The Day of All things Al

This week, I’m working on a research paper for my class, The American Jeremiad: American Religion, American History. At some point during the semester, it struck me that Al Gore has tapped into the heart of American civil religion and begun to reshape it with his mission to bring the environmental crisis to the fore of public consciousness.

In his book Earth in the Balance, published in the early 90s, Gore identifies the environmental crisis as a spiritual crisis, one in which the very foundations of Western civilization are in cataclysmic collision with the natural world, and yet people lack the spiritual ecology to confront the apocalyptic repercussions of our own technology and ambition. He appeals specifically to the United States on the basis of the covenant made with one generation of Americans, but which extends to all, outlined in the Constitution as the fundamental rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Gore shakes America’s hold on the promise of freedom, saying that the only way to continue to make the world safe for democracy is to heal the world and the already-begun environmental crisis. 

In his most recent book, The Assault on Reason, Gore laments over America’s loss of purpose, reason, and leadership in the world, and attributes this loss greatly to the silencing of informed public discourse in American society. Though he may not have invented the Internet, Gore identifies the Internet as a tool of salvation for the American people, with the capability for reinvigorating communication and revolutionizing the mass media and public exchange of ideas, which in the last half century has become nothing less than a tyrannical system for disseminating deceptions and destructive values. America’s future, he says, depends on a reawakening of spiritual zeal and renewal of informed public discourse, in short, a revolution akin to that which formed the nation centuries ago. 

More to come on Al Gore, the new American Jeremiah.