What the Church can learn from Just Stop Oil
Climate activism may be a new religion, writes George Pitcher, but maybe they're being faithful
Just as the more strident atheists have been accused of forming their own religion, so we’re becoming accustomed to a new religiosity among climate-change activists. Calling them the green movement (not to be confused with the Green Movement reformers of Iran) lends them less of the character of a political ideology than a re-emergent pagan cult.
The New Atheists who emerged in the new millennium had their high priests in the late Christopher Hitchens and Professor Richard Dawkins. They looked forward to a faith-free nirvana, a promised land envisioned in John Lennon’s hymn to secular heaven, Imagine, future generations of children liberated from the jackboot of religious oppression.
Now, religious expression (it’s argued) finds its ideology in the existential environmental threat to humanity. The greens have found their prophetic voices in the estimable George Monbiot and Greta Thunberg.
Threatened apocalypse
They have their threatened apocalypse in humanity’s self-destruction, though their own brand of eschatology does appear very much to resemble the sandwich-board wearing prophets of doom in city centres of yesteryear, with “The End of The World Is Nigh” now replaced with “[fill in number here] Days to Save the Planet”.
The global-warming faithful have their own iconography for worship too, from wind farms to carbon footprints, their own version of evil satanic forces in the shape of fossil fuel multinationals and a vision of an Armageddon in which these powers of darkness must be defeated if we are to be saved.
If you think this is going a bit far, just watch any responses to the paragraphs above, here or on social media. They will have all the self-righteous piety of true believers taking on the heretics.
Inherent fault
There is, admittedly, an inherent fault in stating these observations. Militant atheists might ridicule religious beliefs while developing their own. And environmentalists may unconsciously emulate religious practice. But it ill-behoves those of us with theistic faith to censure that.
Otherwise we set ourselves something of a bear-trap, in which our argument develops like this: Look, they’re making their arguments like people of religion, so obviously they must be talking nonsense… oh wait.
We who confess a religious faith might like to attend to the beam in our own eyes before identifying the mote in theirs.
Tolerance and inclusion
That’s not really an observation, though, that I think is very helpful in itself. Where I think there are more fruitful lessons to be taken from the religious fervour of atheism and environmentalism is less in pointing at their idolatries and much more in exploring religious tolerance and inclusion.
The polarising nature of atomised social media is well documented for promoting the presumption that if you’re not with me you’re against me. But the Church didn’t need social media to do that for the two millennia before such platforms were invented.
Almost immediately, in historical terms, after the death and resurrection of the Christ, the argument was on as to who could or couldn’t be Christians (as we much later called ourselves) – whether it was a movement for Jews (Peter) or for all gentiles (Paul).
In the club
And, before we run away with the idea that St Paul is thus the hero of history, for all his pluralism he was very specific about who could be in the club and how they should behave when they were in it. Just ask the women.
Our legacy from those first disciples shows depressingly how little we’ve improved. If anything, we’ve got worse. Let me offer the briefest buffet of tasty, divisive Anglican opinion of the day: You can’t be a priest because you’re a woman. You can’t be a married priest because you’re gay. You two can’t get married in church because you’re the same sex. You can’t be a church if you don’t stand up for trans rights.
And that’s just sex and sexuality. Less visibly, there are tides and subtle undercurrents. I’m struck by how we fetishise religious denomination. For example: I need to be somewhere with a more Catholic tradition. Or: Jesus only speaks to me through the Word.
Surprise Conservative victory
As I say, motes and beams. But, beyond that, what can we (and the atheists) learn from environmental campaigners? For a start, we could behave a bit less like party politicos after the Uxbridge bye-election, where a proposed ultra-low carbon emissions policy delivered a surprise Conservative victory.
For goodness sake, a leading Tory called Labour “the political wing of Just Stop Oil”. We should all agree that there are greater issues at stake here than winning a few votes.
The final point is to witness how a counter-demonstration against Just Stop Oil this week was greeted. Two activists – somewhat posh boys, who may or may not have been petrolheads, with a slightly ruder slogan that “Just Stop It” – flew loud rape alarms on helium balloons into the JSO gathering so they couldn’t hear themselves think.
JSO sportingly described the disruption of their banquet as “impeccable action design” which “we very much enjoyed” and called it “a perfect metaphor for the urgency of the climate crisis”.
Welcoming your enemies, or those who disagree with you, was meant to be our idea. Maybe we – atheists and faithful alike – can learn something here from the climate cultists.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest