ONE OF LIBERALS’ chief motivations these days is fear of the religious right. Ask people on the left to explain their loathing of President Bush or the Republican party, and the answer often comes around to Jerry Falwell, evangelicals, theocracy, and so on. The left’s fear of conservative Christians is fed by a steady stream of news stories. Some are accurate: religious conservatives oppose gay marriage. Some are fanciful: Sponge Bob Square Pants has been accused of being a homosexual. And some are simply false. The left’s most recent salvo against the religious right was launched by an obscure online environmentalist journal called Grist. In October of last year, Grist published an article titled “The Godly Must Be Crazy,” the thesis of which was that conservative Christians are deliberately bent on despoiling the environment:
We are not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. The 231 legislators (all but five of them Republicans) who received an average 80 percent approval rating or higher from the leading religious-right organizations make up more than 40 percent of the U.S. Congress.
Grist‘s fevered accusation might have languished in the less-traveled corners of the Internet had it not been taken up by a more respectable voice of the left: Bill Moyers. On December 1, 2004, the Center for Health and the Global Environment gave Moyers its “Global Environment Citizen Award.” Moyers’s speech on the occasion cribbed liberally from, and at times quoted verbatim, his “favorite online environmental journal,” Grist. He characterized the Bush administration’s environmental policies as “based on theology” and therefore “delusional.” He repeated Grist‘s claim that Republicans, believing that the end of the world is at hand, are deliberately despoiling the environment.
For evidence, Moyers harkened back to the Reagan administration:
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn’t know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious.
Here, though, it was Moyers, not James Watt, who was trafficking in delusion and fantasy. For Watt said no such thing. The quote that Moyers attributed to Watt is fictitious. It originated in a 1990 book called Setting Free the Captives by an eccentric former circus ringmaster named Austin Miles. Miles didn’t claim that Watt made the bogus statement to Congress, however; that embellishment was another layer of fabrication, added by Grist and repeated by Moyers.
As it happens, however, Watt did once mention the Second Coming while testifying before Congress. In February 1981, Watt told the House Interior Committee the precise opposite of what Moyers alleged:
I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.
Watt’s Congressional testimony is consistent with the approach toward environmental policy that he followed throughout his career. In a letter to President Reagan written in October 1983, Watt said:
Our stewardship commitment extends to preserving for future generations those historic sites and structures that pay tribute to America’s past and the principles upon which our Nation was founded.
Because of our concern for and commitment to stewardship, we have accelerated the efforts to bring about the recovery of . . . endangered plants and animals. By the end of this year, we will have approved or reviewed nearly three times as many recovery plans as were developed in the four-year period 1977 to 1980.
So Moyers didn’t just misquote Watt–he mischaracterized Watt’s entire approach to environmental issues.
THE REST of Moyers’s evidence for the Republicans’ “rapturous” approach to environmental protection was equally flimsy. He cited the popularity of the Left Behind novels, in which the Second Coming is a plot element, but offered no support for the idea–ludicrous on its face–that these works of popular fiction are somehow driving the Bush administration’s environmental policies. He referred to a speech in which Zell Miller quoted the Book of Amos:
But Moyers left out the rest of the quote: “Not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord.” And, while Moyers implied that Miller had been talking about the environment, in fact his speech was about Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.
Moyers’s own speech had been reproduced only on the Internet until January 30, 2005, when the Minneapolis Star Tribune printed it as an op-ed. After the Star Tribune article appeared, James Watt contacted Power Line, hoping that we could help him counteract Moyers’s smear. We did. Our post critiquing Moyers’s speech resulted in Moyers apologizing to Watt, and the Star Tribune running a half-hearted correction. The Washington Post, which had repeated the fake James Watt quote, ran a somewhat more gracious correction.
However, while Moyers has admitted propagating a fake quotation, he hasn’t backed off his accusation that Republicans in the grip of “rapture” are working to destroy the environment. In his apology, he repeated the substance of the slur and accused Watt of being a bad Christian. Nor have other media outlets stopped perpetuating the slur. Jon Carroll, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, repeated Moyers’s theme while acknowledging that the fictitious Watt quote was “not verifiable”:
Let’s look at the new budget through this lens, which is (I emphasize) neither fanciful nor satirical. Money for clean water: down.
And so on. The Moyers “rapture” speech has been picked up on countless websites, where it is fast becoming a standard liberal critique of the Bush administration.
All of this has happened without a single conservative, inside or outside of government, having ever drawn any connection, express or implied, between the supposed imminence of the Second Coming and any aspect of environmental policy. Which leaves one wondering which side of the political debate has substituted faith for reason.
John Hinderaker is a contributor to the blog Power Line and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.
