The Rise of the Christian Gaia

“Gaia is Angry” was a popular Green slogan some years ago, and its message was later transmitted in the 2017 Jennifer Lawrence movie “Mother!”—a biblical allegory of how Man destroys God’s Creation by his careless devastation of the world’s resource and makes Mother Earth really, really, well, mother-bleeping mad. The result is global warming among many other plagues.

Or maybe not. Cinema audiences were confused by the allegorical plot, and attempts to explain it confused them further. One made it seem that God was the villain because his over-ambitious male creativity was constantly upsetting a Cosmos that Gaia’s gentle female touch might otherwise have made a little bit of heaven.

That’s the problem with allegories. They ride off furiously in all directions. Let’s get down to earth.

The Venus of Willendorf: Miss April of 22,000 B.C.

Gaia began her career as the goddess who represents the earth in Greek mythology. She was brought down from Olympus a few decades ago by the British scientist, James Lovelock, to give a divine face to his scientific definition of the Earth. Lovelock’s description of the earth is in fact a cool, rational one and it was well-summarized in the Summer 2020 issue of The New Atlantis by Joel Garreau, professor of law, culture and values at Arizona State University, as follows:

The physical components of the earth, from its atmosphere to its oceans, closely integrate with all of its living organisms to maintain climatic chemistry in a self-regulating balance ideal for the maintenance and propagation of life.

That’s a long way from seeing Gaia as the vengeful goddess seeking to punish her rape by murdering her assailants which is the admiring deep green view of her. It’s not even an attempt to personify and feminize the old-fashioned philosophy of pantheism (i.e., God consists of Everything all rolled up together) that the Victorian Scottish critic, Andrew Lang, summed up in the following verse drawn from the religion of cricket:

I am the batsman, and the bat,
I am the bowler, and the ball,
The umpire, the pavilion cat,
The roller, pitch, and stumps, and all

Lovelock’s view is a scientific analysis that treats human beings as valuable participants in nature and proposes to protect them (i.e., us)  by  geo-engineering solutions to global warming—e.g. spraying stuff into the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back into space-- of the kind we used to hear from the late Edward Teller. It’s a good thing for Lovelock that his admirers don’t read him, as both he and Garreau concede, and so don’t know that Gaia is not quite the nice progressive girl they took her for.

Plus ça change...

That is small comfort to the rest of us, however, for Gaia has escaped from her Pygmalion and now wanders around freely, accepting not only the worship of Greta Thunberg and her New Age children’s crusade but also that of senior converts from established religions who seem to believe that she’s already a Christian saint—it’s just that she hasn’t been canonized yet. That’s the culmination of a slow movement by the Christian churches to adopt more and more of the Environmentalist Creed as the Christian creed seems less and less sure of itself.

When Gaia was first presented to the world by Lovelock, there was still some theological resistance to the new secular religion of environmentalism on the grounds that it saw humans not as part and parcel of the nature that ecologists seek to defend but as a plague or “bacillus” that is a threat, maybe a mortal one, to the Earth. Christians and other critics saw Gaia worship as a kind of hostile and aggressive pantheism, and in some of the policies it advanced—notably, population control or reduction, including support for abortion as a right—as self-consciously hostile to Christianity, especially Catholicism.

That suspicion has now vanished down the memory hole of Western Christianity. A few Catholic intellectuals, theologically serious about religions that rival Christianity, continue to resist Gaia’s charms. Otherwise, however, green policies are now a main orthodoxy of the Catholic and mainstream Protestant churches, and Professor Garreau see signs that U.S. evangelicals are increasingly converting to Gaia too.

He envisages two streams in the broad overall Christian exodus to Gaia diverging from each other: the less extreme is what he calls “the greening of Christianity”; the more extreme is a Calvinism-derived “carbon fundamentalism.” The first theme is reformist and open to practical compromises that improve the world’s carbon footprint without solving all climate problems; the second is a totalist approach that subordinates everything to the emergency need for net-zero carbon reduction. It is authoritarian in its politics, punitive towards those who disagree with it, aka mortal sinners, and has no provisions for compromise with the Devil or even for forgiving those who repent.

(It’s worth noting here that Andrew Sullivan has just written a column arguing that if Republicans were to adopt a mix of climate solutions—notably, nuclear power plus innovative new clean energy technologies—it would have a good chance of solidifying its support among electoral groups that closely resemble Christians who have undergone “greening.”  So we're talking electoral politics here as well as faith-based policy solutions.)

