Federal Climate Law: God as the Swing Vote

Senator Max Baucus quoted the Bible last week when he announced his support for a major bill, called America's Climate Security Act, to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

That was the lede of a story that ran today in the Great Falls Tribune, about the Senator from Montana, holder of a crucial swing vote.It's another indication of the important role people of faith will play in solving climate.

"The book of Genesis tells us 'that The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and care for it,'" Baucus testified last week before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "Montanans take God's call to be good stewards very serious."

Hard to argue with that kind of authority. Heck of a chain of command to buck. And it's disrupting the political cohesion of the religious right. Here's how the New York Times described it in its Sunday magazine cover story, "The Evangelical Crack Up":

Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world — over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations......

But many younger evangelicals — and some old-timers...... the born-again experience of accepting Jesus is just the beginning. What follows is a long-term process of “spiritual formation” that involves applying his teachings in the here and now. They do not see society as a moribund vessel. They talk more about a biblical imperative to fix up the ship by contributing to the betterment of their communities and the world. They support traditional charities but also public policies that address health care, race, poverty and the environment.

Baucus, like so many other people of faith worn out by the wedge issues of the past two terms, believes the country has a "moral imperative" to address climate change. It's a new emphasis on solutions, coming from a man whose political Garden is the most coal-rich state in the country.

The Lord works in mysterious ways indeed.

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