Climate Bills and a Green Economy

Obama’s Faith-Based Programs Pushing Global Warming and Climate Change

May 17, 2010

BigGovernment.com - Widely reviled by the left, Bush’s faith-based initiatives were claimed to be evidence that Bush was a “religious zealot” trying to destroy America with evil Christianity.

Now, two years into the Obama administration, we are seeing what Obama intends to do with his continuation of Bush’s faith-based offices: he wants to use them to push the religion of Greenicanism on America’s churches.

This month Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships issued its final report of recommendations and the result is nothing short of astonishing. (download .pdf file)

The question that immediately comes to mind, of course, is if the left will explode in excoriation of Obama’s faith-based policies as it did with Bush’s?

... While Obama is following the left-wing penchant to eschew actual religiosity, Obama has apparently decided that his own special brand of religion would be what is promulgated with his continuation of Bush’s faith-based policies. The money he’s spending to “proselytize” his green ideas apparently doesn’t strike him as a violation of his 2008 proclamations.

Recently Meghan Clyne wrote an excellent piece the Weekly Standard that detailed how Obama is using his faith-based program to push global warming, climate change, and green initiatives on America’s churches, and he’s doing so by brazenly coupling his faith-based council with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Apparently, the president’s council envisions the “partnership” between government and religious institutions as a means of spreading the administration’s environmental warnings, rather than just a way to help churches feed the hungry and clothe the poor. Faith-based organizations, the report notes, can take “a prominent leadership role in influencing policy, education, and action in those areas.”

…The council hopes the new EPA faith office will also help churches and other nonprofits improve “access to financing,” including “establishing revolving loan programs or working with utility companies to help finance greening building projects.” The ultimate aim of all this government-supported retrofitting is clear: “Regional staff would work to engage local faith-and community-based groups to help meet Obama administration targets for greening buildings and promoting environmental quality.”

So, Obama wants to use federal subsidies offered through the EPA and his faith-based outreach to get churches to promulgate the green faith.

Of course, it’s hard to see Obama’s use of faith-based initiatives to push his environmental message and spending millions of tax dollars to do so differs in any material way when measured by the left’s anti-Bush yard stick when they criticized his policies. The left universally cried that Bush was cynically using religion to further his political policies. No one can look at Obama’s current policies and see any reason to excuse him from being smeared with the same brush the left used to tar Bush.

Clyne also makes a seminal point.

“Perhaps it’s only reasonable that global-warming activists would turn to God for help as the scientific case for their position collapses,” Clyne wrote. It’s all as if “Climategate had never happened,” she says.

It is indeed.