Professor Garreau makes a persuasive and reasonable case, and I’m inclined to agree with eighty percent of it. But the twenty percent on which we differ is also worth examining. It comes down to three things:  (a) are these two streams of Christian environmentalism really diverging? (b) does religious environmentalism develop a mistaken dogmatism unsuited to secular controversies? And (c) do the newly green Christian inevitably abandon Christian perspectives and Christian language when they are discussing climate change.

Queen of the May.

First, it’s my impression from reading Christian apologetics on the environment that these two “new traditions” are not so much diverging as that carbon fundamentalists are gradually gaining influence and leadership over the newly-Green Christians (maybe born-again environmentalists?) Consider, for instance, a recent survey of Anglican beliefs on public policy, Rotting from the Head: Radical Progressive Attitudes and the Church of England,  from the UK think-tank Civitas, which consists largely of quotations from Anglican  sources on how they are committing to Green and other progressive causes . It’s summed by one statistic:

Over 70 percent of all Dioceses (71 percent) appoint clergy who promote climate activist warnings and calls for recognition of the ‘climate emergency.’

But that statistic does not convey the radical character of what a large majority of Anglican bishops and priests are advocating: they assume the truth of the most extreme forecasts of climate emergency, propose the most extreme solutions to it with no serious consideration of their impact on human life and well-being plus no serious consideration of trade-offs, and urge support for civil disobedience by Extinction Rebellion and other social activists on the grounds that the “climate emergency” is too important to be left to democratic decision-making.

In other words, the carbon fundamentalists are leading their moderate religious allies towards the most extreme rhetoric and policies of a form of environmentalism that is utopian, pessimistic, authoritarian, and anti-democratic. That's a very bad fit with most of the Christian message and as a result it produces a number of perverse effects.

One is the second difference I sense with Garreau: that many Christians converted to Gaia embrace global solutions which take little or no account of their overall impact on people. In particular, as Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, they violate the commonsense rule that the costs of a remedy for climate change should not be higher than the costs of climate change itself. When we cease to apply such tests to climate policy, we're not doing what Christ wants; We're substituting moral vanity for thought. Such broad-brush errors are not, of course, confined to Anglicans.

Pope Francis won’t be at the U.N. Climate Change COP26 conference in Glasgow—almost certainly for medical reasons—but he will be there in spirit. Only two weeks before it opened, he made a series of demands upon the world “In the Name of God” which began with a request to “the great extractive industries–mining, oil, forestry, real estate, agribusiness–to stop destroying forests, wetlands and mountains, to stop polluting rivers and seas . . . “ and in short to stop destroying the environment for their business.

Freeze to death.

Since Pope Francis is known for deploying ambiguity in argument, we can legitimately ask what he means here. If his meaning is that mining companies should clean up after their activities, he is amply justified. If he means that they should treat the environment in general, including local peoples, with respect, ditto. But if he wants an end to mining fossil fuels asap, as some have interpreted his words, then we must point out that today fossil fuels provide eighty-five percent of the energy for the world, that there is no possibility they can be phased out in anything like the near future, and that if they were to be phased out prematurely, the poor and marginalized in all countries would suffer dreadfully in ways for which neither taxpayers nor “corporations” could possibly compensate them.

That's something that Catholics in particular must consider seriously. Catholic social teaching is blend of moral principles on which the Pope is an authority and practical secular knowledge which is the province of the layman. That’s why its judgments tend to be balanced and to seek to reconcile conflicting legitimate interests. That is not the spirit in which Christianity’s carbon fundamentalists approach climate policy or reform in general. In their moralistic zeal to punish what they see as evil, they risk destroying the huge gains in living standards—several billion Asians lifted into the global middle class since 1989—that are rooted in cheap carbon energy. That fierce spirit has spread to all of Gaia’s new Christian converts. But they don’t know what they do.

And, finally, that spirit is reflected in the language that Christian preachers too often use in debates on the environment. Simply look through the twenty-seven pages of Rotting from the Head devoted to statements by Anglican bishops and priests and you find  very few traditionally Christian terms justifying their radical green demands. Their rhetoric is drawn largely from the radical progressive wing of climate Christianity which is itself shaped by a punitive godless Calvinism.

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There are very occasional references to Christian stewardship or God’s Creation—and that’s it. Interestingly, there are even fewer rebukes to radical Green attacks on human beings as a plague on the planet. And most interestingly of all, there are many fire-and-brimstone punishments threatened to polluters, “deniers,” and the merely uninterested. Except for the elect in Extinction Rebellion, we are all guilty.

