Free Republic

Reading A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future (Oxford University Press, 2006, 288pp.) reminds one of the advocates of civil religion: it’s important that Americans believe in God, whichever one they choose. Roger S. Gottlieb, a philosophy professor, wants believers to be green, and Greens to be believers, whichever God they choose. The book offers a read that is simultaneously entertaining and surreal. Perhaps no surprise, Gottlieb is suffused with all of the usual liberal nostrums. The environment is under catastrophic attack; capitalism is environmentally destructive; globalization wreaks havoc around the world; only draconian regulatory mandates can save...

When academics relay their understanding of religion to the rest of us, they offer interpretations that the religiously observant may find a tad bizarre. “Religion has a certain kind of legitimacy among many people and in many parts of the world that secular life simply doesn’t have,” philosophy professor Roger S. Gottlieb explained in an interview with Jennifer Howard that appeared in the June 23rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “In Madagascar, where the fishermen were dynamiting to get fish and destroying the coral reef and fish stock, when the government said, ‘Don’t do it,’ they kept doing...