Gypsy Rose Lee explained the secret of her success this way: "I always leave them begging for more — and then I don't give it to 'em." There's a time to leave the stage and, accustomed to the limelight of celebrity, too few public figures seem to know when it's arrived. The latest examples are evangelical right icons Jerry Falwell and James Dobson.
"If I decide here, as the pastor, " Falwell told his congregation last Sunday, "and our deacons decide, that we're going to get caught up in the global warming thing, we're not going to be able to reach the masses of souls for Christ, because our attention will be elsewhere. That's pretty wise for Satan to concoct."
Concern for global warming is just another example of Satan's trickery, that is.
James Dobson takes exception to evangelical concern for the global warming issue, too, co-signing practically as Falwell was speaking a furious letter complaining that environmental activism detracts from addressing "the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children," going on to demand that the National Association of Evangelicals dismiss its vice-president, Richard Cizik.
Well.
So that y'all know where I'm "coming from," I was educated as a geological engineer at Michigan Tech, located in North America's glaciated terrain, and an awareness of the earth's heating and cooling cycles is vital to interpreting geological formations there. For that reason, I've long tended to be wary of some of the more garish claims about global warming. We've seen these things before, and man's activities are puny and insignificant when set against the forces that govern the planet. I expect that, when the dust settles, our conceits will be arrested by the discovery that we've made a niggling contribution, at most, to whatever it is that's going on.
But — never mind. If you do believe that man is causing destructive heating of the planet over which the Creator specifically gave man dominion, then ... what to do? The Inerrant Bible doesn't provide much guidance. Columnist Cal Thomas, a co-founder with Jerry Falwell of The Moral Majority, makes the same point. "There is no biblical expectation that a 'fallen' world can, should or will be improved prior to the return of the One to whom evangelicals are supposed to owe their complete allegiance."
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