Lesley Hazelton has another excellent post on what will turn out to be the greatest environmental disaster in history:

Yes, I am aware that ‘evil’ is a religious term. How can a proud agnostic use such a word? I trust my guts. As I look at this, I am sickened. The feeling starts in my throat, travels down to the pit of my stomach, then makes its way up again into my throat, leaving me with such a deep disgust that I feel dirty, degraded.

I think this visceral reaction is simply a human response to evil.

I want to take this idea or thought a step further: The theological implications of this disaster are becoming more and more apparent. Now, let me take two steps back: Two weeks ago, I argued that the disaster would not only bring death to offshore drilling but shake the foundations of American oil culture. Now, let me take three steps forward: My present belief is that American oil culture is finished (it will not survive this mess) and what is next to be shaken and possibly destroyed is the foundation of something even larger: American Christianity.

From NYT:

Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.

This “great belief in technology” is not secular but closely linked with a great belief in American awesomeness. And American awesomeness has always been sustained by the foundations of American Christianity, a form of religion that is humble not toward nature but toward a God who has power over everything and punishes His enemies and rewards His followers. With American Christianity, prosperity is a God-given right, and this frame of thinking has established and reinforced a relationship with nature that is essentially identical with the one that exists between a master and slave.

It is precisely this kind of thinking that in Europe began to crumble in the period that followed the scientific revolution. In Origin of Species (1859), for example, Darwin essentially dethrones humans and pleads, again and again, that this dethronement, this diminishing, decentering is not the end of the world—humans can happily (if not proudly) live as animals among other animals.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The end of the 19th century was not only the end of British awesomeness but also the emergence of a scientific sense of human littleness and limitations. It is a mistake to read the late-19th century books of H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and many others without this understanding. What Darwin saw as a grand “view of life,” many saw as either “The horror! The horror!” (be it in the direction of the deep past—Heart of Darkness) or “A horror of this great darkness” (be it in the direction of the deep future—The Time Machine). Near the end of The Time Machine:

A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.

True, we find dethroned humans in so many American novels (Earth Abides, for example) and movies (The War of the Worlds), but, culturally speaking, this sense of dethronement is far from universal. The certainty of American awesomeness that led to the war in Iraq or to the current destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, has been rooted in one, politically powerful branch of American Christianity. And what has feed much of this overrepresented group’s tireless (and often comical) resistance to the hard facts of, say, Darwinism, has been the belief that American greatness cannot be separated from divine providence, from supernatural agency. What they do best (or famously) is to refuse to register American military power and technological mastery as anything but direct gifts from (and reflecting the power of—and also obedience to) the creator of the universe.

What the spill has made clear is that American awesomeness (technology) has a sure limit. It can only go so far and do so much. Operation “top kill” could not overwhelm that thing that God (technology) is imagined to completely master—nature. But if American awesomeness has a limit, then the God who supports and reinforces it (technology) is also limited. And if God is limited, then He is not a He but only a he, a man, a mere human being (technology).

Not all American Christians have the kind of relationship with nature that has placed this country in such deep waters. And the more the oil spill poisons the gulf, we can expect to see, on the one hand, the steady belittling of the believers of American awesomeness, and, on the other hand, a corresponding increase in the number of Americans whose view of things is much more down to earth.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

65 replies on “Entering the Twilight of American Christianity”

  1. just want to correct something from the NYT article –
    “as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month”

    THIS IS AN ENGINEERING PROBLEM, not a problem for “scientists.” Science is not the one failing to plug the well. Industry, and industry’s engineers are failing.

    This line from the article is getting quoted everywhere. And it is wrong wrong wrong to say this is a failure of science. It is not. This is a failure of industry’s engineers. And of industry. Technology is used by both science and engineering, but those two disciplines are not the same thing! This distinction is important, especially as scientists are getting a bum wrap these days.

  2. Did you compare American slavery to an Oil Spill? I just get this feeling that you write out a sentence and then directly after, forget what you wrote and try and make sense of it.

  4. This event will have no impact on religious beliefs. You are making the mistaken assumption that dogmatic “faith-based” religion involves thought about evidence or logic… it doesn’t.
    New information that does not fit with established belief is to be ignored, and if it cannot be ignored then it is obviously just a test God is allowing the devil inflict on them and the only answer is prayer. Any further thought on the matter is a “crisis of faith” to be stamped out. (spoken as a formerly religious person who let logic get the better of me)

  5. While the oil spilling into the Gulf is natural, the thing that caused it to happen is technological. That oil is spilling from a man-made well, not a fissure in the bedrock. Therefore, this is not a struggle of technology against nature, but a struggle of technology against itself, or more simply, a failure of technology brought about by cutting corners and generally being unprepared.

    As always Charles, you go too far in your predictions. This spill doesn’t change the fact that we need oil to sustain our population, and there is no viable alternative yet. Like other industrial disasters in the past, the gulf oil spill will produce tighter regulations and nothing more.

  6. Aw, shit, I’m too drunk to read that. Maybe later. But it’s perfectly obvious to me that the solution to the problem is for everyone to own more guns.

  7. This “great belief in technology” is not secular but closely linked with a great belief in American awesomeness.

    This is silly. I, like many people I know, have a “great belief in technology,” while rejecting utterly a belief in “American awesomeness.” Like #1 said, this isn’t about science. And as much as it’s about engineering, this is about a failure of ethics and morality. It’s about assholes in industry with more power than they deserved and assholes in government who gave it to them. If the individuals involved who were working in the industry and the government weren’t assholes, this wouldn’t have happened.

    And I’ll add that if you make your living using the internet, you, too, have a “great belief in technology.”

  8. @1 you have an excellent point

    @2 are you high?

    @6 i love you

    @ mudede: not sure if i see the end of either the oil industry or christianity. you must realize we are living in a democracy and the failure of government only leads to stronger government. the logic is, if the plan fails we must try again harder and with more vigor. therefore, the oil industry and christianity only grow with their failures.

  9. This oil is an affront — the the Crypto-Malthusians who have been trying to rule the planet since the 1970s.

    Here it is, right in the face of Global Warmers and Peak Oilers — Mother Nature spitting right in your faces, saying, Oil? You want Oil? I got Oil? Plenty of it!

    You louses have been putting Mother Nature down in IPCC reports, White House position papers and “the science”.

    Guess what…your Science is Sicko. Gushing pure organic oil is bursting at the seams. Energy rich hydrocarbons are being created at a rate that your cars can’t even consume fast enough!

  10. Wonderful post, Mr. Mudede. Dare I say, I’ve never read a finer post from you.

    There’s a strange thing about this dual American faith in technology and, as you so aptly put it, “American awesomeness.” We’ve come to believe that we owe our fossil fuel-intensive way of life primarily to technology. But really, we owe it to, well, fossil fuels.

    And so there is this blithe belief among Americans, who know nothing of the technology or science involved (and many of whom have a certain disdain for science), that technology will come to the rescue as fossil fuels wane. Prime case in point is this belief that, as oil becomes more and more scarce, we will be able to preserve our automobile-dependent way of life, as is, simply by transitioning to electric automobiles.

    Listen, I have no doubt that electric cars are the future. But there’s this question of scale and cost. Oil is this free inheritance that took hundreds of millions of years to place in the ground, and yet we mistake this gift of nature for our own human gifts.

    And listen, I have no doubt that as we go along civilization will rely more and more on technology for our energy needs. But more and more we will realize the limits of technology.

  11. Interesting. I agree with Nomadonthego @4 that this won’t be the end of christianity; however, I think Charles is saying this will be the end of “American” christianity (although even the definition of that is somewhat vague): The idea that the christian god has endowed his *favorite* people – Americans – with incredible technology and awesomeness, with which they can, and should, dominate the Earth. I suppose there are many who truly do believe and follow that, but even those “many” are still a minority (although an often loud one). The loss of that minority would still leave large groups of loud and obnoxious American christians who will forever believe the U.S. of A. is the Greatest Thing Ever, no matter what.

    I like this post Charles, but I agree with some of the other commenters that your predictions seem a bit stretched.

  12. Oh, Charles. The greatest ecological disaster ever? It’s not even the greatest ecological disaster happening in the name of oil today. Are you familiar with a place called Nigeria?

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may…

    Imagine a Gulf oil crisis that continues for forty years: “more oil is spilled from the [Niger] delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico.

    You also forget that the two things Americans are better at than any others are forgetting and ignoring. The destruction of the Gulf Coast will be forgotten by August, just as Katrina is mostly forgotten and the hurricanes that destroyed New Orleans in 1928 and 1965, and the Ixtoc oil spill of 1979-80, the world’s worst, have been completely forgotten before them. And a hundred thousand other things.

