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Christianity and Climategate

by Christian Huebner 

Once in law school, I invited a well-known evangelical lobbyist to address a joint meeting of our Christian fellowship and environmental law groups. At the time, our guest had achieved minor celebrity status promoting what he called “Creation Care,” which linked ideas of Christian stewardship with the global warming movement.

I thought his speech was a disappointment, a disorganized scattershot of Bible quotations and global warming talking points. As best I could understand, his point was that Scripture proved Christians didn’t have to be stodgy right-wing polluters. In fact, they should adopt banner of the global warming agenda under the sign of the Cross. There was also a heavy overlay of the politics of the moment – evangelical Christians weary of associating with Bush Republicanism, and left-leaning greens glad for converts to the cause.

I left that evening feeling that if there was anything to be said for Christian environmentalism, it must be something more than this mixture of politics and slogans.

I’ve thought about that speech again recently, in the wake of the phenomenon known as “Climategate.”  For those who haven’t followed the story, Climategate refers to the large cache of emails and information hacked from the server of a leading climate research center. In some of these emails, climate researchers discuss fudging data, withholding information and blackballing skeptics of the global warming movement. More recently, the research center also admitted that it threw out much of the raw data that underlay its work.

All of this has caused quite a stir.  Supporters of the global warming movement have been quick to dismiss the significance of the emails, while skeptics have claimed a smoking gun on the whole climate change agenda.

My interest here, though, is not to debate the science behind the global warming movement. Nor do I think that’s what the Climategate furor is entirely about, either.

At a deeper level, what Climategate has done is offer a foothold to skeptics who have long sensed that, at its root, the appeal of the global warming movement is not based upon the force of empirical science, but something far more persuasive: it feeds our human longing for meaning.

Sometimes, this is acknowledged openly. Two years ago, a group of international environmental activists met to discuss the future of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP).  After their discussion, they concluded that the most important key to the success of UNEP was “narrative”—that is, the overarching story that provides the context and reason for our actions.  “The environment,” they explained, “should compete with religion as the only compelling value-based narrative available to humanity.”

The global warming movement offers its adherents meaning in life by offering a narrative of the richest sort: a great and serious problem (the destruction of the earth) and a corresponding mission (to save the earth).  The narrative is both individual and universal. 

At its extreme, this narrative can become a kind of neo-pantheism – white-coated scientists for a priest class, glossy nature films for iconography, carbon-footprint minimizing for ritual disciplines, and hiking (the ubiquitous symbol of entering into oneness with the earth) as its worship.

But in some ways the environmentalist narrative also resonates with the Christian narrative: the great problem of sin, and Christ’s great commission to redeem the whole world. This should not come as a surprise. Scripture and Tradition recognize that pre-Christian societies were rife with images of Christ; one would expect today’s pantheism to be similar, if indeed Christ is the Word, the organizing principle of the universe “in [whom] all things were created . . . and in [whom] all things hold together.”

How then, do we properly relate the Christian and environmental narratives?  Pope Benedict XVI recently outlined an intriguing solution in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate.

Benedict’s point is that the proper care and use of the environment is intimately connected with the proper care of the human person. “The book of nature is one and indivisible,” he writes, “it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other.”

Excessive emphasis on “the environment,” especially in an unreal, idealized way, can lead to anti-humanism.  We see this in some strands of environmentalism, a kind of horror at further change and development – as if to say, “humans have done enough damage already; our influence should go no further.”

The counterpoint to anti-humanism, of course, is a brutal, strip mining mentality.  In the aim for “total technical domination over nature,” Benedict suggests, we ignore the balance of nature and the internal “grammar” of its Creator. This error is also due to a flawed view of the human person – one that says humanity should aspire no further than scraping for every available bit of material satisfaction.

True environmentalism then, says Benedict, is simply the way dignified people naturally treat their environment; not as deity, not as a junkyard, but as the setting for becoming who they were made to become. So if you get the nature of the human person right, you get everything else right, too.

That’s a lot more to chew on than politics and slogans.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)