Cornwall Alliance :: Stewardship Notes :: Putting Together the Pieces in the Spiritual World War

Putting Together the Pieces in the Spiritual World War

July 18, 2012

Last week we introduced you to In His Image 2012, our exciting new initiative to educate evangelicals all over America and the world about the integrally related threats posed by Darwinism, the sexual revolution, and the Green movement to the sanctity of human life; the dignity of human sexuality, marriage and the family; and the God-given mandate for human beings to exercise godly dominion over the Earth.

This week, we want to introduce you to more of the thinking behind In His Image 2012.

Satan of course hates God but cannot attack Him directly, so He attacks His image/representative—humanity—instead, in what we need to learn to see not as isolated battles but as related fronts in a “spiritual world war.”

Three exceptionally fine recent books—Robert Zubrin’s Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (2012), Matthew Connelly’s Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2010), and Mary Eberstadt’s Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution (2012)—together reveal the historical and ideological ties in this war. A skeletal outline of it looks like this:

1798: Anglican minister Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principle of Population, arguing that population grows exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, …), while resource supplies only increase arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12), making great population collapses through famine inevitable unless prevented by war or disease. The book incites fear of overpopulation and depletion of resources, undermines belief in man as producer, and portrays him only as consumer.
1859: Charles Darwin, building on Malthus’s thought, publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, undermining belief in the sanctity and uniqueness of human life as bearing the image of God and feeding belief in better (“favoured”) and worse races pitted against each other in competition for survival of the “fittest.”
1883, Francis Galton, building on both Malthus and Darwin, publishes Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, launching the eugenics movement as a means for higher races (the “fit”) to weed out lower ones (the “unfit”) in order to reduce the strain on resources without the two preventives Malthus envisioned, war and famine. This spawns the population control movement, imposed by colonial powers on their colonies, the peoples of whom are Black, Yellow, Brown, and Red (the supposedly “lower” races), not White Europeans (the alleged “highest” race of humans).
1890s–1930s, Progressives like Margaret Sanger (founder of what became Planned Parenthood), embracing Malthusianism, Darwinism, and eugenics, launch the sexual revolution of the 1910s–1920s (“roaring 20s”), advocating contraception and abortion to limit population growth among the “unfit”—who turn out to be non-White-Europeans. Their efforts lead to government “family planning” programs in the colonial world, including incentivized or coerced sterilization and abortion and the intentional promotion of, or refusal to alleviate, famines, especially in India, other parts of Asia, and Africa.
1920s–1950s: Darwinian naturalist Secular Humanists become strong enough to challenge America’s dominant Christian culture, conquering public education by the 1960s, with minor and unsuccessful counterattacks by Scientific Creationists in the 1980s and Intelligent Design advocates in the 2000s, undermining belief that human beings are the image of God with a God-given right to life, liberty, and property.
1950s–1970s: The Progressives’ sexual revolution, put on hold by the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II, revives and, aided by new contraceptive technologies that promise unfettered sexual pleasure without consequences, becomes dominant by the seventies, with serious destructive effects on marriage, family, and broader society.
1962: Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, predicated on Malthusian and Darwinian foundations, launching the preservationist movement and a long series of mostly pseudo-scientific or exaggerated ecological fears that come to dominate the environmental movement and, by the 2000s, American society as a whole. One consequence of Silent Spring was the banning of DDT by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—despite its own scientific studies having shown the chemical was safe to humans and the environment—and the consequent requirement that countries receiving U.S. foreign aid ban it as well, leading to about 2 million deaths every year in poor countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, a result that some environmentalists welcome as reducing overpopulation (though population density in most afflicted countries is lower than in most European countries).
1990s–2010s: The environmental movement grows to world prominence, especially with the U.N.’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (1992) and the founding of the Earth Charter, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol; the growth of the animal rights, plant rights, and ecosystem rights movements (variations on biological egalitarianism); and increasing calls for global governance to overcome supposedly global environmental crises, especially global warming.

Obviously the roots go back earlier than Malthus, and there are plenty of other players and issues involved, but this is a manageable outline.

We at the Cornwall Alliance will continue to focus on the four elements of our mission: to magnify the glory of God in creation, the wisdom of His truth in environmental stewardship, the kindness of His mercy in lifting the needy out of poverty, and the wonders of His grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Our goal in In His Image 2012 is to help evangelicals fighting on many battlefronts to see the interconnections and begin acting more strategically and, we pray, effectively to reshape how people think of human beings and our role on Earth—to reassert the sanctity of human life and sexuality, the beauty and centrality of marriage, the goodness of human multiplication, and the dignity of human work and godly dominion over the Earth.

So I want to invite you to become one of a small, special group of people—a new “Gideon’s Army,” so to speak—willing to generously donate $28 per month for our “In His Image 2012” campaign.

Just 300 people contributing a tax-deductible gift of $28 per month will provide the budget to help us:

Reach over 500 churches in 10 states, and conduct special pastors’ briefings, beginning with a few states and, God willing, spreading nationwide.
Educate political leaders in our nation’s capital and state legislatures.
Reach out to over 2,500 reporters and producers in the mainstream and Christian media.
Provide study guides and materials to teachers, students, and laymen in select states about the grave dangers of the Green radical environmental agenda, and the blessings of genuinely Biblical Earth stewardship.
Begin to develop an evangelism program based on Genesis 1:27-28 which uses environmental issues as a platform for the Gospel, and shows how true image-bearing can only occur through a relationship with the perfect Image of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Will you help us?

Please click here to sign up for an automatic tax-deductible donation of just $28 per month, or whatever you can afford, to help us defend and promote these foundational Biblical truths.

And please make sure to indicate a monthly contribution on the form to maximize your support!

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is Founder and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance, author of Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate and Answers for Atheists, Agnostics, and Other Thoughtful Skeptics: Dialogs About Christian Faith and Life, and a frequent speaker for churches, colleges, and schools.