    Or maybe not. Maybe this will go down as this century’s Johnstown Flood, the moral of which, like everything else, is more stupid faith in a stupid god.

  15. I think I’ve found the poster boy for our modern American faith in technology. He is Nathan Myhrvold, onetime Microsoft CTO and, according to this Newsweek.com interview, “a founder of Intellectual Ventures, a scientific think tank working on solutions to the world’s thorniest problems—including global warming.”

    What’s disturbing is Myhrvold’s belief that there is a technological answer for every energy and environmental problem and his contempt for anyone who suggests that we may need other answers. Consider his statement “that much of the environmental movement is anti-technology.”

    Just because you think technology is not the only answer doesn’t mean you think technology is not an answer. And having concerns about the limitations and unintended consequences of technology doesn’t make you “anti-technology.” But Myhrvold seems to be anti all other answers. “A lot of environmentalists feel that if everyone believes there’s a simple fix, they’ll demand that. And then they’re never going to get rid of their SUVs and they’re never going to tax carbon.”

    Never mind that things like a carbon tax or moving away from an SUV culture may actually help spur technological innovation. I see economics isn’t the field Myhrvold got his Ph.D. in.

    Like all too many people with extremely high IQs (and I have to admit I’m one of them), Nathan Myhrvold is not immune to being a fool.

  16. I don’t know. If religion, and the Catholic church, can survive priests buggering and abusing tens/hundreds of thousands of children, kill millions, burn women, and hold inquisitions, I just don’t see oil completely wiping out all life in the Gulf as making a dent in it either. I wish it would, but the sheep will keep following. In fact, I predict, the Vatican becomes richer out of this.

  17. Seconding Urgutha Forka @11. I still think this is a terrific post even though I agree with the commenters who say Mudede’s pronouncements are (as usual?) overblown.

    And I think Fnarf @12 nailed it with: You also forget that the two things Americans are better at than any others are forgetting and ignoring. The destruction of the Gulf Coast will be forgotten by August, just as Katrina is mostly forgotten…

    It’s my view that Americans will learn nothing from this oil spill that might make a dent in the cultural beliefs that are the foundation of our oil addiction. We Americans want to have our cake and eat it too. We want our oil to be as cheap as can be, no matter how much we’re forced to externalize the real costs; at the same time we don’t want any drilling in our backyards. Our blindness to this glaring hypocrisy is something of a survival mechanism.

  19. Like a 5 year old: If I say it over and over and over again, I will make is so with my will.

    Good luck on that Charles.

  20. I have had time to think about this more. Ultimately there are two results that need to be looked at. One is that the oil spill fucked a lot of natural shit up, the other is that people use it everyday. As far as people are concerned the oil in their car is as disconnected from that spill as possible. People can easily blame BP and not themselves for continuing to fill up their navigators and SUVs with premium unfiltered.

  21. Charles. First of all, tl;dr for the most part.

    2nd. Christians have been counting on the seas tot turn to blood. This reinforces that.

  22. Charles,
    For the record, I read (and recommend) Lesley Hazelton’s “After the Prophet”. It’s a fair examination of what happened in the wake Mohammed’s death. It is quite an eye opening for those unfamiliar early Islamic history. Ms. Hazelton is British and resides in the Puget Sound area.

    Regarding your insights. Indeed, there is calamity in the Gulf of Mexico. I am greatly pessimistic about an immediate solution to the problem of capping the well. Technology has it’s limits. What fazes me is the lack of contingencies regarding off-shore drilling. I’m fairly sure you’ll disagree but Krauthammer has a point:

    http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/op…

    The technology was around to drill 5000′ underwater. It should be around to stop this catastrophe. But, I admit this disaster is testing my “faith” in technology. Whether Christianity will decline as a result of American “exceptionalism’s” decline remains to be seen. It’s not a stretch to say that this could be Pres. Obama’s Katrina.

  23. I realize now how this can be such a great post and yet the other commenters’ critiques can be so spot on. Charles is right about the reality of the situation. And the commenters are right about Americans’ continued failure to perceive this reality.

    It’s like this. I have no doubt that history will eventually prove the foolishness of technological deus ex machinists like Nathan Myhrvold. But if Dr. Myhrvold goes to his grave never having been proved a fool, was he really a fool?

