Now, what would a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the front of a boat (I assume with victims of the recent flooding in Louisiana) have to do with that, I wondered. Most of the Catholics I've ever known have been staunch Democrats. As you can guess, religion is fingered as a main culprit. Singled out in the sidebar to the short piece which informs us that:
More than one person tells her [Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild] that environmental concerns are pointless, since the second coming of Jesus and subsequent total destruction of the Earth will make it irrelevant. About 40 percent of Americans believe Jesus will return by 2050.
Which also added to my puzzlement at the illustration. Apparently it escaped the notice of Theo Anderson and his editors and publishers at In These Times but that particular statue is pretty much a symbol of the Catholic Church whose head published an encyclical last year, Laudato Si*, one of the most powerful statements on the moral obligation to save the environment ever issued. Perhaps they were too busy figuring out how to work slamming religion into this topic to have read about it.
Anderson goes on, cluelessly:
Hochschild calls this the great paradox of Louisiana. Though the people say they want clean air and water, they vote for more tax cuts for business, less regulation, more pollution, more disinvestment in public resources.
The state’s pervasive religiosity does play a role. Hochschild notes the town of Lake Charles, with a population of 70,000, supports about 100 churches. More than one person tells her that environmental concerns are pointless, since the second coming of Jesus and subsequent total destruction of the Earth will make it irrelevant. About 40 percent of Americans believe Jesus will return by 2050, according to a 2015 Pew poll, which helps explain why environmental issues are a low priority.
I don't think there is any evidence that a belief in an imminent return of Jesus "helps explain" why environmental issues are a low priority. I would like to see that there is evidence that 40% of the people who might tell pollsters that they believe that would say that their ability to breath and drink clean water is irrelevant.
But that belief is only one tiny piece of a much more complex picture. Strangers methodically builds the case that there are deep, multi-layered stories at work in the lives of the people whose conservative politics grip the region. Within those stories, religion is less a license to destroy the planet than a grounding force for moral striving and community. As Hochschild writes: “Being Christian and taking Jesus as your savior was … a way of saying, ‘I commit myself to being a moral person. I daily try to be good, to help, to forgive and in fact to work hard at being good.’ ”
I don't know exactly what Hochschild says but, as presented in the article, the charge against religion is refuted by what is being said.
Most remarkable, and most obviously missing the point in the article, the two strongest forces in explaining why so many white working-poor folk vote conservative are almost entirely unmentioned, TV and radio. People spend a hell of a lot more time watching TV and listening to the radio than they do just about anything except working. TV and radio in the United States - freed to lie in their own interest by liberals who freed them from paying a price for lying - are the sources of the lies that lead people to vote Republican. That lapese might explain a lot more about how the lefty media have consistently failed to understand this phenomenon - they're too busy with things like slamming the religion of such people to really do what Hochschild claims needs to happen, to listen to and understand the people you want to vote for Democrats. There is something more than slightly condescending about a U. of California at Berkeley Sociologist explaining the working poor of Louisiana to everyone but presenting it the way Theo Anderson and In These Times does multiplies the sense of sneering disrespect.
* And the beginning of the document shows that Catholic Popes have been sounding the alarm on that a lot longer than In These Times has been around.
1. “LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.[1]
2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.
Nothing in this world is indifferent to us
3. More than fifty years ago, with the world teetering on the brink of nuclear crisis, Pope Saint John XXIII wrote an Encyclical which not only rejected war but offered a proposal for peace. He addressed his message Pacem in Terris to the entire “Catholic world” and indeed “to all men and women of good will”. Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration, I wish to address every person living on this planet. In my Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, I wrote to all the members of the Church with the aim of encouraging ongoing missionary renewal. In this Encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home.
4. In 1971, eight years after Pacem in Terris, Blessed Pope Paul VI referred to the ecological concern as “a tragic consequence” of unchecked human activity: “Due to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation”.[2] He spoke in similar terms to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations about the potential for an “ecological catastrophe under the effective explosion of industrial civilization”, and stressed “the urgent need for a radical change in the conduct of humanity”, inasmuch as “the most extraordinary scientific advances, the most amazing technical abilities, the most astonishing economic growth, unless they are accompanied by authentic social and moral progress, will definitively turn against man”.[3]
5. Saint John Paul II became increasingly concerned about this issue. In his first Encyclical he warned that human beings frequently seem “to see no other meaning in their natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption”.[4] Subsequently, he would call for a global ecological conversion.[5] At the same time, he noted that little effort had been made to “safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic human ecology”.[6] The destruction of the human environment is extremely serious, not only because God has entrusted the world to us men and women, but because human life is itself a gift which must be defended from various forms of debasement. Every effort to protect and improve our world entails profound changes in “lifestyles, models of production and consumption, and the established structures of power which today govern societies”.[7] Authentic human development has a moral character. It presumes full respect for the human person, but it must also be concerned for the world around us and “take into account the nature of each being and of its mutual connection in an ordered system”.[8] Accordingly, our human ability to transform reality must proceed in line with God’s original gift of all that is.[9]
6. My predecessor Benedict XVI likewise proposed “eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correcting models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment”.[10] He observed that the world cannot be analyzed by isolating only one of its aspects, since “the book of nature is one and indivisible”, and includes the environment, life, sexuality, the family, social relations, and so forth. It follows that “the deterioration of nature is closely connected to the culture which shapes human coexistence”.[11] Pope Benedict asked us to recognize that the natural environment has been gravely damaged by our irresponsible behaviour. The social environment has also suffered damage. Both are ultimately due to the same evil: the notion that there are no indisputable truths to guide our lives, and hence human freedom is limitless. We have forgotten that “man is not only a freedom which he creates for himself. Man does not create himself. He is spirit and will, but also nature”.[12] With paternal concern, Benedict urged us to realize that creation is harmed “where we ourselves have the final word, where everything is simply our property and we use it for ourselves alone. The misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognize any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves”.[13]
"Don't let the facts interfere with my presuppositions and prejudices."
ReplyDeleteEven when, as you say, the facts in the article refute the baseless assumptions.