Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

by Jane Borden

they believed God impelled them to use the natural world for their benefit. Buttressing this was the more elemental and heartbreaking belief that nature is evil. This predates Protestantism, sure. But the Puritans upped the ante, thanks to their notion of predestination, which reasoned that anyone pre-chosen by God as saved had been given grace and contained no nature in them whatsoever. That’s the hierarchy: holy grace above evil nature. But, they reasoned, if you use the material world for a godly purpose (for example, your work), then you are improving the world and making it more godly. Not only can you extract what you want, you must. “Nature belonged to the gracious and could no more resist their control of it than Satan could resist Christ.” This doctrine has become known as the grace-nature divide and has undergirded and justified centuries of runaway extraction economics.