    I’m reminded of that great quote by that great economist Keynes, “In the long run we’re all dead.”

    The Roman Empire eventually declined and fell. The British Empire eventually declined and fell. But if you were around just for the salad days, why should a little thing like the future spoil your party?

  25. Please don’t forget that it’s not OUR oil addiction, it’s everyone’s oil addiction. The global demand for oil is going to double over the next ten or fifteen years, and virtually none of that increase is going to come from the US. The global demand for cars is going to QUADRUPLE by 2035. That’s not coming from the US. It doesn’t matter how many Priuses you buy.

  26. Fnarf is correct, up there at #12.

    I’m not at all convinced that this disaster will have a significant impact on Americans’ religious faith. For every superstitious person who thinks “Why would God let this happen?” and maybe gets his/her faith shaken a little bit, there’s another one who will think “God must be trying to punish us / send us a signal!!” and that person’s faith will be reinforced.

    Also: American awesomeness cannot fail, it can only be failed.

  28. Since no-one in the mainstream press is saying the truth about this spill, I doubt anyone will learn anything from it, let alone change anything about American Christianity. The Christian Right is completely insulated from the facts of the policies leading to this disaster. I guess I lack faith in rationality of mankind.

    @9 You’re joking right? If not, Rush Limbaugh called. He wants his crazy pills back. I might be reading you wrong as your post isn’t very clearly written.

    I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you go inject yourself with some %100 organic cobra venom to prove your point that all natural things are good for us. Crude oil is toxic. Global warming is irrefutable scientific fact, and there is a finite ammount of oil on this finite planet. There is so much death as a result of this spill. The gulf will be recovering for decades if not centuries.

    We should have listenned to Jimmy Carter. We wouldn’t be in this mess.

  30. @29 Noted. Sometimes I am so dumbfounded by the level of ignorance displayed by Right Wingers, I can’t help myself

  34. Religious people will say that this “happened for a reason.” God is obviously “sending a message.” Or some such bullshit. Christianity is a keeper, unfortunately.

  35. This isn’t even really an engineering problem. The problem is that they’ve been trying to plug the hole in such a way that they can get back in there later on and restore the well. If they just went in and blew the fucking thing to kingdom come or capped it with concrete, we’d be done by now.

    And I think, Charles, that American awesomeness is alive and well, in that a lot of America’s awesomeness is based on our resources-to-population ratio. The United States is one of a very few countries on the earth that has a massive food surplus. We have mineral resources that Europeans would kill for, and our capacity to farm timber, if we wanted to, exceeds pretty much any country on earth. The United States could, if we could get our shit together, still be the most awesome country on the planet because the Americas are still, in spite of everything, comparatively unexploited pools of resources. That model is somewhat complicated by the fact that we’ve mortgaged a lot of those resources to China over the last 20 years, but that debt could be erased with the flip of a currency switch. We’re not willing to do it for the same reason we’re not willing to blow the oil well in the Gulf — interested parties don’t consider it a good economic move. But we *could*.

    Roosevelt’s speech almost 80 years ago is still basically true — the United States has nothing to fear but fear itself. With the kind of unified effort displayed during World War II — with those kinds of price controls and infrastructure spending — the United States could be right back on top in 10 years.

    It’s not a lack of power. It’s a lack of will. And that’s a whole other kind of problem.

  36. I’ve been thinking about that article all day. Especially these numbers:

    “In the beginning of May, a few weeks after the rig explosion, the Pew Research Center asked 994 Americans about the oil spill: 55 percent saw it as a major environmental disaster, and 37 percent as a serious problem.”

    Almost 2/3 of americans did not believe that a massive oil spill is a serious problem. Almost half believed it wasn’t a major environmental disaster. On the news all I hear people talking about are lost fishing revenues. What do people care about if not this? We are so insulated from reality.

    On the news they focus on the beaches. Oh, the beaches are getting oily. What about the rest of the ocean? Where are the people wailing in grief? If this were happening here, I would be out at the ocean screaming and attacking BP employees. I would be throwing all of my clothes into the ocean to try to sop up the oil. I would mourn. I would grieve. I would cut my hair.

