Global warming is once again a ‘hot topic’, if you’ll pardon the pun. Public clamour encouraged by David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion (XR) has, seemingly, forced the Government’s hand: on Wednesday Britain became the first country to declare a national environment and climate change emergency.
The astonishing surge of popular support for this issue has swept with it senior clergy and many ordinary professing Christians. I read of an 83-year-old believer who was arrested last month while partaking in a prayer vigil on top a train in Canary Wharf.1 Closer to home, acquaintances of mine, including church-goers, have been filling their social media feeds with anti-climate change petitions, and a local pastor has made sustainability the theme of several recent sermons.
Climate change touches on many issues into which Christians are uniquely positioned to speak truthfully and meaningfully: justice, compassion, judgment, redemption, sin, salvation. But it cannot be assumed unquestioningly to be a righteous cause. There are many aspects of the climate change lobby and the green movement in general that are demonstrably oppositional to Scripture.
It is vitally important that believers be found at this moment consulting their Bibles and enquiring of the Lord in prayer to better understand the issue, not jumping aboard the green bandwagon without backward glance. Yet, I fear that the latter is indeed what is happening, more than the former.
Articles of Faith
The environmental or ‘green’ movement encompasses a variety of sub-movements including campaigns against pollution and environmental degradation, campaigns for conservation, campaigns for sustainability and of course activism about climate change.2
For all the diversity within this movement, green lobbyists and their flankers in the media and government promote a very simple narrative about the environment that is widely reported as indisputable fact: that is, in one way or another, human beings are ruining the planet.
Specifically regarding climate change, the narrative asserts that manmade carbon emissions are warming our climate, de-stabilising ecosystems, melting polar ice caps and tipping us perhaps irreversibly into an era of ecological collapse. From this narrative follows, logically, the call for humanity to drastically overhaul itself in order to save the world.
There are many aspects of the climate change lobby and the green movement in general that are demonstrably oppositional to Scripture.
Though not an expert in environmental science, after six years traversing university Geography departments I am confident that the science of manmade (anthropogenic) climate change, like that of evolution, is in no way conclusive. What we know about our own planet is far exceeded by the amount that we do not know. But you cannot tell this from the green lobby’s assertion to the general public that “The science is clear: It is understood that we are facing an unprecedented global emergency…of our own making.”3
The green narrative of climate change, upon closer inspection, therefore begins to look rather religious: requiring adherence to a core set of doctrines about humanity, the world and the future, which must be taken on faith because there is no conclusive proof.
Those who accept these doctrines, apply them to their lives and proselytise others to do likewise are considered virtuous, while those who doubt or dissent are branded heretics. The ultimate insult these days, second only to being dubbed ‘homophobic’ or ‘Islamophobic’, is to be branded a ‘climate-sceptic’.4
Radical Discipleship
But the green articles of faith do not end with this narrative about climate change. They encompass an entire worldview on life, the universe and everything, one with uncannily biblical overtones.
Let’s start with the green myth of Edenic bliss, in which primeval ‘nature’ (note, not ‘Creation’) is romanticised as humanity’s a priori life-source. Then ensues the Fall, or the sins of the Industrial Revolution. Then comes the heavy warning of fiery judgment (witness protest posters declaring “the end is nigh!”), with a list of impending disasters that reads like Matthew 24 but without any concern for divine judgment or personal responsibility towards a holy God.
Finally, the green lobby has its own covenants – the Paris Agreement notoriously reneged on by President Trump, for instance – and its own gospel of redemption, requiring repentance and penance from every individual and every nation, to atone for their carbon sins.
This new religion requires no small amount of sacrifice: only the complete renunciation of the ‘ways of the world’, or Western culture, which has evolved around mass fossil fuel usage. In this schema, anarchy is virtuous: a righteous uprising of the people against the powerful and corrupt in government and industry. No sacrifice is too great to avert the impending ecological catastrophe, and no means of protest is ultimately out of bounds (despite the commitment of April’s XR protestors to non-violence).
The green articles of faith encompass an entire worldview on life, the universe and everything – one with uncannily biblical overtones.
Not About the Climate
I could go on, but you get the point: the green movement is more than a campaign: it is a quasi-religious framework for understanding the world and man’s place within it. I believe it is fast becoming Britain’s new religion, purportedly uniting people from ‘all walks of life’ (so XR claims), but appealing particularly to those of a pantheistic, universe-worshipping disposition (ironically, given its supposed basis in rational science).5,6
Extinction Rebellion, which plays a lot on the language of rebellion as part of its campaign. See Photo Credits.Other commentators have picked up on this; it’s not a new claim to make. But many grassroots supporters, Christians undoubtedly included, are not aware of it. Neither are they aware that underneath the movement’s apparent concern for climate change lies a deeper rebellion against Christianity.
The engines of the Western green lobby were fired in the 1960s/70s, alongside a host of other counter-cultural, ‘progressive’ movements like feminism, pacifism, social justice, LGBTQ+ ideology and radical socialism. These all share a general disdain for the 3 ‘Cs’: Western civilisation, capitalism and Christianity.
