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(A quote from The Very Reverend Digger Nielson’s Faith, Ecology, and, Despair.)
The part of the Climate Trials dealing with religion needs to be understood as dealing not with religion per se, but rather as being about a specific form of modern organized religion. It might be hard to believe now, but in 20th century America a type of anti-intellectual religiosity had become a dominant force in society. It asserted its influence not because of it’s many followers, but rather because of the specific type of behaviour it encouraged. I’m talking about that unholy alliance between the old Republican Party and conservative Christianity.
Conservative politics in the USA has throughout it’s history been focused on fear of “the Other” (to use Edmund Husserl’s term). That is to say, a key part of the identity that this type of Christian had constructed for themselves involved being in opposition to people that they had expressly rejected as being “lessor”---for one reason or another. People of colour (sometimes pejoratively dismissed as “mud people”) were feared due to projected imaginings about their impact on what they chauvinistically called “real Americans”, like themselves. Paradoxically, this fear seemed to consist of a contradictory melange of ideas about how these people were “parasites” who lived off the hard work of middle-class whites (also called “job creators”), or, who drove down wages of working people (especially Asians and Hispanics). They were viewed as destroyers of community because their physical presence was deemed enough to destroy the value of one’s home. (The fact that this had become a self-fulfilling prophecy just because people believed it to be true never occurred to them.)
This opposition to the Other expanded dramatically since the 1960s as more and more categories were added to the old racial ones. Feminists, gays, environmentalists, antifa, scientists, and, socialists became new categories of unknown and profoundly misunderstood “boogiemen” that the churches were able to draw upon in order to create the feeling that parishioners were under siege by dark forces who wished to drive religion out of society, outlaw Christmas, and, brainwash their children into atheism.
As a scholar of the Gospels, who self-identifies as a follower of Jesus Christ, I find this type of thinking irreconcilaby discordant with our Saviour’s teachings. That’s because if there is one message in the New Testament, it is that the “Other” is welcome at the feast of love. God always has a place for the outsider at the table of the Lord. The Jesus of The Gospels did not hide in fear from people who were outside the pale or who were “unclean”---he socialized and ate with prostitutes, non-Jews, and, people who served the occupying power.
The point that the Climate Trials raised when they put conservative Christianity on the docket, was that it was far more conservative than it was Christian. I couldn’t agree more. When Fundamentalists read the Gospels they specifically did so like lawyers---trying to find any loophole that would allow them to continue living the life they’d always lived instead of changing it to be in harmony with the Good News.
The biggest “lesson” that people in these churches learned wasn’t to “love your enemy”, “help the poor and oppressed”, or, “turn the cheek”, but rather “do what you are told”. And what they were usually told was “vote Republican”, and, “be afraid of the Other”.
As the advocates arguing for the environment pointed out during the Climate Trials, these hidden commandments of “do what you are told” and “fear those who are different” allowed these churches---who never commanded much more than between 10 and 20% of the population---to “punch above their weight” in electoral politics. The congregants of these denominations could be relied upon to donate, volunteer, and, vote for whomever their clergy endorsed in the election. And those pastors could be reliably depended upon to support Republicans. In contrast, more liberal denominations were headed by people who actually believed in the division between Caesar and God. Those ministers not only believed that they had no right to tell people how to vote, they also knew that if they attempted to do so, they’d alienate large fractions of their flocks. The type of theology that denominations supported made their societal influence asymmetrical.
Compounding this problem was the existence of the so-called “Bible belt” in the rural South. When people thought about this area, they naively believed that there was something specific about the rural Southern USA in terms of fundamentalist religion. But in actual fact---as the advocates in the Climate Trials pointed out---conservative religious belief was at that time equal all over the continental USA’s rural areas. What was different in the South, however, was that Gerrymandering and the relative lack of large urban cities had resulted in the weight given to votes in Southern rural areas being much greater than in urban ones.
In any given electoral district a seat in the House, Senate, or Electoral College was only loosely based on the specific number of voters who lived in that district. If the population of one district was half that of another and both had equal numbers of representatives, that meant that the individual votes cast by the population in the former were twice as powerful as those in the latter.
In the United States---especially in the South---rural voters tended to have far more influence per capita than urban ones. Moreover, even if a rural voter was more power than an urban one, if the number of urban voters was sufficiently larger than that of rural ones, this disparity could be overwhelmed. In the Southern parts of the USA successful governments had allowed the disparity between urban and rural vote power to grow far more than in the North. Moreover, most of the largest cities in America aren’t in the South, but rather the North and the two coasts. This meant that the fundamentalist church---which was mostly concentrated in rural areas---had an added benefit in the South which allowed it to dominate electoral politics far more than their numbers would suggest they should have.
The worst part of this problem was the fact that the very powerful Senate was elected on the basis of two members per state, with no account being given to the population. This meant that a rural state like Wyoming (population 580,000) had the same influence as an urban state like New York (population 19.5 million). Any organization---like a fundamentalist church---that was disproportionately rural and whose members were also disproportionately willing to follow centralized political direction was bound to benefit from an electoral system that allowed this type of wild disparity to exist.