  38. Are we ready to question that oil is dinosaur meat and plants yet? And this organic matter is poison? The truth is that oil is a by-product of the Earth’s core and it is near limitless. And if we don’t stem it’s use it will choke Christians and atheists alike…

    It will be used, if not by us then by all the countries of the planet until the standard of living of all rises to our level, and if the same environmentalists who pushed drilling this far out into the deep water try to limit the poor from it, we will not be able to conceive of the brutality of the coming wars…

  39. Breaking news from Kent:

    Assault: 9:45 a.m., 10601 N.E. 132nd Street. A 17-year-old Bothell female assaulted a 16-year-old Lake Forest Park girl by punching her about the head and face causing injury. The assault occurred on account that the 16 year old was sending the other girl’s boyfriend flirtatious texts.

    http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/east_king/ki…

  42. Judah, I’m seeing a lot of people throwing around suggestions like yours, but it’s always coming from commenters who, presumably, have no experience with oil rigs or the drilling process.

    As it happens, I do know someone with this experience, and his opinion is that neither of those options are really viable. I’m well aware that the Russians reportedly used nuclear weapons to stop their own oil leaks, but can we just for a second imagine that perhaps the situation in the Gulf is not comparable to those leaks?

  43. You seriously underestimate religious fanatics. They have a convoluted way of turning everything into an answer to their prayers. When logic and reason have no meaning, nothing proves them wrong.

  44. While I don’t doubt that the uniquely American Fundamentalist version of Christianity is dying, I don’t think this is what you think it is.

    For this to be the final, or even a major, straw, it would have had to be seen as a religious issue in the first place, one that God didn’t handle well enough.

    It will be effortless for those who need to do so to cast this as a secular failing of Big Business who didn’t care enough, and that the Democrats (godless) didn’t fix.

  45. We can accomplish amazing things, yet if our undereducated twits who implement what the engineers do, we get an impending disaster. Seriously … we blame the engineers AFTER the workers, the policy makers, and execs failed to implement what they designed. It’s our fault for creating … well a general culture of corruption and border line ethical practices, and profit accordingly. We make our living marketing half truths, and exaggerations. We don’t like data and are more than willing to shoot the messenger because it’s difficult and inconvenient.

    Make no mistake about it, we need oil, still. We need it for our materials, food supplies, as well as energy. It’s not going to away for decades. It’s depressing and it sucks, but our hydrocarbon needs, will not be met as of yet for 6 billion plus and growing population through sustainable means (yet) BUT there are things we can do make a step in the right direction … like the smart people do their job, listen to what they say, and implement the safety devices they designed!

  46. You seriously underestimate anti-religious fanatics. They have a convoluted way of turning everything into an attack on religion. When logic and reason have no meaning, nothing proves them wrong.

  47. I’m not convinced that this tragedy will change American oil culture without more tragedies like this happening within the next two years.

    I do agree, however, that there is a perfect storm of events — the financial meltdown, unwinnable wars and now this — that is leading to a breakdown of American Christianism, although not Christianity. The blind trust that God will always protect America because America is God’s land cannot be held in the midst of all of these failures of American institutions. This won’t happen quickly, by any stretch of the imagination, but the prosperity-gospel megachurches are going to be replaced by something less arrogant and less theocratic.

  48. Yes, I am aware that ‘evil’ is a religious term.

    Dear Lesley Hazelton,

    “Evil” is not a religious term. It is a moral term. “Evil” is (therefore) a religious term only to the extent that moral judgments are the exclusive domain of religion. That is, not at all.

    As a “proud agnostic”, you should consider that such rhetorical tics do not make you seem reasonable or balanced, but instead concede the whole argument to the religious folks you are implicitly addressing. Yes, they say to themselves reading your post, there is no morality without religion. She can’t even TALK about morality (“evil”) without discussing religion.

    It’s a question of framing.

    Uplift

  49. What is the gibbering African on about this time? his father worked for the Zimbabwe government; that’s how Charles’s family made their money, through the rampant corruption of Mugabe and failed socialist policies of the ZANU-PF.

    Why would anyone listen to Mudede’s opinion on economics or race?

    I guess in the all white world of the STranger and its readership this is what passes for a token black: a jibbering fool who’s family helped loot Rhodesia.

  50. No, now science and technology are bad, and God is good (and probably punishing us).

    God always wins. 9/11? God wins. Prosperity again? God wins. Military victory? GOD WINS.

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