not accept a political contribution in return for a favorable vote. He would not appoint a political “hack” to a judiciary position. He would not seek to suppress public voting. He would not drive a car or truck powered by gasoline nor fly in a jet plane. He would not take a cruise on a “luxury liner”. He would neither own nor operate a “powerboat”. He would not play soccer nor encourage anyone to reduce intelligence in this or any other manner. He would not get children addicted to simple carbohydrates or unhealthy fats. He would not approve of prison policies that facilitate inmate violence. He would not live in a “McMansion”, nor have an expansive lawn, nor reside in a gated community. He would not live in a home heated by oil or gas, nor use a power mower, nor use electricity from a nuclear power or coal-fired plant. He would not burn toxic materials to generate energy for an industrial plant. He would not sell DDT to an “underdeveloped nation” lacking laws to protect its citizens and soil. He would not routinely feed chickens or cattle preventive anti-biotics, nor grow nonorganic food using fertilizer from sludge farms. He would not work in an industrial plant making products from
asbestos. He would not inoculate children against the flu or other diseases with injections laced with mercury. He would not perform elective surgery without explaining to the patient at great length the potential risks and harm involved. He would not destroy a delicate ecosystem nor threaten endangered species for a housing, office, or industrial “development”. He would not condone the glorification of violence on TV, nor work for a TV station seeking to mislead the public. He would not slash the budget for public education, nor hinder union organizing. He would not abandon those in nursing homes, nor operate a nursing home in which patients lack constructive stimulation or must wait a painful amount of time for an aide to escort them to a bathroom. He would not use a dryer in a laundromat in geographic areas where the sun and/or wind can easily accomplish the drying. He would be an advocate for all life-affirming governmental programs—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Peace Corps, Environmental Protection Agency, Super-Fund, Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He would support Representative Kucinich’s proposal for a federal Department of Peace. He would champion transportation by rail and wind, earth-safe communities, organic farming, xeriscaping, alternative energy, truthful media, good nutrition for poor children in impoverished countries (such as “plumpy’nut”), the healing arts and sciences, nonviolent means of social control and national defense, the nuclear “lock down” programs of the International Atomic Energy Administration and the National Nuclear Security Administration, environmental protection and civil rights organizations, the United Nations, and world peace. The Church should raise the question: What Jesus would do? about
every social, cultural, economic, and political issue, and above all, the issue of protecting the environment—earth’s life-support system.
In summary: -
The surface of planet earth is warming and being polluted;
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The warming and pollution are killing off many species of life; the biosphere is being simplified;
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Ecosystem complexity is the basis for human life;
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Human life is in jeopardy;
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The global economic system, corporate socialism, including its products, by-products, and processes, is causing global warming and pollution;
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Corporations are not effectively seeking to change their products, by-products, and processes to make them “earth-safe”;
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Corporations and the “super-rich” people who own and control them are increasingly concentrating wealth and power in their hands; the ability of humankind to influence the “top one percent”, to prod them into being more environmentally and socially responsible, is correspondingly being reduced;
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Religion, the institution responsible for creating, maintaining, and disseminating the ultimate human values that set the stage for developing norms and roles in all institutions, including the economy, is failing to use its moral influence to stop wealth concentration, global warming, and pollution;
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The ethos of Christianity is life;
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Christians are not using their moral force to fight ecocide by developing a contra-culture and counterforce against the dominant, corporate-engineered culture that is destroying life on earth;
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The 95 theses presented herein seek to provide a blueprint for creating that contra-culture and counter-force, including opening church doors 24/7, conducting educational and employment programs, demonstrating an “earth-safe� pattern of living, and, as is the case with Christian Evangelicals, becoming politically-active.
Coda A giant corporation has recently run a stirring commercial on television. It takes the viewer inside one of its manufacturing plants, displaying some of the extremely complex assembly-line equipment and processes. Then the viewer is taken to a runway, lined with engineers and technicians from the plant. Their faces are beaming with pride as they observe the initial successful operation of the huge and powerful machine they have
presumably designed and built, one intended to contribute to societal efficiency and speed. Unfortunately, it will also contribute to both global warming and pollution. The product in question symbolizes the remarkable sophistication of modern technology, which produces ever more complex structures and machines designed to make the lives of human beings easier, safer, or more efficient. How tragic it is that the brilliance that has produced these remarkable artifacts apparently cannot be harnessed to address the problems of global warming and pollution. Talk about cultural lags! The gap between technology and morality has never been wider, and today’s gap is so wide it may spell the end of all life on earth. It is a grotesque irony that humankind has the brilliance to progress so far in technology, yet lacks the morality to protect life on earth. There is a role in this regard for religion, especially for Christianity. If the Church can somehow motivate earth’s populace to say “No!” to every aspect of technology that is harmful, and “Yes!” to every trait and trait-complex that is beneficial, we may still be able to act in time. There is also a role in this regard for social science, in particular, the discipline of sociology. It is uniquely suited to the task of designing social structures that may be able to assist in implementing a survivalistic morality. This disquisition has suggested a variety of such social structures. It is my hope and prayer that others will use the ideas presented herein as a springboard to develop ever more refined and effective “save life on earth” strategies and tactics.
Conclusions Christians, unite! You have nothing to lose but your souls! The “super rich” obviously are not going to follow Ralph Nader’s advice and do the job of saving life on earth. Change will not come from “above”, from the elites. This social class now controls cities, states, and nations, as well as corporations. “Business as usual” is its norm, including keeping us dependent on fossil fuels, nuclear power, and other products destroying the biosphere. Accordingly, change must come from ”below”, from the working and middle classes, hopefully with at least some assistance from members of the upper class who have a social conscience. Individual members of these classes cannot effect change. Survivalistic social and cultural reconstruction must be done on the group level. The potentially most powerful structure to organize the mass of citizens into cadres to fight for life is the Christian Church, the congregations of which could serve as these cadres. Today, the basic units of society are the corporation and the family. Corporations and their political lackeys are responsible for the destruction of the biosphere, and families are not powerful enough to fight them. Probably the only units with the potential power to make a difference are church congregations. Now that conservatives have staged a “velvet coup d’etat” by means of the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court (high-ranking administration officials and Supreme Court Justices don’t go on outings together just for recreational purposes!), government is essentially controlled by the corporate elite, and it has, to a large degree, relinquished its role as the guardian of life. Accordingly it is time for the
Church to become relevant again—relevant to individual, family, and community life. Historically, the Church has been a most relevant institution, performing many health, educational, and welfare, as well as spiritual, functions. Nothing would recast the Church as a vitally relevant institution again more than becoming the leader in the war against global warming, pollution, and wealth concentration. This war will require the Church to become much more active in its historic health, education, and welfare functions, and to become a major employer as well. It is time for Church leaders to stop being irrelevant and morally hypocritical and start practicing “real” Christianity. They should urge congregations to develop survivalistic communities capable of demonstrating to the larger society how meaningful lives can be conducted without destroying God’s carefully constructed life-support system on our planet. Time is of the essence. Humankind and most of life on earth could become extinct if we do not act with all deliberate speed. If no congregation is willing to adopt a life-saving code with the potential for arresting, perhaps even reversing, global warming and wealth concentration, then let us start a new one. The approaching 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses presents an opportunity for us to rededicate ourselves to the mission and calling of making Christianity a religion of which Jesus Christ and Martin Luther would be proud!