The Climate Religion Fills the Void Left by Christianity
"The need for religion has not extinguished today; it is simply directed towards a different subject."
Protestant Church Calls for Participation in Climate Strike
"The Time to Act is Now"
One of the most important lesson the world hasn’t learned from the horrors of the 20th century, is the extreme danger of totalitarian political religions that form out of mass psychoses, be they secular, like socialism (in all its forms) or theist, like Islam. Like it or not, humans are religious creatures and are prone to fall for the intoxicating lure of mass movements. Critical thinkers who can escape this phenomenon are few and far between. Many countries, like my native Canada, are effectively woke theocracies led by a few illuminated high priests who impose their political religion from on high. I hope this piece will add to the discussion regarding the dangers we are facing.
The following is our translation of an important essay by Hannah Bethke published in the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag, on December 10th 2023.
The original article in German can be accessed here.
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The Climate Religion Fills the Void Left by Christianity
by Hannah Bethke
The climate movement exhibits many characteristics of a religious community, including asceticism, atonement, and prohibitions. At the same time, churches are losing their significance. A historian explains the new form of selling indulgences and speaks of an "eco-debt industry."
While the Church continues to lose importance, a new faith has been gaining popularity in recent years: the climate religion. This synonym for the climate movement is not without reason.
In 2019, when Fridays for Future was rapidly gaining reach, and the antisemitism scandal of the movement was not yet foreseeable, Heiner Koch, the Catholic Archbishop of Berlin, remarked, "The Friday demonstrations remind me a little of the biblical scene of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem." He did not want to turn Greta Thunberg, the icon of the movement, into a "female messiah," as Koch stated on RBB radio, but he believed that society needed "real prophets" from time to time.
On the Protestant side, the then council chairman of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, warned against sacralizing Greta, but the Protestant bishop Christian Stäblein also said that Greta Thunberg had “something prophetic”. Quite a few even spoke of a “revival movement”.
The trend toward the ecologicalization of theology continues to this day. Especially the Protestant Church, but also parts of the Catholic Church, have made climate protection one of their central themes, as if they no longer knew where to place their faith. One could even say that there is an interdependence between the de-churching of the Church and the deification of the climate movement.
"The churches are no longer seen today as mediators of transcendental truth," says historian Volker Reinhardt in an interview with WELT AM SONNTAG. However, this does not mean that religion has disappeared; it has merely shifted. Reinhardt is convinced that the vast majority of people need something like a transcendent anchor. Instead of God and the Church, the glorification of nature has taken their place.
The historian, who teaches at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, points out that this actually departs from the basis of Christianity: "Man damaged his nature and nature as a whole when he rebelled against God in paradise. According to Christian theory, this original sin marks the beginning of the history of sinful humanity." But in today's interpretation, nature is absolved of its sinfulness: "In this sense, a purification of Christianity has taken place," says Reinhardt.
At the same time, Christian leitmotifs continue to influence the handling of current issues. The discussion about climate protection is permeated with themes of guilt and repentance: individuals blame themselves for environmental destruction, confess publicly, show remorse, make amends through donations to environmental projects, evangelize, and publicly criticize others. Reinhardt refers to this as a new form of indulgence trading, a veritable "eco-debt industry." He explains, "I'm trying to understand how a stripped-down Christianity, detached from its original theological dogmas, continues to guide and determine us."
A Desire for Power Among Climate Activists
The diagnosis that various forms of substitute religions are emerging from the erosion of faith in the secularized world is not new. At the height of the environmental movement, even more radical interpretations could be derived from it.
Around 30 years ago, psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter wrote that the loss of trust in God had led to an "unbridled urge for control" through which people were destroying the environment and ultimately themselves. In his book "The God Complex," he sees the cause of the Western society's "urge for technical omnipotence" in its underlying “horror at an unbearable loss and powerlessness in the world”.
Richter here follows a critical perspective on growth, which was typical of his time. From this perspective, environmental protection is not an expression of religious elevation but, on the contrary, a correction of the widespread "omnipotence delusion."
Today, the situation is exactly the opposite: Climate activists themselves are overcome by a form of delusion of omnipotence, a sense of empowerment to reshape the world according to their premises, regardless of the consequences. From this perspective, the need for religion has not extinguished today; it is simply directed towards a different subject.
So, does the climate movement also contain underlying Christian motives, as historian Volker Reinhardt suggests? Johann Hinrich Claussen is skeptical. He is a theologian and cultural commissioner of the EKD. He considers the term "climate religion" to be polemical, intended to disqualify the climate movement, as if there were no scientific basis for the protest. "One must take the self-perception of the actors seriously, which is largely not religious," Claussen says in conversation with this newspaper. "If you label something as a religion," the theologian continues, "you enter into a complex hermeneutical project." He does not see the criteria for this being met in this strongly secularized movement.
However, it is debatable whether, especially with its statements about the climate movement, the Protestant Church is not contributing to the mixing of politics and religion. "It is always the task of evangelical Christians to engage politically," Claussen asserts. "We live in this world and should take responsibility for the polis." Climate protection is a crucial issue for the future: "I don't see why Christians should not express their opinions on this." The accusation that the Church is too political is not new. It has been heard since the 1970s when various political movements formed, including evangelical Christians: the peace movement, protests against nuclear power, and the environmental movement. The current debate is not entirely new; it is just a new application.
However, the fact that the politicization of the Church began earlier does not weaken the argument against an excessive mixing of these spheres. The sacralization of political movements and ideologies can lead to fanaticism and intolerance, as current examples show. In the climate movement, this is particularly evident in the illegal protests of the "Last Generation," which fixate on catastrophic visions as if in an apocalypse.
And the identity politics wanderings of "woke" groups, who attempt to regulate the world down to the use of individual words and divide it into "good" and "evil," bear eloquent testimony to this. This quasi-religious elevation of political views does not serve the cause well: neither does climate protection benefit from it, nor does the Church gain acceptance by interfering in political matters.
For those unfamiliar with the way it is set up, both the Catholic and Protestant Church in Germany are tax-financed. In 2023 the Catholics received 6.8bn Euros, the Protestants 6.2bn. So while they are technically not state churches like the Anglican Church in Great Britain, they serve in praxis as amplifiers of state power.
The climate religion is similar to a pagan nature worshipping religion that predated monotheism. It’s religious but not monotheistic.
The Enlightenment pushed back on religion in the public square, casting doubt on whether religious ideas ought to decide public policy. The climate movement circumvents the title of religion and aims to control society like the pre-Enlightenment church did. It avoids the many controls put into place to prevent that.