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" Rush Limbaugh has taken an issue that should be amenable only to fact and, in criticizing Mitt Romney and the 2012 field, made it subservient to faith. A preacher is standing on a rooftop during a flood, the water up around his knees. A boat comes by, and an emergency worker yells, &amp;quot;Hey, preacher, get in.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;No, thank you,&amp;quot; the preacher says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been praying to the Lord, and the Lord says that He will provide.&amp;quot; An hour later, the water has risen to the preacher&amp;#039;s hips. Another boat comes by. &amp;quot;Hey, preacher,&amp;quot; the emergency worker yells. &amp;quot;C&amp;#039;mon, it&amp;#039;s time to go.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, thank you,&amp;quot; the preacher says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been praying to the Lord, and the Lord says that He will provide.&amp;quot;  An hour later, the water is up to the preacher&amp;#039;s chest, and a third boat comes by. &amp;quot;Hey, preacher,&amp;quot; the emergency worker says, &amp;quot;The water&amp;#039;s rising. For God&amp;#039;s sake, please get in.&amp;quot; The preacher just smiles, and says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been praying to the Lord, and the Lord says that He will provide.&amp;quot; An hour later, he is swallowed by the floodwaters and has to appear in front of Saint Peter for his exit interview. &amp;quot;But I don&amp;#039;t understand,&amp;quot; the preacher says. &amp;quot;The Lord kept on saying that He would provide.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The Lord provided three boats,&amp;quot; Saint Peter says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not His fault that you were too dumb to get in.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s an old joke, a preacher&amp;#039;s joke, and if you go to church in the United States, you&amp;#039;ve probably heard it. But it&amp;#039;s also possibly the best summation of the situation that the United States faces in regard to global warming. The water is rising, and yet because a significant portion of the American public believes that the tide carries the threat of secularism, environmentalism, liberalism, socialism, or what have you \u2014 anything but the simple threat of drowning \u2014 they will keep praying to the Lord rather than doing anything about it. Indeed, they are committed to inaction by the very terms of their prayers. I have written in this space that American democracy now comes with a guarantee of the right to pick your own apocalypse. But that doesn&amp;#039;t mean that everybody&amp;#039;s choice is equally valid, as our most recent go-around with the May 21 doomsday deadline demonstrates. If you have to pick your poison, climate change seems the poison to pick. Hell, one may even be forgiven the temptation to ask the question of Republicans \u2014 Hey, how&amp;#039;s that whole global-warming-is-a-hoax thing working out for ya? \u2014 as unprecedented storms and floods give way to unprecedented droughts and heat waves, and the most dire predictions of climate scientists appear, without exception, to be coming to pass. But for most self-identified &amp;quot;conservatives,&amp;quot; it will never matter how high the water rises or how convincingly the evidence mounts, because from the start the debate about global warming has never been a debate in which rules of evidence apply. Rather, it has been a tectonic collision of belief systems, the vision of America as a uniquely secular nation and the vision of America as a uniquely Christian one smash together and create earthquakes before they create mountain ranges, and in which secular Americans expressing concern for their children&amp;#039;s future and Christian Americans expressing concern for their children&amp;#039;s future turn out to be talking about two different things entirely. Last week, for example, was not just the week of Weinergate. It was also the week in which Americans seemed finally to feel the heat \u2014 to look around at the storms, and the floods, and the fires, and the droughts, and the rising food prices, and to ask, What&amp;#039;s going on? It began with the Times reporting on global crop yields withering even as the global population expands; it continued with Tom Friedman&amp;#039;s declaration that the earth (once Flat\u2122) is now Full\u2122; and then ended with a report on the record temperatures recorded in cities from New York to Chicago. At the same time, Mitt Romney announced his presidential candidacy with the heretical acknowledgment that global warming might be a reality, and all in all the country seemed to be slipping back to the place of relative sanity it occupied ten years ago, when even candidate George W. Bush had a climate-change plank in his platform. And yet no sooner had Romney dared say that global warming was a problem that had to be dealt with than Rush Limbaugh accused him of falling for a hoax, and it became clear that although we might not know who the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2012 is going to be, we know for certain that he \u2014 or she \u2014 will not &amp;quot;believe&amp;quot; in global warming any more than he or she &amp;quot;believes&amp;quot; that the great operative force in all biological creation is evolution. He or she will not be allowed to express such a belief, by Rush and Roger, the two crafters \u2014 and enforcers \u2014 of the Republican narrative.  And so it is that already Tim Pawlenty has recanted his governor-of-a-liberal-state support for cap-and-trade \u2014 &amp;quot;the biggest clunker of my career&amp;quot; \u2014 and Chris Christie, this election cycle&amp;#039;s wish-list undeclared candidate as well as the &amp;quot;moderate Republican&amp;quot; of fanciful myth, showed that he has at least some interest in running for president by pulling New Jersey out of a multistate agreement to limit greenhouse gases and telling a reporter who asked if he believed in evolution that it was none of his business. And so it is that the other wish-list Republican, Rick Perry of Texas, not only responded to his state&amp;#039;s historic drought by asking his constituents to pray for rain but also doubled down by asking them \u2014 and all Americans \u2014 to pray to Jesus, and only Jesus, by name, for America&amp;#039;s salvation and their own. Now, there is a distinct possibility that Governor Perry has fallen for a hoax more comprehensive and far-fetched than the one supposedly exposing the credulity of Mitt Romney. But Rush Limbaugh would never say that, because it is in his interest that the Republican party remain less a political organization than a theological one. When Limbaugh derides global warming as a &amp;quot;religion,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;s on to something, and not just because Tom Friedman&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;The Earth Is Full\u2122&amp;quot; column ends with a hopeful vision of a world deciding to exchange a &amp;quot;consumer-driven growth model&amp;quot; for a &amp;quot;happiness-driven&amp;quot; one \u2014 not just because all end-of-the-world scenarios are just veiled exhortations for repentance. No, global warming has become a religion because Rush and Co. have succeeded in making it one. He has succeeded in recasting the global-warming debate in the same way he has succeeded in recasting the debate over everything else, from taxes to health care to gay marriage. He has made an issue that should be amenable only to fact amenable to faith, indeed subservient to it, so that if people don&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;believe&amp;quot; in global warming, it&amp;#039;s not happening. The great secret to the success of the Republican party since it became an arm of the American church and the American corporation is that it pretends to abide by &amp;quot;absolutes&amp;quot; while remaining committed to the relativism at the heart of all religion, which is that if you believe in something, it exists, and if you don&amp;#039;t, it doesn&amp;#039;t.  The result is not simply a recipe for denial, it&amp;#039;s a closed loop, in which evidence that global warming is happening is interpreted as evidence that it&amp;#039;s not. Rick Perry, praying to God for relief from drought and praying to Jesus for relief from America&amp;#039;s habit of calamity, will never call for lower greenhouse-gas emissions, because it&amp;#039;s the people calling for lower greenhouse-gas emissions who have caused the drought and brought on the calamities.  And if the waters should rise, the American faithful will huddle on the roof, waiting for the arrival of an angel blowing his trumpet, when all God ever wanted was for them to get into the damned boat. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a10092/global-warming-religion-5912388/>