Are Evangelical Leaders Saving Scott Pruitt’s Job?

By Margaret TalbotJune 8, 2018

How is it that the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, a public
servant who walks around clouded in ethics scandals like Pig-Pen in his swirl of dust, still holds
his job? At the E.P.A., Pruitt has engaged in acts that range from the pettily self-serving
(allegedly asking agency employees to help him acquire a used mattress from the Trump
International Hotel and to set up meetings so that his wife could get a Chick-fil-A franchise) to
the egregiously self-serving (spending millions of dollars on an around-the-clock, twenty-person
security detail, which is unprecedented at the Agency, and splurging on first-class flights) to the
weirdly clandestine (installing a forty-three-thousand-dollar soundproof phone booth in his
office, though there are other secure locations for conversation at the E.P.A. headquarters, and
declining to follow past practice and release his schedule in advance). At an agency that strives
for earnest probity, Pruitt’s blundering, for which he is now the target of Government
Accountability Office and congressional investigations, stands out in vulgar relief.

The last head of the E.P.A. to get into anything like this kind of trouble, Anne Gorsuch Burford,
held the post during Ronald Reagan’s first term. But she had the decency to resign after being
held in contempt of Congress, a charge on which the Reagan Administration ultimately declined
to defend her. Donald Trump, on the other hand, seems to see nothing amiss with Pruitt’s
performance. “People are really impressed with the job that’s being done at the E.P.A.,” Trump
said, at a hurricane-preparedness event this week, where Pruitt also appeared. “Thank you very
much, Scott.”

One reason that Pruitt has managed to hang on this long is that some of the people he seems to
have most impressed include the heads of polluting industries whose support helped bring
Trump to power. People such as Robert Murray, the C.E.O. of Murray Energy, the largest
privately owned underground-coal-mining company in the country, and a Trump booster who
donated three hundred thousand dollars to the President’s Inauguration, and then presented the
Administration with a four-page “action plan,” much of which, with Pruitt’s crucial assistance,
has come to pass. (See, for example, one of Murray’s top priorities: the repeal of the Clean Power
Plan, which Pruitt announced in October.) Lots of conservative think-tank types love Pruitt, too,
for giving industry a break; for energetically pursuing an anti-regulatory, federalist agenda; and
for not being especially worried about global warming. Rolling back the administrative state
would be one of the Trump Administration’s greatest legacies, Brooke Rollins, then the
president and C.E.O. of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, said in an interview
with Pruitt at the Heritage Foundation, in November. “I don’t know that there’s anyone more at
the tip of the spear than you are in what you are doing,” she told him. “And what a great hero
and warrior you have been.” (Rollins now works at the White House Office of American
Innovation, headed by Jared Kushner.)

But there may be another secret to Pruitt’s tenacious grip on the agency that he’s busy
undermining. Like several other members of the constantly churning Trump Administration
who’ve managed to hold fast—Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Housing and Urban
Development Secretary Ben Carson, and Vice-President Mike Pence—Pruitt is an evangelical
Christian. This group attends a weekly Bible-study session for Cabinet members led by Ralph
Drollinger, a seven-feet-one-inch former college-basketball player who is the founder and
president of Capitol Ministries and the author of “Rebuilding America: The Biblical Blueprint.”
Drollinger recently told an interviewer for the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag that he
offered his White House flock “the high-protein diet of the Word of God.” Speaking about
Drollinger’s Bible study, Pruitt told Christian Broadcast Network News, in March, that “to be
encouraged, to pray, to basically—each of us are dealing with large issues—and so to spend time
with a friend, a colleague, a person who has a faith focus on how we do our job, whether it’s
through prayer or through God’s Word, and to encourage one another in that regard is so, so
important, and we have that in our Cabinet and it’s such a wonderful thing.”

Eighty per cent of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump. This was to be expected, as that
group has strong ties to the Republican Party and wanted a President who would appoint
conservative, anti-abortion judges to the bench. It seemed at first like a hold-your-nose kind of
bargain for values voters, who might be presumed to find a lewd and crude man like Trump
problematic. Yet the surprise is that so many evangelical leaders have not only endorsed Trump
but exalted him. “In my lifetime, he has supported the Christian faith more than any President
that I know,” the evangelist Franklin Graham told the Times, in February. Jerry Falwell, Jr.,
predicted that Trump would be “the greatest President since Abraham Lincoln.” The charismatic
pastor Dutch Sheets has described Trump’s election as a “miracle,” brought about through
prayer. And, last week, news emerged that students at Liberty University, the Christian school
founded by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Sr., in Lynchburg, Virginia, will be making a feature film
called “The Trump Prophecy,” to be shown in theatres nationwide this October. The film will tell
the story of a retired firefighter from Florida who, in 2011, received a message from God that
Trump was going to become President. Why wouldn’t Trump want to keep pleasing the
evangelical constituency, and retaining the Cabinet members with connections to it?

And here’s another way that the Christian Right is helping to sustain both Trump and Pruitt. Its
members can find justification for their climate-change skepticism and for the valorization of
extractive industries in evangelical teachings that insist, against the overwhelming scientific
consensus, that humans could not have created global warming. In an essay published on the
Capitol Ministries Web site in April, Drollinger explains that accepting a human role in climate
change and trying to do something about it poses a terrible moral danger: “To think that Man
can alter the earth’s ecosystem—when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in
the current affairs of mankind—is to more than subtly espouse an ultra-hubristic, secular
worldview relative to the supremacy and importance of man.”

Drollinger warns that environmentalism has pretensions to replace Christianity and must be
halted in its tracks: “In our lifetime there has been a radical shift in aggregate, national religious
belief. In essence and unfortunately, America has been in the process of changing horses: from
the religion of Christianity to one of Radical Environmentalism. We are in the process of
exchanging the worship of the Creator for the worship of His creation. This is a huge and dire
error, with extreme consequences, and it presages disaster.” And, when it comes to exploiting
natural resources, Drollinger writes, “God is pleased when organic and inorganic substances, the
lesser of creation, are utilized to benefit those uniquely created in His image.”

Drollinger may be uniquely influential with his Washington, D.C., ministry, but he is not the
only evangelical climate-change denier. This line of thinking can be seen in the work of the
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a group founded, in 2005, by Calvin Beisner,
a theologian who posits that environmentalism is “the greatest threat to Western civilization,”
because it combines “the utopian vision of Marxism, the scientific facade of secular humanism,
and the religious fanaticism of jihad.” The Alliance, which recently filed a comment supporting a
controversial rule Pruitt has proposed governing how the E.P.A. relies on scientific data, holds
that the Earth is “robust and self-regulating” and that “God’s wise design” will correct the
damage we do to it.

Pruitt echoes much of this thinking—he speaks frequently about “stewardship” and
“management” of the resources that “God has blessed us with” and clearly wants us to use, and
of following the “Biblical world view” on environmental matters. He has expressed doubts about
the human contribution to climate change, and, throughout his career, voiced alarm that the
United States was keeping religion out of the public square. What may be the scariest thing of all
about Pruitt’s tenure at the E.P.A. and the damage he can do to the environment is the
righteousness he surely feels in doing it.