This article appeared today, on a day when the forces represented by Franklin Graham and the likes of Jerry Falwell, Jr., are calling on the people of God to “pray for the President” that he might be strengthened against his “enemies” (many of those being people rising up in defense of Creation).
It’s highly ironic that Graham quotes this bit of Scripture , obviously referring to “Trump’s enemies”:
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” .
(Ephesians 6:12)
The “Principalities and Powers” have been identified by most of the theologians I read, as “the powers that be”; those collectives that exert and maintain power and typically use it for their own gain. But , in typical fashion in the Christian Right, these are “turned toward” their perceived enemies. Those “enemies” are defined for them by their direct benefactors (or they who WANT them to believe that they benefit from their rule by “invoking” God and Bible and ‘faith’ )
Indeed, Franklin’s father Billy saw the dangers that we are seeing played out, when he said : “The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”.
The biggest danger of all is the hard right’s alliance with the fossil fuel industry, who have constructed a propaganda machine of “manufacturing doubt” about the clear results of science, so that they can continue being the most profitable business in the history of humanity. They know the science, and deliberately set out to deceive us about it’s implications, telling us it’s all “being alarmist”. The right wing has succeeded in convincing scores of Christians that the ecological crisis is a lie; an overblown political manipulation. It is this manipulation, more than any of the others, that will be our undoing if we don’t see the error of these ways , and repent, so that our land might be healed :
2 Chronicles 7:14 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
“ if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
The above passage from I Chronicles 7 is “The Day of Prayer” that we, the church, needs to have every day for the past 30 years, and for the next 30 and beyond, especially now in light of the most recent urgent warnings from Climate Scientists, telling us we have an urgent window of opportunity. That “window” can no longer be “to “prevent ecological disaster”, but only to try and avoid as much of it as possible. This is a matter of millions, perhaps billions of human lives at stake, on top of all the other varieties of life that we have not noticed so much, as to the vital role that EVERYTHING TOGETHER plays in the drama and balance of Creation.