Rush Limbaugh's discussion - or whatever it is - of the confession to plants at Union is actually quite fascinating. I already mentioned the startling way in which he derides climate crisis thinking as "religion," going so far as to suggest
we have been trying to defeat this. We’ve been trying to defeat this with logic. We’ve been trying to defeat this with science. We have been trying to defeat it with common sense, with adulthood. We’ve been trying to talk sense into people, and still it overwhelms them. It does become a religion to them. And I know why. I know how they’ve done this. It’s very simple.
Everybody wants meaning in their life. Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to think they are important. That’s the starting point, that’s the psychological realization that the advocates of this particular movement have. They know that your average Tom, Dick, and Harry out there who are anonymous, even on Twitter or not, they want to be relevant. They want to think they matter. They want to think they’re making a difference.
But they’re not. So how do you bring ’em aboard? Well, the first thing you do is you tell them that the very place they live is threatened and they might die, but they can save it, even though they are part of the problem.
Some of that may be true - activists and scholars alike have for some time discussed the ways in which environmentalism is a religion - but, um, Rush, haven't you accidentally given us the pluybook of the religious right? Isn't this how you've inoculated millions of people you've scared the hell out of against logic, science, common sense etc.? Or is your religion different from this kind of religion?
So that's interesting, in all sorts of ways. But revealing in another and perhaps more troubling way is something else in his mocking gloss of the original tweet about the plant liturgy:
“Students at Union Theological Seminary prayed to a display of plants” – weeds! – “set up in the chapel of the school, prompting the institution to issue a statement explaining the practice[”] as many on social media were making fun of it.
and a few minutes later:
my friends, sadly this is very real. These are seminary students. They’re at an institute of theology. Supposed religious people praying to weeds.
You may have legitimate theological questions about what went on at Union, but it should be clear from every account of what went on (and even the initial tweet, on which most of the response built), that these are not weeds. What does it reveal that Limbaugh glosses all plants as weeds?
Weeds are plants that shouldn't be somewhere, interlopers in our garden. Call them illegal aliens, if you wish. But what would it mean if all plants were interlopers? How twisted must the understanding of nature, and of our place in it, have become, how distanced from our elemental dependence on plants, to allow this glib move? I dare say it shows that, to some extent, the whole natural world is an illegal alien in the imagination of a certain kind of evangelical Christian. (It might start with seeing human nature is weedlike, gone feral.)
But what a terrible alienation from our existence as terrestrial beings!!
we have been trying to defeat this. We’ve been trying to defeat this with logic. We’ve been trying to defeat this with science. We have been trying to defeat it with common sense, with adulthood. We’ve been trying to talk sense into people, and still it overwhelms them. It does become a religion to them. And I know why. I know how they’ve done this. It’s very simple.
Everybody wants meaning in their life. Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to think they are important. That’s the starting point, that’s the psychological realization that the advocates of this particular movement have. They know that your average Tom, Dick, and Harry out there who are anonymous, even on Twitter or not, they want to be relevant. They want to think they matter. They want to think they’re making a difference.
But they’re not. So how do you bring ’em aboard? Well, the first thing you do is you tell them that the very place they live is threatened and they might die, but they can save it, even though they are part of the problem.
Some of that may be true - activists and scholars alike have for some time discussed the ways in which environmentalism is a religion - but, um, Rush, haven't you accidentally given us the pluybook of the religious right? Isn't this how you've inoculated millions of people you've scared the hell out of against logic, science, common sense etc.? Or is your religion different from this kind of religion?
So that's interesting, in all sorts of ways. But revealing in another and perhaps more troubling way is something else in his mocking gloss of the original tweet about the plant liturgy:
“Students at Union Theological Seminary prayed to a display of plants” – weeds! – “set up in the chapel of the school, prompting the institution to issue a statement explaining the practice[”] as many on social media were making fun of it.
and a few minutes later:
my friends, sadly this is very real. These are seminary students. They’re at an institute of theology. Supposed religious people praying to weeds.
You may have legitimate theological questions about what went on at Union, but it should be clear from every account of what went on (and even the initial tweet, on which most of the response built), that these are not weeds. What does it reveal that Limbaugh glosses all plants as weeds?
Weeds are plants that shouldn't be somewhere, interlopers in our garden. Call them illegal aliens, if you wish. But what would it mean if all plants were interlopers? How twisted must the understanding of nature, and of our place in it, have become, how distanced from our elemental dependence on plants, to allow this glib move? I dare say it shows that, to some extent, the whole natural world is an illegal alien in the imagination of a certain kind of evangelical Christian. (It might start with seeing human nature is weedlike, gone feral.)
But what a terrible alienation from our existence as terrestrial beings!!
