Eyebrows raised. Had Utah Congressman Chris Cannon actually asked Southern Utah Wilderness Association representative Heidi MacIntosh to state her personal and religious background during June wilderness hearings in Washington, D.C.? MacIntosh, visibly stunned by the question, responded that she was from Tucson, Arizona, but failed to expound upon her religious beliefs.
Congressman Cannon did not press further and the hearing proceeded to other matters. However, the topic had been broached. SUWA's web page immediately announced, "For your information, Heidi MacIntosh testified at the hearing this morning and was pegged as an extremist. Why you may wonder? Well, she went so far as to include words like 'cherish' and 'lyrical.' Apparently, this was grounds enough for the committee to ask her what religion she practiced. Unbelievable!"
Religion was mentioned by a Congressman from a Utah where, due to an imposing Mormon majority, the subject is discretely avoided when discussing politics. What could have motivated this departure from political correctness? Perhaps it was concern that the unabashed religious agenda of the environmental movement could no longer be ignored.
"They were desecrating my temple," testified Daniel Kent in San Juan County, Utah Justice Court earlier this year. Mr. Kent was on trial for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after he attempted to stop a county road crew from grading a two-track road on public land which has been identified for potential wilderness designation under the 1964 Wilderness Act.
Mr. Kent is one of many environmentalists who have concluded that certain lands, public and private, must be preserved untrammeled because they are quite literally sacred. These eclectic believers have appropriated romantic stereotypes of Native American religions and mixed them with Old World paganism, modern indigenous shamanism, and some concepts ostensibly derived from the Bible to establish a New Age environmental religious movement.
Interestingly, among Mr. Kent's co-believers are the President, Vice President, and Secretary of the Interior of the United States of America. Through public declarations and official actions the leaders of the world's greatest power have made clear they consider traditional Judeo-Christian values inadequate to meet the planet's urgent ecological-spiritual needs.
The religious imperative for New Age environmentalism is found in writings such as Arthur Versluis' 1991 book, "Sacred Earth The Spiritual Landscape of Native America." Therein Mr. Versluis wrote:
"Environmentalism divorced from a spiritual understanding of the human place in the cosmos is simply a sublimated version of the very mentality that is causing the destruction. ... We cannot cease destroying, and we will not fill that emptiness within, until we effect a spiritual renaissance. Only when we--each of us individually--turn toward spiritual truth, and open ourselves to that truth, will we strike at the heart of that imbalance we see all around us in this world. ...
Believing Earth's rocks, springs, plants, creatures and petroglyphs to be the manifestations of life-sustaining spirits, Mr. Versluis asserted that taking on "the spirituality of the original [aboriginal] peoples is essential." Otherwise, the Earth faces imminent death when the few remaining wilderness areas are violated and last of the spirits withdraw from Earth.
Utah naturalist and writer Terry Tempest Williams was invited by President Clinton to speak at the dedication ceremony of the Grand Staircase--Escalante National Monument on September 18, 1996. There Ms. Tempest Williams exhorted her audience, including the President, Vice President Al Gore and actor Robert Redford, to listen to the spiritual voices of the aboriginal Anasazi people who inhabited the Southwest before the modern Indians. She stated:
"The sacred heart of this continent beats in the unagitated and free landscapes of North America. The Kaiparowits Plateau is the heart of the heart. ... The Hopi elders have told us this morning, it is a time for healing. A healing must begin within our communities, within ourselves, regarding our relationship to the natural world. We are not separate. ... These lands are sacred."
Ms. Tempest Williams had previously written a fervent paean to Nature in her book, "Desert Quartet An Erotic Landscape." Therein Ms. Williams sought to answer the question, "How might we make love to the land?" Extolling the sexual passion of desert wilderness, she described her own uninhibited sexual-spiritual interaction with the four basic elements of nature: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. That Ms. Tempest Williams was selected to speak just before President Clinton at the monument dedication was appropriate as the Clinton administration had already embraced New Age Earth worship as dramatically as Constantine embraced Christianity in the Fourth century.
Vice President Gore in his 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance, Ecology and the Human Spirit", called for the world to broaden its religious perspective, to look to Native American religions and ancient paganism for inspiration. Mr. Gore argued:
"The spiritual sense of our place in nature predates Native American cultures; increasingly it can be traced to the origins of human civilization. A growing number of anthropologists and archaeo-mythologists ... argue that the prevailing ideology of belief in prehistoric Europe and much of the world was based on the worship of a single earth goddess, who was assumed to be the fount of all life and who radiated harmony among all living things.
"... Its best-documented tenet seems to have been a reverence for the sacredness of the earth ... [I]t is probable that many barbaric practices accompanied the more benign beliefs. Still the archaeological scholarship is impressive, and it seems obvious that a better understanding of a religious heritage preceding our own by so many thousands of years could offer us new insights into the nature of human experience.
President Clinton, during his monument dedication address, lauded Vice President Gore, stating, "I read (Gore's book) Earth in the Balance, and I realized that it was a profoundly important book ..."
In March, 1996, Mr. Clinton had issued an executive order "to preserve and protect Indian religious practices" by assuring access, use and protection of "sacred sites" on public lands. Earlier, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had attempted to bar everyone except Native American religion adherents from access to Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming during the summer solstice month of June each year. In June, 1996, a federal judge blocked the attempt, ruling that it constituted an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment. [continued...]