Peter Walks for Democracy

The Trump administration’s attacks on climate, on science, education, and on human health was completely predictable. Its roots are in the confluence and cooperation of big religion and big oil. These two factions in American life have been in a tacit alliance that goes back decades. As I’ve written in previous posts, it became clear to me in the mid-2000’s when a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania passed an “intelligent design” creationism policy that opened the door for big religion in schools.

The ensuing court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, resulted in a minor political firestorm. Tammy Kitzmiller and several other parents took the Dover School Board to court for violating their First Amendment rights under the free exercise of religion clause. They won in a trial that lasted forty days and forty nights. I covered it for a small paper. I read the expert testimony, dug into the writings of the proponents of intelligent design including influential young earth creationists and free market think tanks. What I found hiding in plain sight was a plan to fundamentally transform American life. That plan is playing out in the Trump administration’s attacks on biological and climate science, on renewable energy and human health, and women’s and minority rights today. That is to say, I am not in the least surprised at what’s happening. As I’ve been showing in previous posts, Kitzmiller v. Dover was an obvious predecessor event to the coup happening right now. [You can read my two previous entries on this here. It is part of larger project on mindful ecological citizenship.]

The Dover Board’s strategy was codified in “The Wedge Document.” It was penned in 1998 by Dr. Stephen Meyer, the Director of the  Discovery Institute’s Center for Renewal of Science and Culture. “The Wedge” argued that materialism’s consequences have been devastating. Materialists, it argued, had created a dehumanizing worldview through Marxism and Darwinism, one that saw humans as mere instruments of a godless environment. They concluded that it erased “objective moral standards,” “undermined personal responsibility,” and “spawned a virulent strain of utopianism.” Under such conditions, they argued Marxists and Darwinists “could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge” with “coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.” To stop materialism’s advance, they devised a strategy to break materialism’s perceived dominance.

“[W]e must cut it off at its source,” they wrote. “If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a “wedge” that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points.” The project had already gotten underway with some important writings that critiqued Darwinism in the 1990s by lawyer, Phillip Johnson and Dr. Michael Behe’s infamous book, Darwin’s Black Box. They envisioned a new and positive Christian scientific enterprise that manifested in intelligent design (ID). 

Their vision would be realized through three phases, each with distinct goals and objectives. The first phase focused on “Research, Writing and Publication” that would create the intellectual and persuasive firepower on which a coherent and defensible enterprise could be built. The scientific enterprise they were trying to change required enough changed minds and practices that the revolution could take hold. The second phase would launch ID and this new theistic realism into the popular mind. They would cultivate influence in all media, think tank leaders, scientists and academics, and political, church, and higher education leadership. Ever-conscious of their base, they knew they would have to deepen their roots in a “natural constituency, namely, Christians.” The third and final phase would arrive once they had both the intellectual foundation and a broad base of support, namely into “direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science.” This would happen in the seemingly lifeless world of conferences, through legal challenges where they perceived legal resistance, and into open debate in the public where they could strike. The all-of-the-above strategy would undermine materialism in American culture. 

At about the same time, Republican strategist Frank Luntz was advising President Bush on how to message on the environment. He saw that Republicans were easily caricatured as conniving villains in league with corporations, rubbing their hands together as they pillaged the earth. On page 137 of the now infamous “Luntz Memo,” he provided guidance on “Winning the Global Warming Debate.” Recognizing that the science was improving, he saw a practical window.

1. The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming with the scientific community. Should the public ome to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.

Luntz joined this guidance to other key observations. Americans want a free and open discussion, that our technology is great but that we should oppose mandates to move in one direction, and that international agreements will harm us while letting China, India, and Mexico off the hook. He also urged his audience to adopt a “commitment to sound science.” This practical but very cynical guidance would create the veneer of genuine credibility, especially when it was supported by “experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message.” These would be the people who Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway would call “merchants of doubt.” A well-funded strategy, led by fossil fuel companies, free-market fundamentalists, and America first thinkers and leaders would coalesce. Their goal was to undermine the public’s confidence in policies, programs, and plans to draw down carbon emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change.

While Kitzmiller was building steam, I was vaguely aware of what was happening with climate politics. It seemed largely niche to me. But three things would change my perspective. They were An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change winning the Nobel Prize , an article in an obscure creationist magazine called Acts and Facts, and an education bill in Louisiana that put the attacks on evolution and climate science right next to each other on the literal same page.

In 2007, Louisiana would pass S.B. 733: The Louisiana Science Education Act. On its face, the bill seems reasonable. It promoted science education, critical thinking and open discussion, guidance for teachers and effectiveness, textbooks and instructional materials, and “related matters.” All things being equal as an American, these are hard things to argue with. But all things are not equal. Louisiana’s politics are deeply rooted in white Protestant Christianity and the fossil fuel lobby exerts intense pressure on state politics. With two national movements articulating strategy in the Wedge Document and the Luntz Memo, Louisiana was a perfect test case for unified action. 

Low and behold, S.B. 733 would target “scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” The bill uses the adjective “objective” twice and states that it “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.” It left implementation and administrative regulation up to the local educational unit prior to the beginning of the next school year.

Not only were conservative Christians going to war with evolutionary science, they were also attacking the science of climate change AND defending fossil fuel companies. This was appearing in their own literature and in legislative actions at the state and district level. If a unified voting block was allied with the most powerful polluting corporations in the world and aimed at schools with disinformation, distraction, doubt, and delay, it would fundamentally hamstring our democracy from taking action. This had potentially civilizationally damaging ramifications.

I was right.

In coming posts, I will share more on how the fight unfolded in front of my eyes at Penn State. There, I met three people who would change my life: Madhu Suri Prakash, an educational philosopher and guest editor at YES! Magazine, Don Brown, a former environmental lawyer and winner of the Avicenna Prize for his ceaseless fight for the ethics of climate change, and Michael E. Mann, the award-winning climate scientist who became the epicenter of America’s climate wars. They met me at a critical time in my life, opening me up to my own convictions and launching me into growing advocacy, activism, and eventually running for local elected office.