Senior pastor Nick Garland recently attended a private reception in the Washington offices of his First Parishoner -- he recruited EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to his congregation when Pruitt was a law student, and their evangelical commitment has been unwavering. Before joining the bar, Pruitt went to Romania on a First Baptist missionary trip, and as Attorney General of Oklahoma , returned to teach a church seminar on how to blend one’s faith into communication and current events.
Garland says Pruitt long ago realized the Lord wanted him to do more “than be a student of law.” and compared his protégé "to an eagle:” one of the rare creations of God that delight in the storm,” Dozens of evangelical leaders endorsed Pruitt’s 2016 EPA nomination in an open letter echoing the Dominionist rejection of “any ideology that sees human beings as a blight upon the planet and would harm human flourishing by restricting or preventing the rightful use and enjoyment of creation.”
Garland recently told Mother Jones magazine does not believe humans are the main cause of climate change, and neither does Pruitt.
“I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,”Pruitt said in March 2017, and in October, barring researchers with EPA grants from serving on the agency’s science advisory boards, he quoted the Book of Joshua:
“Choose this day whom you’re going to serve.”
The Lord, said Pruitt:
“ created human beings in His own image, bearing responsibility to advance human flourishing through many forms of human activity, from agriculture and enterprise to technology and innovation,”
Voicing a view antithetic to religious leaders, including Pope Francis, who believe environmental stewardship resides in conserving God’s creation, Pruit went on to say :
“Is true environmentalism ‘do not touch’? It’s like having a beautiful apple orchard that could feed the world, but the environmentalists put up a fence around the apple orchard and say, ‘Do not touch the apple orchard because it may spoil the apple orchard.’”
Ignoring a Biblical injunction not to pick apples--
What could possibly go wrong ?