But punishments imposed by Whom? God is no longer allowed by progressive Christianity to threaten such things. It seems that for a satisfying denouement we’ll have to rely upon an “Angry Gaia." And unfortunately, as we have seen, Gaia’s thunderbolts are more likely to strike the sheep than the goats.

Pelosi's Delusion: Catholics Can be Pro-Choice

No doubt the fires of Hell burned a little warmer and brighter at the Vatican this weekend as Pope Francis met with U.S. speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

The geriatric speaker, 81, and the daughter of a mobbed-up family of Baltimore politicians whose brother Franklin D. Roosevelt d'Alesandra was once arrested for statutory rape, and of course skated on both that charge and another for perjury, was lucky in her choice of popes. Although Francis has called abortion "murder," as the Church has long taught, he has also resisted the notion of some American bishops to deny the sacrament of communion to nominally Catholic politicians who support it.

Indeed, Pelosi was recently criticized by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, her place of residence, after the Speaker claimed to be a devout Catholic who supports a woman’s right to have an abortion.

No one can claim to be a devout Catholic and condone the killing of innocent human life, let alone have the government pay for it,The right to life is a  fundamental—the most fundamental—human right, and Catholics do not oppose fundamental human rights. To use the smokescreen of abortion as an issue of health and fairness to poor women is the epitome of hypocrisy: what about the health of the baby being killed? What about giving poor women real choice, so they are supported in choosing life? This would give them fairness and equality to women of means, who can afford to bring a child into the world.

There are really three distinct ways to look at human life. One, that human life is unique and involves a God-given soul that is given to each person at the moment of conception. Anyone who believes that cannot and should not support abortion in any way. If you are of this frame of mind, then no one has a “right” to an abortion any more than any person has a “right” to blow away an annoying two-year-old.

We should certainly be tolerant of women who choose abortion, as we should be tolerant of all sinners since, after all, we  too are sinners. But to love the sinner does not mean one should approve of the sin.

Why is this man smiling?

The second way to look at human life is to say that we are uncertain of its significance. Perhaps it is unique and perhaps it involves a soul. Perhaps it is neither. Perhaps one applies, but not the other. We simply do not know and it is up to each person to figure out what he or she believes.

This is of course the classic path that justifies the legality of abortion. Since people can disagree about when human life begins and what makes human life different, each prospective mother should be able to make a choice that is consistent with her beliefs.

Speaker Pelosi is free to be an advocate of this line of thinking, but she needs to be crystal clear that to a Catholic – specifically the “devout Catholic” she claims to be – this reasoning is completely and unalterably inconsistent with the Catholic faith. It is as inconsistent as claiming to be a devout Catholic who supports a communicant’s “right” sell the Eucharist to devil-worshipers.

Catholics believe some things are sacred, such as the Eucharist and human life from the moment of conception. There is no “wiggle room” that allows us to say its all right for someone to abuse or destroy what is sacred.

It is worth noting that the original Roe v. Wade decision recognized that medical advances would make the life of a fetus outside the womb more and more possible at earlier and earlier stages of pregnancy as medical science advanced. Thus the “trimester formula” was part of the decision: no abortions allowed in the third trimester, abortions possible but limited in the second trimester, and abortions allowed in the first trimester. (And yes, I’m over-simplifying, but this is a column, not a legal treatise).

So why are late term abortions routinely performed? Because there were two escape clauses incorporated in Roe: 1) the court said that a fetus is not a person and thus not entitled to protection under the 14th amendment (thanks Potter Stewart), and 2) if the health of the mother was at stake, then abortions could happen at any time. In a subsequent decision the court decided that the “health of the mother” essentially included her emotional state, ergo if being pregnant made a woman sad, she could have an abortion whenever she wants, ergo any woman can have an abortion whenever she wants.

There is third way to look at human life: that it is neither unique nor involves a soul. It is a mere accident of nature. This is the depressing view of the atheist, a materialistic doctrine that values human life no more than that of a rat or a stalk of corn. It holds that we blinked into existence for our short stay in the material world and will blink out of it, never to manifest any other form of existence. We just disappear.

You can say that again.

This mindset not only finds abortion a perfectly reasonable proposition, it eventually leads to the horrors of eugenics and euthanasia. Indeed, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was primarily interested in using birth control as a means to prevent the spread of what she considered to be “mongrel races” like our black- and yellow-skinned brothers and sisters. It is an evil way of thinking that spawns systems like Nazism and Communism.

