The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and social activism, when the aim is to enlarge government control, is inescapably traveling the road to political tyranny.
In The Social Gospel Has Found its Savior I wrote:
Regrettably, well meaning Christian ministers like Rick Warren are supporting Mr. Gore’s junk scientism and the power of man over the earth, rather than sticking to faith in the one True God as Creator and Regulator of the cosmos.
Rick Warren emailed me a nice message saying that he does not agree with the social gospel, acknowledging that it is simply atheistic socialism mimicking Christianity.
Nonetheless, mixing religion with purely secular and highly speculative activism like Al Gore’s campaign is hard to distinguish from the early 20th century’s social gospel.
While we must strive to be a Christian nation, ministers should scrupulously stay out of politics and confine themselves to saving individual souls. Jesus commanded us to go out and preach the gospel, not go out and organize political action committees.
What Al Gore, along with Rick Warren and his fellow preachers, propose is collectivism on a grand scale. No sane political society is willingly going to bomb itself economically back into the stone age to “save” the planet. Intellectual cadres will have to be empowered, with their armies of bureaucrats, to produce millions of regulations implementing Kyoto, and they must have means of enforcing those regulations, hence the origin of Gestapos and KGBs.
In a sketch that fits Al Gore remarkably well, Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, described what life has to be under such collectivism:
The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land…
All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!â€Â
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
