Thoughts and Prayers. The need to separate church and state when it comes to climate change.
Australia is currently in the grip of drought and shaping up for what may be one of our most catastrophic bushfire seasons. Debate rages about whether now is the time to talk about climate change as rural Queenslanders are evacuated from bushfires and their fellow Sunshine Coast banana benders are being pummeled with hailstones the size of tennis balls.
After showing up and offering his thoughts and prayers, our Prime Minister Scott Morrison has all but disappeared during a national crisis, prompting the hashtags #wherescotty and #haroldholt to trend for an entire weekend. Not standard behaviour for ScoMo, who doesn’t shy away from a staged media event, no matter how ill-thought-out.
When Scott Morrison invited the media into his church for one such photo op during the 2019 election campaign, hands aloft, singing songs of praise, I was filled with an unease that only those that have renounced evangelistic and eschatological movements can comprehend. ScoMo is waiting for Jesus and this country that he governs and the world it sits on is but a mere stepping stone to eternal salvation, and a temporary one at that. Because we, readers, are living in the end of times.
I was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, you may remember us from such news happenings as the Waco Texas siege, Mrs Kim from the Gilmore Girls and as the inventors of Cornflakes. Scott Morrison observes the Pentecostal faith, and while the two religions may observe different diets and days of the week to worship, they have more in common than most people would realise.
As a junior Seventh-day Adventist in Sabbath School, it was all about Jesus and the lambs, Moses in his basket and felt storyboards where you could build the statue from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream with a separate piece of material for each limb and corresponding metal. While the sermons were long, and the days were hot in our Saturday best, it was a fun scheduled playdate followed by lunch with the very few other SDA families in our small mining town.
Later, in our teenage years, we would leave Sabbath School and moved to more intensive Bible study classes. Our religious education turned to Daniel and the Book of Revelation that foretells apocalyptic prophecy. Fishes and loaves were replaced with fire and brimstone as our elders scared us into staying within the flock and not risk being left behind in the rapture. We were told that, as Christians, we would be persecuted, but not before being tattooed with the mark of the beast in barcode form to complete our weekly shopping. Under his eye indeed.
Around this time my Aunt, who had left her Catholic church to start speaking in tongues with some local Pentecostals, lent me a series of books titled Warning 1 2 3 — a low budget publication which gave me more nightmares than Pet Semetary. Seventh-day Adventists had shied away from naming the date for Jesus’ RSVP after he failed to show up in 1844 in what is now dubbed “The Great Disappointment”, but my Aunt’s new friends and their accompanying literature indicated that we were living in the end of times. It was quite literally about to be the end of the world as we know it, and I did not feel fine.
In 2010 Pew Research Centre identified that 41% of Americans believed that the Second Coming will take place before 2050. This figure increased to 58% amongst white evangelical Christians, where the Pentecostal faith resides. Australia, like America on paper, is considered to be a secular country and 30.1% of Australians identified as having no religion in the most recent census, overtaking the previous pole position of Catholics in 2011 at 25.3%. Considering the provided figures, there is a growing imbalance in government representation where more than 40% of the Coalition identify as Christian. The Coalition has an appalling record of climate change inaction, could their faith be a contributing factor?
Pope Francis called upon his followers to act against climate change in his encyclical letter Laudato Si’. The Catholic Church subscribes to the amillennialism eschatological view, where there is no set timeline, and the book of Revelation isn’t taken quite as literally. Pentecostal theory, and in particular the Horizon Church that Scott Morrison attends, believes in a “premillennial, imminent and personal return of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Further to their futurist stance, the Pentecostal church believes in divine providence and that the future is in God’s hands, and in a sense is already foretold. This raises questions as to whether Scott Morrison believes that climate change is a part of God’s providential plan and could further explain his reluctance to meet with the Coalition of former fire chiefs. If it is written, “Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age.” (Matthew 13:40), then Jesus might just BRB.
Sonya Sachdeva, a Research Social Scientist from the United States Department of Agriculture, completed the review Religious Identity, Beliefs, and Views about Climate Change in 2016. Published by Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Sachdeva’s paper examines the relationships between various faiths and the environment and their action, or lack thereof, when it comes to climate change. Most of the findings indicate a correlation between Christian faith and climate change scepticism or inaction for the following reasons:
· Climate change is a sign of the Second Coming where Earth is considered “one step on a road to eternal life” and “earthly concerns have no relevance to true believers”.
· Those that believe in the End of Times prophecy have a shortened view of the future and are less likely to support long term policy.
· The belief that God is an external intervening agent and that climate change is out of their control, reducing personal agency.
Unlike Eastern religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism that recognise an interdependence between humans and nature, and Indigenous groups who believe that humans and Earth are interconnected, Western Judeo-Christians have a dominant relationship with nature. The research paper Religion Does Matter for Climate Change Attitudes and Behavior surveyed 1927 Australians from four different religions, Buddhists, Christian literalists and non-literalists, and Secularists, and also found that faith was a determining factor in attitudes towards climate change.
· 43.8% of the Atheist, Agnostic, No Religion group and 45.7% of the Buddhist group were the highest participants concerned or alarmed by climate change.
· 16.3% of the Atheist, Agnostic, No Religion group and 2.9% of the Buddhists group were the lowest in segments that were doubtful or dismissive. The sample response overall was 20.6%
· Christian literalists, which includes Pentecostal and Evangelical churches consisted of 19.6% of respondents that were alarmed or concerned and 30.2% were doubtful or dismissive.
· Christian literalists are less likely to support climate change action, believe that is climate change caused by human activity, and are less likely to support the reduction of carbon emissions in Australia.
· Buddhist were the most engaged group in supporting climate change action, more so than secularists.
Lower levels of science literacy and a negative attitude towards science as a whole by Christians also contributes to the denial of climate change. My later years of education were at a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school, and until you have seen evolution squeezed into one lesson of ATAR Human Biology while the teacher is booed, you probably can’t grasp the levels of repudiation of what they consider to be the dark arts.
There has been hypothesis that in recent times there has been a “Greening of Religion”, but this has been debunked in the article The Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part Two): Assessing the Data from Lynn White, Jr., to Pope Francis, as research continues to show that Christians interest in the environment has waned in the last few decades compared to atheists, agnostics and those who do not practice religion. As recently as 2015 evangelical Christians in an American study rated their greatest concerns as the economy (69%) and abortion (67%) while the environment only concerned 16% of those surveyed. Closer to home in Australia this article expands from religiosity to politics indicating that “the support base of environmental concerns is generally much stronger among Labor and Green supporters, postmaterialists, those who engage in eastern spiritual practices and professionals.”
End of timers are currently collating news articles, including the Australian bushfires to prove their dogma while our Pentecostal Prime Minister remains cagey about what parts of his belief system he is willing to share and anywhere up to 40% of the current governing party may share similar views, some out of fear of the unknown. When Scott Morrison famously told the Australian public, “I’ll burn for you”, in his election victory speech I don’t think we realised how literal that could be.
