“Woe to you, O churches of the land, who tithe and fast, who preach and pray, who grow megachurches in the twinkling of an eye, who care about souls but not the land on which they live, which I too have made and called good”

Some conservative Christians, from Sarah Palin to Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, have seen the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a chance to tar Barack Obama with a legacy like the one Hurricane Katrina left for George W. Bush.

But as the slick spreads and the toll mounts and hopes for a quick solution fade, a number of other Christian conservatives, notably evangelicals who have in the past taken a largely laissez-faire approach to environmental protection, are seeing the disaster as a moral challenge to their own free-market dogmatism and are even repenting of their previous positions.

In one of the most passionate and penetrating reflections, a blog post titled “Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience” Russell D. Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, compared the oil spill to the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. http://bit.ly/bRmubg
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At the website of Christianity Today, the evangelical monthly, managing editor Mark Galli approaches his jeremiad even more literally, starting his lament, called “Judgment in the Gulf,” with paraphrases of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah and then riffing onward in the same Old Testament style.
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“Woe to you, O churches of the land, who tithe and fast, who preach and pray, who grow megachurches in the twinkling of an eye, who care about souls but not the land on which they live, which I too have made and called good. Woe to you who trust me not for their daily bread, but look anxiously to smoke billowing diesel to deliver them from their hunger. Woe to all who lift up their eyes to call upon my name, but who do not look down at that which they destroy by sucking up energy in their spacious megabuildings and at international gatherings to glorify my name.”

Read More: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/06/04/gulf-oil-spill-and-an-evangelical-crisis-of-conscience/