Core XR activist Stuart Basden admits that the XR movement “isn’t about the climate” but about undoing the “toxic system” of European civilisation, which he deems a racist, colonialist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ+ (etc) endeavour.7 He openly acknowledges the roots of the radical green lobby in a morally relativist, radically Marxist, neo-pagan worldview, which considers Western civilisation (and, thus, its Judeo-Christian underpinnings) as the ultimate evil.8
In other words, much of the green lobby is built on and propelled by fundamentally anti-Christian sentiment. It is neither founded upon, nor checked by, scriptural principles. It is therefore both idolatrous and dangerously anarchic.
Much of the green lobby is built on and propelled by fundamentally anti-Christian sentiment.
Case Study: Population Control
By way of example, because the green lobby as a whole does not recognise God or his creational order, neither does it recognise man as having any kind of special place in the world. In fact, it actually positions humanity as earth’s central problem. Accordingly, one of the major themes of radical green activists has long been population control.9
In Genesis, God commanded humans to “increase and multiply” and to “fill the earth and subdue it”. Scripture counts children as blessings from the Lord; biblically humans are the pinnacle of God’s Creation, each soul precious in his sight. This contrasts atheistic/pagan environmentalism, which conceives of humans as chance products of the ‘natural’ world with no inherent dignity or worth, and no right to assume authority over any part of it. Quite the opposite in fact: we ought to subordinate ourselves to the greater good of ‘nature’.
Hence, green activists will protest the spilled blood of rabbits and rats, but not that of unborn children.10 In fact, many also have no qualms campaigning for population control, which in reality means life-demeaning, destructive practices like forced sterilisation, abortion, starvation and euthanasia.
Our Mandate
In saying these things, I am not arguing for animal testing, nor against the realities of environmental degradation; nor am I commenting on anthropogenic climate change (though I am well aware that some Christians deem it a conspiracy to pave the way for a one-world government). As Christians, we have a God-given mandate to care for the world. We are, biblically speaking, stewards, or caretakers. Historically, believers have led the way in showing compassion for other parts of Creation.11
The problem comes when well-meaning Christians, who want to play their part in stewarding Creation well, end up being swept along with what is effectively a new pagan religion for the postmodern age, imbibing its values and beliefs even when they conflict with Scripture. Believers must walk a more prayerful path, striving to care for our environment without yoking ourselves unevenly with the green worldview, which ignores the sinful condition of the human heart and erases the eventual prospect of facing a holy God.
Believers must walk a prayerful path, caring for the environment without yoking ourselves unevenly with the green worldview.
It is only Scripture that can channel care for Creation properly, such that we not only look after it, but also apply good moral principles in our approach to its protection. Ultimately, only God’s word can afford us true perspective on the destiny of Creation, the coming judgment and the one hope of salvation: the Cross of Jesus Christ.
It is these things which Christians must be proclaiming and defending, not only for the sake of the ‘natural’ world, but for the many souls in danger of being subsumed into a new national (even global) religion. The postmodern paganism of the green lobby is anti-God, anti-human and antithetical to Scripture. It is far more dangerous than most realise.
Notes
1 Christian Today, 27 April 2019.
2 The term ‘climate change’ has generally replaced that of ‘global warming’ in public discourse as it has been recognised that despite the thesis of global warming, that manmade fossil fuel emissions are leading to an undesirable global temperature rise, the outcome may not be a uniform warming all over the world.
3 Extinction Rebellion website, retrieved 2 May 2019.
4 As Melanie Phillips frequently points out, this authoritarian, fundamentalist streak is an important sign that what we are dealing with here is not objective fact, but an ideology: a normative agenda of ideas and values rooted more in belief than fact.
5 Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gill Badbrook is a self-confessed pagan spiritualist who birthed the movement using psychedelic medicine and describes receiving ‘codes for social change’ by praying to the universe. Listen to her story in ‘Emerge’, a podcast with Daniel Thorson, 11 December 2018. The clashing of science with pagan myth in the green lobby is discussed by Melanie Phillips in her book The World Turned Upside-Down, and encapsulated by James Lovelock’s seminal environmentalist book Gaia, which conceives of the globe as a divine ecosystem, drawing on the Greek concept of a Mother Earth goddess.
6 So claims Extinction Rebellion. However, the movement does remain predominantly middle class, with a notable lack of concern for how stringent climate change measures might affect the poor.
7 Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate. Medium, 10 January 2019.
8 As James Delingpole expresses rather more light-heartedly in this week’s Spectator: “Scratch any greenie and what you’ll invariably find underneath is just another whiny, misanthropic, anti-capitalist Malthusian who sees the natural world less as a source of joy and wonder than as an excuse to remind humans what a terrible, destructive blight on the planet we all are.” The Spectator, 4 May 2019, p24.
9 The world’s population has burgeoned since the Industrial Revolution, but modern technology has kept pace with this growth. Had resources been shared properly and the environment cared for wisely, we might well have avoided much of the famine and degradation that occurred through the 20th Century.
10 This tendency was shared by the Nazis, who championed nature worship, conservation and veganism but disdained human life. It is the abiding theme of paganism through history, being the same Canaanite practice of subordinating human life to the worship of wood and stone, as this week’s Jeremiah study details.
11 William Wilberforce, for example, though best known for his contributions towards Britain’s abolition of slavery, also founded the RSPCA, the world’s first animal welfare charity.
