Cal Thomas' Batshit Symphony in G major

Cal Thomas. He's a man on a mission, and that mission is apparently to prove that he's the most batshit person on the face of the planet. His most recent column can be found here, but I'll quote him as needed.

In fairness to Cal, the first sentence of his column is actually a perfectly viable question.

"What is it with evangelical Christians that so many of them need a cause beyond the commission they've been given?"

Now that's a fair criticism. To evangelize merely means to teach and spread the word of Christ. They've never actually been particularly good at that, frankly, which should come as no surprise to anyone who's ever seen a Chick Tract (my particular favorite is here). Instead of improving their technique, they've apparently decided to give up on the teaching thing and embrace ham-fisted moralizing. For people who believe that the fate of a person's soul is solely dependant upon that person's faith in the Resurrection, they sure seem overly concerned with sticking their nose in every aspect of people's lives.

"Having witnessed the damage to the church's fundamental message of redemption from a too-close association with the 'kingdom of this world' - first in the liberal National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches, and more recently with various conservative religious-political movements - some evangelicals have decided to give it another go. This time, the issue isn't abortion, gay rights, or cleaning up offensive TV programs. They want to clean up the planet."

Wait... what??? Okay, right off the bat, this guy was bitching about "Happy Holidays" along with the rest of his brood just a couple months ago. Environmental conservation is too trivial, but holiday greeting semantics isn't? More important here, though, is the fact that Cal is starting a column with a faulty premise, based on his mistaken concept of what "the World" means in a biblical sense. "The World" is the realm of man, as opposed to Heaven, the realm of God. Things "of the World" are constructs of man... things like politics and the stock market and medical industry lobbyists and Snickers bars. The Earth itself is actually not "of the World" because it is not a construct of man. If one believes God created the Earth, then one must grant the Earth the same divinity one grants any divine creation.

"Last October, it appeared the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), which claims 30 million members, was headed toward an alliance with the more liberal wing of Christendom over the environment. Rather than call it "environmentalism," which to some reeks of sensible shoes and reusing hotel towels, these evangelicals embraced a euphemism more to their liking. "Creation Care" they decided to call it, and solving "global warming" would be their objective.

It now appears that at least some cooler heads have prevailed over global warming. While some superstars of evangelicalism - including best-selling author Rick Warren ('The Purpose Driven Life') - have signed on to the global warming doctrine, many others have not. This division in evangelical ranks prompted the NAE to pull back from an expected endorsement of the issue following last October's statement that mankind has 'a sacred responsibility to steward the Earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part.' A statement issued Feb. 1 by NAE President Ted Haggard recognized 'the ongoing debate' on global warming and 'the lack of consensus among the evangelical community on this issue.'"

I am the first to admit that some environmental causes are over-the-top. A lot of your most hard-core environmentalist activists are a lot like your most vicious neoconservatives; they're young people who have embraced an ideology and now depend on it for their identity, unable to critically think about the issues because their very existence is dependant on the rightness of their cause. That said, people like Cal piss me off. People who prefer to ignore potentially dangerous environmental problems are not "cooler heads." At best, they're "apathetic marketing-susceptible consumers," and at worst they're "corporate whores." Global warming isn't really something you can deny anymore... you can argue about its cause, or the best way to handle the problem, but we know that the global temperature is rising. Some very intelligent, very well-educated people think that this could lead to some pretty nasty consequences, and I'm not convinced that they're just godless, America-hating socialists, despite the best attempts by people like Rush Limbaugh. Sorry, but I believe that Rush has more of a political axe to grind than environmental scientists do. I don't hold it against Cal, Rush, and the rest that they don't buy apocalyptic global warming theories, but I do find it suspicious that instead of countering such claims, they attack the intelligence and patriotism of the people making them. That's just lazy.

"A better objective would be to follow another statement made not by a committee but by a single individual who claims ownership of His church and requires obedience to all who would follow Him: 'Go and make disciples of all nations.' (Matthew 28:19) Jesus also called on His disciples - then and now - 'to obey everything I have commanded you.' A quick look does not reveal those teachings as having anything to do with global warming or the environment. Rather, He calls individuals to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison and pray for those who persecute them. Evangelicals should pursue these higher virtues instead of settling for the lower life of politics."

Okay, now see, here is where Cal sabotages his own argument. Feeding the hungry and clothing the naked are valid callings for evangelical Christians, but they also mandate an effort to keep people from being hungry and poor, or at least not fighting such efforts. No matter who you blame for global warming, there is pretty solid evidence that it is causing the expansion of deserts and increased drought conditions. Working to reduce or reverse global warming, then, is actually an attempt to keep entire regions of people from being poor and hungry. This is not an argument you can make for keeping homosexuals from legally marrying or teaching creationism in biology classes. Frankly, for the first time in a decade, the evangelicals may have found a cause that actually coincides with the tenets they profess to follow.

"Some evangelicals lift a verse from Genesis that speaks of being good stewards and 'taking care' of the earth. But that was before the fall of man, when sin and corruption entered the world."

So we're supposed to give up because the job has gotten too hard? Nice work ethic, jackass. We broke it, but we don't have to clean it up. That's got to be one of the worst biblical arguments I've ever read.

"I'm all for trying to keep the air and water as clean as possible, and I do not toss litter on the ground, but I worry that, having been mugged several times before at the end of the political alley, evangelicals may be setting themselves up for more damage to their credibility."

But you started this argument, Cal, by claiming that Evangelicals should stick with evangelism and not worry about politics. Why, then, should they refrain from pursuing a cause because it might be politically unpopular?

I can't believe that this column is syndicated. I don't mean that Cal's self-righteous pseudo-intellectualism should be censored. He should have the right to say whatever he wants. I simply mean that he is a poor writer and his arguments are frequently faulty, and therefore he is not qualified to take up space in serious newspapers. By giving space to someone who is nothing more than a poorly spoken shill for the corporate elite and the American nationalists, we're not only giving credence to his argument, but we're also lowering the expectations we have for people engaging in public debate.