[Return to Part I]
[...continued...]
On November 11, 1995, Mr. Babbitt, spoke to a joint meeting of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In his speech entitled, "'Between the Flood and the Rainbow' Our Covenant: To Protect the Whole Creation", Mr. Babbitt discussed his spiritual transformation from traditional Catholicism to Earth worshipper:
"I remember when I was ... a child growing up in a small town in Northern Arizona. I learned my religious values through the Catholic Church, which, in that era, in that Judeo-Christian tradition, kept silent on our moral obligation to nature. ... In all the years that I attended Sunday mass, hearing hundreds of homilies and sermons, there was never any reference, any link, to our natural heritage or to the spiritual meaning of the land surrounding us.
"Yet outside that church I always had a nagging instinct that the vast landscape was somehow sacred, and holy, and connected to me in a sense that my catechism ignored.
"At the edge of my town a great blue mountain called the San Francisco Peaks soars up out of the desert to a snowy summit ... It was always a mystical, evocative presence in our daily lives. ... And it was a young Hopi friend who taught me that the blue mountain was, truly, a sacred place. ...
"That awakening made me acutely aware of the vacancy, a poverty amidst my own rich religious tradition.
The Secretary's remarks were immediately condemned by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, but a more apocryphal assessment came from columnist Alston Chase, who wrote in the Washington Times,
"What is special about this speech is not its liturgical or legal accuracy. The Bible advises us to worship the Creator, not creation. Rather, the real significance of Mr. Babbitt's talk is that it admits the obvious: that environmentalism is a religious movement. And this observation carries profound constitutional implications. ...
"It may be only a matter of time before America becomes a complete theocracy -- a place where in the name of environmentalism, science and religion fuse with civil authority to rule the populace.
Are New Age environmentalists exploiting environmental legislation to establish a state religion complete with immense sacred land preserves dedicated to Earth worship and primitive recreation like that practiced by Ms. Tempest Williams? There is no dearth of religious references in their arguments.
SUWA has called for 5.7 million acres of Utah land to be dedicated to wilderness as a "tithe" of Utah's lands with such amount to encompass about ten per cent of Utah land mass, or an area almost as large as Delaware and Rhode Island combined. On January 9, 1997, in Salt Lake City, Ella Sorenson of the National Audibon Society, urged that no development be allowed on privately-owned Fremont Island because, she considers "the islands of the Great Salt Lake sacred." On the same day in Washington D.C., while receiving an award from President Clinton, actor Robert Redford repeated his call for millions of acres of Utah land, including most of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, to be proclaimed wilderness. Mr. Redford stated, "Wilderness to me is a place for the soul. Considering future generations, we should leave something of this country aside to be considered sacred."
Although the 1964 Wilderness Act did not make religious utility one of the criteria for wilderness designation, now virtually every environmentalist argument for wilderness emphasizes "spiritual values." SUWA's web page states, "Wilderness areas are important because they provide long-term protection for the last of our nation's wild country, country that contains spectacular beauty, maintains spiritual values, supports native plants and animals, and provides opportunity for primitive recreation." Ms. Tempest Williams, like Mr. Redford a leading SUWA member, stated during the monument dedication ceremony, "This land possesses spiritual values that cannot be measured in economic terms. Through its protection we find faith in humanity."
Inspired by Utah's 19th century Mormon theocracy established by Brigham Young and her ancestors, Ms. Tempest Williams maintains that there can be no separation between political and spiritual. Testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Forest and Public Lands Management in 1995, she stated,
"Only a few generations ago, Utah was settled on spiritual grounds. It is ironic that now Utah must be protected on spiritual grounds for the generations to come. ... Our sense of community must be extended to all life forms, plants animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. ... If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. ... [T]hose of us who so love these lands in Utah ... recognize America's Redrock Wilderness as a sanctuary for the preservation of our souls ..."
