The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
them. Scientists believe that global warming is exaggerating existing weather patterns, resulting in greater flooding, especially in low-lying areas, more intense fires and storms, and the like. The dangers of global warming are often presented in apocalyptic language that resembles the biblical terminology that evangelists once used to describe the end of the world (Lilly 2016).
A fair number of people, typically political conservatives who are generally wary of increased governmental initiatives, however, have rejected such claims outright. Others have argued that they are exaggerated, have suggested that they might be the result of unknown phenomena that are not so directly connected to human actions, or have argued either that combatting global warming might have adverse economic consequences or that funds spent to reduce global warming could better be spent in other ways (Alumkal 2017).
Support for this position might be fueled in part by conservative interpreters of the Bible who believe that Genesis teaches a literal six-day creation and who therefore suspect that scientists might have a hidden agenda in advancing theories of global warming just as they believe they did in advancing the theory that humans evolved from other forms of animal life. Critics are particularly suspicious of individuals who in their judgment seek to deify the earth or nature in an attempt to elevate attention to the environment. Some may, indeed, believe that Christ’s second coming might be so imminent as to think that it is pointless to worry about such long-run dangers (Delgado 2017, 17). Others believe that advocates of global warming are showing a lack of faith in the resilience of God’s creation as evidenced in Psalm 19:1–6 and its own self-correcting mechanisms. Moreover, some have argued that God’s promise to Noah in Genesis 9:11–12, 15–16 that he will never again cover the earth with water would preclude the kind of flood levels that some scientists have predicted (argument cited in Alumkal 2017, 165).
The Bible contains many accounts of natural disasters. While some, like the flood from which Noah and his family escaped on an ark, or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, were attributed to God’s wrath against man’s sins, they were initiated by God rather than through direct human causes. One scholar has thus noted that “the biblical apocalypse posits humanity at the center of the universe and upholds the notion of a Creator who intervenes in history on behalf of humans. This God bends nature to his service, causing both hellscape and 110New Jerusalem to emerge in the story of humankind. In contrast, Enlightenment science’s appeal to apocalyptic language has no subject and no body. It tells no history, elicits no desire, and offers no catharsis. Its crisis is measured in meters, not monsters” (Lilly 2016, 368–69).
Much of the biblical arguments relative to global warming have centered on two passages, both of which come from the creation accounts (McCammack 2007, 648). Genesis 1:28 gives humans dominion over the environment: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Genesis 2:15, however, indicates that human beings serve as stewards of creation: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”
One perceived threat of global warming is that its negative consequences will fall both on the most vulnerable nations of the world and on the most vulnerable individuals within such nations. This seems to be a major theme in a report by the Evangelical Climate Initiative entitled “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” which ties concern for climate change both with biblically based concerns for the poor and with the Christian call to love one’s neighbors. Texas Tech professor Katharine Hayhoe (2019) cites 2 Timothy 1:7 in an attempt to persuade theological evangelicals thinking about climate change that Christians should have a spirit of love and power rather than one of fear.
See also Judgment; Natural Disasters
For Reference and Further Reading
Alumkal, Anthony. 2017. Paranoid Science: The Christian Right’s War on Reality. New York: New York University Press.
Delgado, Sharon. 2017. Love in a Time of Climate Change. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress.
Evangelical Climate Initiative. n.d. “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.” https://www.npr.org/documents/2006/feb/evangelical/calltoaction.pdf.
Hayhoe, Katharine. 2019. “Caring about Climate Change Is the Christian Thing to Do.” New York Times. October 31.
Lilly, Ingrid Esther. 2016. “The Planet’s Apocalypse: The Rhetoric of Climate Change.” Apocalypses in Context: Apocalyptic Currents through History, ed. Kelly J. Murphy and Justin Jeffcoat Schedtler. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, pp. 359–79.
McCammack, Brian. 2007. “Hot Damned America: Evangelicalism and the Climate Change Policy Debate.” American Quarterly 49 (September): 545–668.
Clinton, Bill (New Covenant)
On July 17, 1992, William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton (b. 1946), a former governor of Arkansas, accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for president. He had emerged from a large field of Democrats and went on to win against President George H. W. Bush, who, while having successfully repelled the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, was not perceived as having done as good a job with the domestic economy.
Both Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore Jr., were raised as Southern Baptists. According to 1 Corinthians 13:13, the three great Christian virtues 111are faith, hope, and charity (love). Just as Barack Obama would later write a book called The Audacity of Hope, so too Clinton capitalized on this virtue by referencing the name of the town of Hope where he grew up. As a candidate with a better common touch than his Republican rival, Clinton was able to identify with small-town America, observing in his acceptance speech that he learned “more about equality in the eyes of the Lord than all my professors at Georgetown; more about the intrinsic worth of every individual than all the philosophers at Oxford [Clinton had been a Rhodes Scholar], more about the need for equal justice under the law than all the jurists at Yale Law School.” Clinton observed, “For too long, those who play by the rules and keep the faith have gotten the shaft. And those who cut corners and cut deals have been rewarded.”
Pointing to his own successes with the economy in Arkansas, Clinton called for “a new approach to government.” Whereas previous presidents had talked about a New Deal (Franklin D. Roosevelt), a New Frontier (John F. Kennedy), or a Great Society (Lyndon B. Johnson), Clinton called his own approach “a New Covenant, a solemn agreement between the people and their government, based not simply on what each of us can take, but what all of us must give to the nation.” Although the covenant Clinton described was thus between the people and their government rather than between the people and God, it nonetheless reached back not only to social contract philosophers like John Locke but also to America’s Pilgrim fathers, who patterned their own government on the laws of Israel that they traced back to the covenant they had made with God at Sinai. Christians divide their Scriptures into the Old and New Testaments, which are also often referred to as the Old and New Covenants.
President Bush was known for having difficulty with what he sometimes called “the vision thing.” Clinton gamely capitalized on this by quoting “Scripture,” without mentioning the chapter and verse of the biblical maxim in Proverbs 29:18, that “where there is no vision, the people perish.” He cited this phrase three times within as many paragraphs.
Most of the rest of Clinton’s speech focused on outlining this New Covenant, which was based on balancing rights with responsibilities in fields as diverse as college opportunity, health care, taxation, welfare, defense, and the like. Rather than dividing the nation into “us” versus “them,” Clinton further associated