Climate activists repel us with their religious fervour
Violence at Christian councils is nothing new, writes George Pitcher, but COP26 shouldn't follow their example
There’s a legend that at the First Council of Nicaea, in the spring of 325, a debate became so heated that Nicholas of Myra punched the radical Alexandrian priest Arius in the gob. St Nicholas was the prototype for Santa Claus, which presents the slightly uncomfortable possibility that, as council chair, the Holy Roman Emperor Constantine the Great was telling Father Christmas to “leave ‘im, Nick, ‘e’s not werf it.” Not one to tell the children at the crib service, perhaps.
The row was over what became known as the Arian heresy. It’s not worth detaining you here over what that was all about. It makes about as much difference today that it was about Jesus Christ being of one essence with his Father, begotten not made, as it would if Arius had just spilt Bishop Alexander’s beer or been lookin’ at St Nicholas’s bird, frankly.
Egg-thrower
But it’s worth clocking that the tradition of emotions running high at such conferences had been around for a long time – getting on for two millennia in fact – before John Prescott chinned an egg-thrower at a Labour Party rally. Though it would be good to know whether eggs were thrown at the Council of Nicaea.
It was that dust-up that set the tone for the Christian Church’s summits. A few years later, at the Council of Constantinople, they tried to consecrate Maximus the Cynic as bishop of that city (for reasons again too boring to go into now) in the cathedral. A fight broke out and the service had to be completed in a local flautist’s tenement - it’s not recorded whether he was asked to play.
The 16th-century Council of Trent was delayed because Charles V’s troops had sacked papal Rome - “raping, killing, burning, stealing, the like had not been seen since the Vandals".
All this is by way of saying that there’s nothing like a symposium of those committed to world peace for kicking off extreme violence. Anyone who has attended a General Synod meeting of the Church of England can feel that undercurrent.
The secular world should perhaps do better. But the portents aren’t good. The United Nations’ climate-change conference, COP26, is scheduled for early November in Glasgow. This should be a model for international collaboration and commitment to the common good – shouldn’t it? But it’s shaping up to be something of a ruck too.
Dragged off motorways
Already, middle-aged men and women, plus a vicar who has sewn his lips together, have tried, if not to get run-over by trucks exactly, then at least to get dragged off British motorways and locked up. All this under the banner of “Insulate Britain”, which may be the least inspiring rallying call since Martin Luther’s “justification by faith alone”. Elsewhere, other women have demonstrated with placards pleading for the Government not to kill their babies.
Shades of Herod’s slaughter of the first-born, as well as martyrdom, though someone has yet to be canonised for super-glueing themselves to tarmac.
It’s a commonplace to claim that climate-change has grown into a modern religion. Zealotry is certainly apparent on the M25 and we can be confident that it will be in Glasgow as it was at the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople and Trent.
And it’s true that prime minister Boris Johnson has lately been exhibiting all the zealotry of the convert, in his transformation from the kind of Trumpian figure who would say that there’s no global warming because it’s snowing, to a new eco-warrior who is calling for “humanity to grow up” on carbon emissions.
The most obvious difference between COP26 and church authorities that call for heretics to be burned at the stake is that Warmists – to try to give them a religious cult name – have the science on their side. Few of a truly religious fervour can claim the same since the Enlightenment.
Self-righteous millennials
But it’s nevertheless true that fanaticism can present the same symptoms, whether religious or secular. This may partly be the polarising effect of social media. Or it may be the self-righteousness of millennials with renewable wind in their sails (though Insulate Britain look more like the generation who take off their cardi to appreciate the difference).
Sceptics of global warming are described as “climate deniers” in a deliberate echo of Holocaust denial. And recently Nick Cohen wrote that climate deniers are no better than those who resisted the abolition of the slave trade.
I admire Nick’s writing and enjoy his company when we’ve met. He may be right that one day we’ll condemn those who have claimed that mean global temperatures have been falling in recent decades in the same breath and with the same fervour as those who packed human beings into cargo ships and threw them overboard when they became economically devalued. But that’s not the point here, which is that to make this kind of assimilation is tactically ineffective.
Personal safety
Lord Lawson, probably one of the more high-profile climate sceptics and as Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor no stranger to robust debate, has said that “I have never in my life experienced the extremes of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification which I – along with other dissenters, of course – have received for my views on global warming and global warming policies.”
I doubt he’ll be in Glasgow in November, for reasons of personal safety. But there we have it – what hope do we have of bringing the People’s Republic of China into a compatible global effort collectively to reduce carbon emissions to net zero if those who are leading those ambitions can’t even engage with Nigel Lawson?
It’s usually religious fundamentalism that excludes any kind of engagement with those of a different opinion or disposition. But these days we can simply choose whether to hold to religious tenets of faith or not, without fear of literal martyrdom.
Not so with the more hard-line of the environmentalists’ faith leaders. In that respect, one fears for any heretics who turn up in Glasgow for COP26. Excommunication would be the best they could hope for.
Arguably, it wouldn’t matter if this was just about religion. But, with the future of the planet itself at stake rather than “just” the salvation of humankind, Johnson may be more right than he realises when he says that it’s time for humanity to grow up.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest