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Oil God
14 March 2005Secretary of the Interior Gale A. Norton waxes poetic on the op-ed page of The NYTimes today, describing in rapturous prose the miracles of American ingenuity that will allow us to suck oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge without disturbing a mouse. Is any of it true? We can't say. But there's a ghost of a religion story here, and its name is James G. Watt, the Reagan-era interior secretary who told The Washington Post "My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns." Norton, a Watt protege, is just as relentless as her mentor in her pursuit of deregulation, but she's more polished. Her faith, though, may be just as strong. In 2002, I attended a prayer meeting of government officials and private citizens at The Cedars, the Arlington, Va. headquarters of the Fellowship, a self-proclaimed "invisible" organization dedicated to bringing politicians, businesspeople, and military officers -- the "up and out," the group calls them -- into private prayer cells together with the longterm goal of a worldwide government of 200 leaders networked together under a heretical theology they describe as "Jesus plus nothing." At this meeting, we were asked to pray for our "good friend" and "associate" Gale Norton, who, we were told, was bringing these principles to the management of the environment. It's worth nothing that there was a World Bank meeting in D.C. at the time, and we were also asked to pray for a "mighty rain" that would wash the protestors off the street. Now that's faith-based environmentalism. Prayers aside, Norton has been quietly re-mapping the line between church and state. In 2003, she reversed a 1995 Justice Department ruling that disallowed active houses of worship from receiving federal preservation grants. Norton has also presided over a religious shift in the National Park Service: creationist texts on sale at the Grand Canyon, biblical plaques in public parks, a video history of the Lincoln Memorial revised at the request of Christian right groups who worried that footage of pro-choice and gay rights rallies, among others, suggested that Lincoln would have supported abortion and gay rights. (Here's a round-up of articles at "Bad Geology.") Norton's Christianity is of a prickly variety. Keeping your neighbor off your property seems to be more important than loving him. She's such a fierce advocate of "state's rights" and small government that in 1996, she lamented the Confederacy's loss of the Civil War. There was a brief stink when that speech came to light following her nomination in 2001, but since then Norton has been walking softly even as she swings a big stick, remaking a century of American environmental policy -- much of it set in place by Republican forebears -- in the image of a laissez-faire God.
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