Dean also praised Dr. Rick Warren, the author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” and televangelist Joel Osteen, who welcomed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) to his Houston Lakewood Church. Dean added, “Those people don't beat up on other people to make their point and raise a lot of money.”
Like Sen. Inhofe, Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow and author of the “Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” Chris Horner was skeptical of the religious calls to protect the earth from climate change.
Horner wrote in an email, “As you might expect, even though some individuals of faith sincerely buy the slogan offered by those usual-suspect groups underwriting their participation in the debate, upon scrutiny conflating this agenda with faith is quite clearly a distortion at best and perversion at worse. In fact, it is unavoidable that for most serious adherents of this agenda, ‘environmentalism’ as practiced in this post-modern form is the religion in itself.”
In the hearing, a number of faith-oriented campaigns were mentioned like the “What Would Jesus Drive?” project sponsored by the Evangelical Environmental and Jewish community’s “How Many Jews Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb” drive to replace incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent ones during Hanukkah.
There was even discussion of a religious program that sells carbon offsets. The Evangelical Climate Initiative, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), offers tax-deductible carbon offsets for $99 per year through a program called “Cooling Creation.” Their website states that 93 percent of the carbon offset “donations” submitted “goes directly to offsets, climate change education and outreach.”
Historian David Barton, summoned to the panel by Sen. Inhofe and named one of the “Twenty-five Most Influential Evangelicals in America” by Time Magazine, commented on these various campaigns: “The next time we see Jesus, He will be driving neither a Hummer nor a Hybrid.”
Barton suggested that Boxer was exaggerating the religious community’s support for liberal environmentalism. “The Scriptures teach conservation, not preservation,” he said. “Man was the steward of nature and environment, and while man definitely is to tend and guard it, it is to serve him, not vice versa. From the beginning, God warned about elevating nature and the environment over man and his Creator.”