The Rt. Reverend Carolyn Tanner Irish, Episcopal Bishop of Utah, is an avowed disciple of Ms. Tempest Williams and vigorously proclaims that environmentalism and religion are one. While presenting the Sterling M. McMurrin Lecture on Religion at the University of Utah on March 12, 1997, Reverend Tanner stated, "Religion is inescapably interwoven with nature." She continued,
"Until recently I did not think of "ecology" as a religious word either. But, of course, it is. In its highest form it may well be very close to what Jesus meant when He spoke of the Kingdom of God. ...
"And all too often we have thought of "salvation" -- which has the same root as the word for health or healing -- we have thought salvation a strictly personal or private matter, particularly so since the 16th Century. But it is not. Salvation is social, indeed it is ecological.
Closing her speech Reverend Irish quoted another believer's reworking of the Apostle Paul's teachings in I Corinthians 11, wherein the physical creation replaces Christ as the object of sacrament:
"To live we must daily break the bread, break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do this ignorantly, greedily, destructfully, wastefully, it is a desecration. And in such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness and others to want.
Rev. Irish's views are preached in other dioceses, and particularly in the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. That church, notes Alston Chase, "boasts that it is 'in the forefront of sacred environmental work' and in 1994 it invited Vice President Al Gore (himself a divinity school alumnus) to give a sermon in which he intoned that 'God is not separate from the earth.'"
The New Age environmental movement more than matches the influence of the Religious Right where its adherents include the President, Vice President and Secretary of Interior of the United States and many of the "boomer" bureaucrats in the Office of Environmental Quality, Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department. President Clinton proclaimed the 1.7 million acre Grand Staircase--Escalante National Monument at SUWA's request and the Clinton administration continues to hunt for means to preserve its lands for spiritual use while Congress considers whether to grant the lands wilderness designation. Bureau of Land Management planners in charge of planning the monument are vigorously scouting not just for ancient ruins and petroglyphs, but also for plants sacred to believers. Each sacred site found represents another vast expanse of land which may not be touched by technology.
As criteria for environmental protection increasingly become religious rather than scientific in nature, there are few objective limits to what lands--public, private, exploited or Eden-like--may be visualized as sacred by reverential New Age believers. In "Sacred Earth" Arthur Versluis explained that sacred land need not be pristine: "By 'virgin nature' I do not necessarily mean nature wholly free from human influences--for one could well argue that no such places any longer exist on Earth. Rather, 'virgin nature' refers to sacred wild places that still maintain their numinosity, or spiritual power."
Such religious criteria allow believers to see millions of contiguous acres, like those included in the Grand Staircase--Escalante National Monument, as wilderness despite the existence of power lines, grazing cattle, oil wells and 1,600 miles of interconnected roads. However, since religious criteria are irrelevant under the 1964 Wilderness Act and of questionable constitutionality under the Establishment Clause, some, like Mr. Cannon, may desire to ascertain whether a wilderness advocate's views are based upon New Age beliefs, rather than on objective criteria.
If Southern Baptists were to visualize Lake Powell void of boats and concessions and to demand that Congress eliminate all activities spiritually inconsistent with Christian baptisms, the public and members of Congress would express concerns about the constitutionality of the plan under the Establishment Clause. However, unaware of the scope and power of the New Age environmental religion movement, the public has yet to consider the movement's ecclesiastical goals, including its demands that millions of acres of visualized "wilderness" be set aside as sacred land. Accordingly, when Mr. Cannon mentioned religion during the wilderness hearing, the media and many on Capitol Hill were surprised.
Mr. Cannon is reported to have apologized to Ms. MacIntosh the following day. Upon reflection, the freshman congressman probably deemed it wiser to avoid the no-win scenarios inherent in discussing religion, the Establishment Clause not withstanding.
Despite Mr. Cannon's limited inquiry and apology, a columnist subsequently compared Mr. Cannon to Joseph McCarthy. Ironically, the columnist identified and discussed Mr. Cannon's orthodox Mormon beliefs in the context of the wilderness issue while, as at the congressional hearing, Ms. MacIntosh's beliefs were neither identified nor discussed.