Faith Communities and the Environmental Bandwagon

Vincent J. Curtis

31 July 2015

In the July 22, 2015 edition of my hometown newspaper, author and activist Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko wrote a piece headlined, "Faith Communities need to get on the environmental bandwagon."

Below is a response.

Last week, Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko described the efforts of those in the environmental movement to gain the active support of Christian Churches.  She spoke of showing Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” but what really got traction, in her view, was the recent encyclical of Pope Francis.

Ekoko was somewhat mystified by the reluctance of Christian faith communities to get deeply involved in the environmentalist movement.  She recognizes that Christian churches for centuries have been involved in seeking social justice, and could not understand why they were not similarly enthused by a call for “climate justice.”

Ekoko will likely continue to be disappointed in Christian faith communities.  Environmentalism bears the hallmarks of a religion itself, as a review of the terms Deep Ecology and Gaia will show.  The Christian community have notions of about worshiping God, and God is not “Mother Earth,” the goddess of the environmentalist movement.  Thus, the secular aspects of environmentalism may be of some interest to the secular part of Christians, but the deeper philosophical import of environmentalism will prove to be off-putting to a serious Christian.

Hence, you can get Christians to grow a victory garden, or put solar panels on the roof of their church.  These are things that are not obvious endorsements of the concept of a Mother Earth.

Climate justice is not at all like social justice to a Christian.  Social justice involves human beings, living creatures of God, who are endowed with rationality and capable of understanding God in a limited way.  Climate, in contrast, is not even a real thing with substance; it is a rational construction of the human mind.  Justice is not a concept that applies to it.  It may be possible to smudge the distinction between making nice to Mother Earth and acting for the interests of the human beings that live on earth, but the openness to the concept of climate justice to a concept of Mother Earth or Gaia cannot be hidden.

Christians, as a rule, take the idea of Truth quite seriously.  Thoughtful Christians would be astonished at Al Gore’s propaganda epic “An Inconvenient Truth.”  The Inconvenient Truth about “An Inconvenient Truth” is that the movie is full of distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsehoods, as a U.K. court ruled several years ago.  People are generally aware that there is something wrong with Al Gore’s movie, and Christians are uncomfortable with lying, even if it is for the sake of a cause thought to be good.

Hence, Ekoko will continue to be disappointed by faith communities.  They already have a religion.

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