As a Catholic, I fully recognize the problems my church has had and the mistakes that it has made. It is a human institution and human beings are fallible. But there is no mistaking the Catholic view that abortion is the taking of a human life and no Catholic should support it. Pelosi, like Joe Biden -- another nominal Catholic -- needs to pick a lane.

Wanted: a Modern Martin Luther

When Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the Castle Church door at Wittenberg in 1517, he was committing an act of resistance against the Deep State of the day. The Holy Roman Empire (“neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire” snarked the atheist Voltaire, inaccurately), was broke and selling Get Out Of Jail Early cards, “indulgences,” which, for a fee, reduced the buyer's time in Purgatory.

Which is exactly what today’s Deep State is doing with their Green Energy Bull.

Call it the New World Order, the UniParty, the U.N., the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, or the global political establishment, it is so morally and spiritually bankrupt that it's selling Green Agenda indulgences and convincing people conditioned by 50 years of the Democrats’ “believe[ing] truth over facts” to buy them.

The intent of the buyers and sellers is the same as in the sixteenth century: preservation of the ruling establishment.

The Deep State in Luther’s day was trying to hold on to the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church rather than allowing the individual to read his Bible and reach God in his own way -- the foundation of northern European Protestantism.

Take that!

The Deep State today is trying to usurp global political power from independent, individual nation-states, and its pronouncements against that liberty created in large part by Luther’s Reformation. No one would have sailed -- or needed to sail, for religious reasons -- to Plymouth absent the Reformation.

Both States were and are using ignorance and lack of access to information to prop-up religious and political  establishments concerned only with self-preservation, and not with their charges: the Christian man or woman in the 16th Century, individual liberty under dispassionate law today.

The consequence of indulgences in Luther’s time was the Protestant Reformation.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century is, next to the introduction of Christianity, the greatest event in history. It marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times. Starting from religion, it gave, directly or indirectly, a mighty impulse to every forward movement, and made Protestantism the chief propelling force in the history of modern civilization.

The consequences of today’s indulgences are different.

Even if we assume all promises of those signing on to the Paris Agreement are fulfilled by 2030, and continue to fulfill them until the end of the century, and there is no ‘CO2 leakage’ to non-committed nations, the entirety of the Paris promises will reduce temperature rise by just 0.7 degree C (0.306 degrees F) by 2100.

How did today’s individual learn of the unholy, rising New World Order -- most recently articulated by George H.W. Bush? How did the individual come to be able to read his Bible, heretofore available only in Hebrew, Greek and Latin and accessible by the Church clergy? The printing press, mass literacy and vernacular access to the Bible, including Luther's own translation (from the original ancient Greek and Hebrew), which remains to this day the cornerstone of the modern German language language.

Luther was asking people to read, learn and decide; the Deep State is demanding people NOT read, NOT learn and NOT decide… just buy the indulgence. Let the forests burn. Turn out the lights. Close the factory.

Except it's all a lie. Massively increasing extraction industries – with the concomitant environmental damage -- is just one consequence of buying Green Indulgences:

… a rough conclusion is that getting all of our electricity from wind, solar and batteries would consume around 70% of all of the copper currently mined in the world, 337% of global nickel production, 3,053% of the world’s total cobalt production, 355% of the U.S.’s iron output, and 284% of U.S. steel production. Along with unfathomable quantities of concrete–which, by the way, off-gases CO2.

Destroying a nation’s economic outlook, strip-mining the planet, and bulldozing the suburbs for a corrupt faith lacking any factual proof or support is just not going to happen. The world is not going to return to pre-Reformation, pre-Science, pre-Liberty days in order to pay obeisance to the new self-anointed rulers.

Frederick III, Elector of Saxony – “Frederick the Wise” -- saved Luther for a while, protecting him from the Holy Roman Emperor (Charles V, of the house of Habsburg) and Pope Leo X by sheltering him in the Wartburg near Eisenach, and thus fostering the creation of the modern world. Without Frederick's temporal power, the Lutheran Church would likely not exist, nor would the entire chain reaction of Reformation and Counter-Reformation (in which the Roman church adopted long-needed reforms).

But where is our secular Luther today? If we are going to continue the modern world, today’s eco-indulgences must be stopped. We do have Trump, Brexit, and a growing Western understanding of the corruption of the Globalist State, and that the Green Indulgences are nothing more than tributes taxpayers pay to vice, to paraphrase La Rochefoucauld.

If we are going to reduce the corruption of the Deep State, if we are going to preserve liberty, if we are going to keep the lights on… the Green Indulgences must be rejected.

Because the Deep State is neither Holy, nor Western, nor (yet) an Empire. And must not be allowed to become so.