IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 75

Book Reviews
A. David Wunsch

Paranoid Science
Paranoid Science: The Christian Right's War on Reality
By Antony Alumkal, New York University Press, 242 pages, paperbound edition, 2019.

n a 2012 radio ad--
dress on the Voice of
Christian Youth of
America network,
U.S. Senator James
Inhofe of Oklahoma announced "...
God's still up there. The arrogance
of people to think that we, human
beings, would be able to change
what He is doing in the climate is to
me outrageous." Evidently Inhofe
had never heard of the terrible Lon-
don fog of 1952, estimated to have
killed 10 000 people, which was
brought on by the heavy use of coal
for winter heating during a tempera-
ture inversion.
At the time of his statement,
Inhofe served as chair of the Senate
Committee on the Environment and
Public Works. Oklahoma lies in the
top 10 of fossil fuel producing U.S.
states, and Inhofe's campaigns -
no surprise - have been generous-
ly funded by the oil and gas
industries. Incidentally, Inhofe
favors a constitutional amendment
banning same sex marriage.
Inhofe's persona, lying at the
intersection of business, politics,
and an American brand of evangeli-
cal Christianity, could have stepped
from the pages of Antony Alumkal's
book, Paranoid Science and,
although the Senator is not includ-
ed, the author gives us some tools
to understand what species of per-

son Inhofe is. Reading the subtitle,
The Christian Right's War on Reality, you might think the author to be
a flaming atheist, a la Richard
Dawkins - and you would be
wrong. He is a Professor of the Soci-
ology of Religion at the Iliff School
of Theology in Denver, CO. Judging
from his book, I would guess he
practices a form of liberal Christian-
ity, and would characterize himself
as a member of the Christian left.
Alumkal's text is about the
beliefs, politics, and propaganda of
the Evangelical Right in American
Christianity. In four chapters he
deals with their rejection of Darwin-
ian evolution, their promoting a
belief that homosexuality is a
reversible aberration offensive to
God, their assertion that research
on human embryonic stem cells
flouts the teaching of the Bible, and
finally, that environmentalists are a
"green dragon" who are denying the
agency of God in creating climate.
Since we began with Inhofe and
the environment, let us start with
the last chapter. Here we meet one
E. Calvin Beisner, a sometime pro-
fessor at evangelical colleges and a
longtime fellow at the pro free-mar-
ket Acton Institute for the Study of
Religion and Liberty. In 2005 he
organized the Cornwall Alliance for
the Stewardship of Creation. The
organization released in 2010 a
DVD for distribution to churches
and schools with the title Resisting
the Green Dragon which puts forth

I

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Date of current version: 18 June 2020

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

the thesis that environmentalists
(his Green Dragon) are "seducing
your children," placing "nature
above the needs of people, of even
the poorest...". These tree huggers
view the gospel as "just social jus-
tice" and are enemies of Christi-
anity. If this sounds like paranoia
("seducing your children") it is.
Alumkal frames his book using
an essay of Richard Hofstadter's
delivered at Oxford Universit y
in 1963, The Paranoid Style in
American Politics.
To understand what motivates
the Cornwall Alliance, Alumkal sen-
sibly follows the money. Beisner is
not immune to connecting himself
with secular business groups advo-
cating doubt about anthropogenic
climate change, e.g., he is a mem-
ber of the board of directors of the
Committee for a Constructive
Tomorrow, which is heavily funded
by oil and steel interests. Alumkal
points out that this is a part of a
larger pattern of Christian Right
leaders quietly allying themselves
with corporate backers. What the
right does assert, in the words of
the Cornwall Alliance, is that
"Among God's promises are two
that are particularly relevant to
fears of dangerous manmade glob-
al warming: (1) ...natural cycles nec-
essary for human and ecosystem
thriving ...will continue as long as
Heaven and Earth endure (Genesis
8:22) and (2) flood waters will never
again [after Noah's flood] cover the

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