The Religious Right’s favorite anti-environmental activist Cal Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance appeared on Janet Parshall’s radio show In The Market on Monday where he maintained that environmentalists are following the same path as Satan. Ironically, the corporate-allied Beisner lamented the presence of “theft,” “covetousness” and “greed” in society, which he said that along with “sexual perversion” and disobedience were part of “the growing depravity in the United States,” which he of course linked back to the environmental movement. Beisner later used the refrain, used by conservatives from Rick Santorum to David Barton, that efforts toward environmental protection are dislodging God and humanity from their rightful place and is turning the natural order “upside down just as Satan did in the Garden of Eden.”
As I look at the growing depravity in the United States, whether it’s in those things that most of us think about in terms of depravity, sexual perversion and so on, or in those things that people don’t usually think of in those terms but Paul certainly does: theft, disobedience to parents, dishonoring of authorities, covetousness, greed, idolatry. All of these things are signs of the depraved mind to which God gives people over when they choose not to recognize Him. The Cornwall Alliance is trying to call attention to these things to show particularly how they are dominant in the environmentalist movement.
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It turns upside down the whole understanding that Scriptures gives us of God, man and the earth. In Scripture, in Genesis 1-3, we see that God is supposed to be in supreme authority, He rules over man, man then rules earth as God’s representative, so hierarchically it’s God, then humanity, then the earth. The environmental movement turns that upside down just as Satan did in the Garden of Eden as he tempted Eve, he wanted Eve to submit her will to a serpent, one of the creatures, and put that serpent over her and God under her, so it becomes earth, then humanity, then God. That happens in the secular movement but frankly, Janet, it increasingly begins to happen among some evangelicals.