But having pointed out the above, the question still arises “Why did the fundamentalists churches become so invested in fighting against any attempt to deal with the Climate Emergency?” This gets to the theological issue that really is at the heart of this book. The Gospels, and the entire Bible for that matter, really doesn’t have much to say about the environment. At the time they were written nature could, by-and-large, pretty much take care of itself without any conscious effort by human society to protect it. Yes, there were problems such as the deforestation of the Mediterranean Basin, but there was nothing like the Climate Emergency. Even if such macro problems had emerged, there wasn’t the scientific knowledge needed to understand them. When you look at the sacred texts to find an answer about ecology, all you get is a vacuum.
There has been some talk in liberal theology about calls for people to be “stewards” of the earth. This hearkens back to Genesis 1:28’s
“And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
The problem with this position---for fundamentalists---is that there is an enormous difference between subduing and having dominion over the earth, and, the attitude of humility that the science of ecology brings to the subject, and, the reverence for nature that sustains the commitment of most environmental activists. For evangelicals, the feelings of humility and reverence may only be directed towards God---anything else smacks of paganism. And this was a key charge against the environmental movement in general: that it was fundamentally anti-Christian and neo-pagan. (Certainly there could be no room for humility and reverence for nature in the theology of “shut up and do what you are told”.)
Finding a significant void in God’s omniscience and filling this void with paganism are pretty scary prospects for fundamentalists. That’s because if you are going to live your life around an infallible sacred text, isn’t part of the infallibility it’s exhaustiveness? If you are facing an existential crisis and God doesn’t have anything to say about it, could it be that God didn’t even know about it? Liberal churches don’t face this dilemma. They see both the Bible and the Gospels as a collection of divinely inspired, but ultimately human-created texts. As such, they suffer from the same limitations inherent in any book. When something new comes along---like the Climate Emergency---it is just something new that people need to pray over and let the Holy Spirit help guide human reason (ie: science) in addressing. (Which is why they had no problem in creating and embracing a new theology around environmental “stewardship”.)
Modern science is at odds with fundamentalism of any sort. And the Climate Emergency is something that people simply can’t ignore like paleontology or cosmology. If it exists, it intrudes on people’s lives---either directly through local disasters like floods and droughts, or, indirectly through government regulations like restrictions on fossil fuel use and extraction. This requires individuals to come up with novel theological formulations---but the whole point of fundamentalism is to not think for yourself. Instead, it seeks the inerrant guidance of God as revealed in holy text and interpreted by the local ecclesiastic authority.
“Luckily” for the fundamentalist Christians, their Republican overlords had been co-opted by the fossil fuel industry who spread the message that the Climate Emergency wasn’t real. Instead, they said that it was a pseudo crisis cooked up by pagan city dwellers who wanted to destroy rural people’s way of life---which presumably consisted mostly of destroying nature in order to extract fossil fuels. This was justified theologically on the strange basis of suggesting that it is arrogant to believe that God would allow the human race to destroy the planet. They extended this viewpoint to the point where they felt that there was no sense trying to limit the filth we spread on it because that seemed to imply lack of faith in God’s ability to clean up the mess. If this sounds like a wild slander, consider the parallels between this idea and the denominations opposed to vaccinations (Dutch Calvinists), blood transfusion (Jehovah’s Witnesses), or, even modern medicine in general (Christian Science). Each of these seem to boil down to the idea that using modern medicine shows a lack of faith in God’s ability to heal any illness. The parallels in reasoning are obvious---at least to this author.
I suppose you could say that this point of view is the logical extension of fundamentalism---it goes beyond the idea that humans should thinking for themselves about issues of morality and God’s existence to the point where they should stop thinking about how to be human at all.
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I always ask for money in these posts because I think it's tremendously important that the people who can afford to pay for news and art should be reminded to do so. I love the new world of information that comes from the World Wide Web, but I think it's important to remember that the obscene amounts of money it creates for the big tech companies has to some extent been taken away from people like musicians, journalists, and, so on. These were never very well paid jobs, but an entire generation of people have had to give up their passions and find something else to do because of the "economic disruption" that professors of economics blandly describe as being "useful destruction".
Anyway, I'm not going to ask for readers to buy a subscription today. (Although feel free to do so if you want.) Instead, I'd like everyone to think about telling others about the blog. I promote it through Face Book, Twitter, Linked In, and, Instagram, but I think I've plateaued using those sites. I can only promote this thing through word of mouth, and it's important to expand my readership base if I'm going to ever make this into a viable enterprise. So if you are in some sort of discussion group---a sub-Reddit, email exchange, etc---where you think others might be interested in a post, please stick a link to the blog with a statement like "I thought this article really spoke to this issue---you might be interested too". This sort of thing dramatically increases readership.
As any salesperson will tell you, "word of mouth" is the absolute best advertisement.
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