It is not easy to watch pictures of an elderly protestant clergywoman, sporting her dog collar, being arrested for breaching the peace as she disrupts traffic, as the Rev’d Sue Parfitt did. Or a dignified clerical grandfather from Macclesfield, the Rev’d Bill White, being carted off by uniformed police. Two sets of uniforms, one representing the Church and one representing the state.
Our history is in fact punctuated by moments when the Church and state find themselves in the most intense opposition to each other. The Church’s integrity is dependent on being sure that the moral values it backs against the State’s opposing values are fully aligned and consistent with what it stands for.
But how certain do the protesters have to be before they can safely invoke God for their cause of protest? What if God is not uniquely and exclusively on their side of the political argument? And that is the difficulty with both politics and ethics. They almost always have two sides to them.
I was asked recently by the editors of Radio Four’s “Beyond Belief” series about the issues that underlie this public debate. They want to examine the claims of the clerical protestors to be acting in the name of God as they provoke civic pain and provoke the authorities to arrest them.
The invocation of God by the clerical activists depends on two things: their duty of care to their neighbor and their certainty that the science and the politics are on their side.
Sue Parfitt explained her position by saying :
“I am doing this because we are on the brink of the greatest catastrophe that human beings have ever known, and the Government and the public have to wake up to this.
“The Government’s in extreme dereliction of its duty in not explaining the facts of climate change to the public.
“If they did of course everybody would be in panic and they would be terrified and they would be persuading the Government to take the urgent action they need to take, which is to stop emissions and particularly not to dig up any fossil fuels.”
But there are two major difficulties here. The science is exactly that, what science always is, a falsifiable hypothesis that has not yet been fully tested. The computer programmes predicting eco-apocalypse are not and cannot be 100 per cent reliable. There are indeed other scientists offering alternative hypotheses including the facts that sun spots may have more influence on our weather than CO2; and CO2 , which is not entirely bad for plants and vegetation, follows warming, and doesn’t cause it. If you are not a scientist, how do you choose between these different interpretations of the facts?
That is not to say that we are not required to face undeniable facts that do demand immediate action. The simple and stark destructive levels of pollution that we are responsible for are an example of that; but the climate emergency is so far theory and not fact. Other reputable voices believe that the climate emergency may not be everything that Mr Bill White and Mrs Sue Parfitt think it is.
Part of the problem with interpreting the science is that most of us, including the activist theologians, have to take their science on trust and it does not appear to be coming to us value-free.
During these summer months, the mainstream “legacy” media have been presenting the public with weather maps coloured in lurid red to show the impact of the high temperatures across southern Europe. Critics have gone back into broadcasts of a few decades ago to find a summer with similar temperatures, where without the political and ideological pressure of climate change, the maps were portrayed in a simpler and more calming pastel.
The news of the fires in Greece, and on Rhodes in particular, have been presented as the direct outcome of global warming and the forerunners of the coming apocalypse. Until, that is, it emerged that the majority of the 667 fires were begun by arsonists and not spontaneous combustion. And the reason that the fires spread so dangerously on Rhodes was due to the Green policies the government slavishly followed which forbad any cutting down of trees.
The consequence of this was that the firebreaks that previous generations had built into the landscape were missing, and the fires spread accordingly. It was not global warming that caused the catastrophe, but arson and Green political policies.
Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked, has written an article energetically critical of the politicised hype that is being deliberately created to foster the sense of emergency.
He was particularly critical of the Secretary General of the United Nations who added an unusual level of what seemed to be near hysteria to the public debate.
“‘The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” he pronounced.
O’Neill commented : “It’s hard to know what’s worse: the hubris and arrogance of this globalist official who imagines he has the right to declare the start of an entire new age, or the servile compliance of the media elites who lapped up his deranged edict about the coming heat death of Earth. ‘Climate change is here [and] it is terrifying’, he said. We see ‘families running from the flames [and] workers collapsing in scorching heat’ and ‘it is just the beginning’, he said, doing his best impersonation of a 1st-century millenarian crackpot. In fact, forget ‘climate change’, he said. Forget ‘global warming’, too. What we’re witnessing is a boiling. It all brings to mind the Book of Job which warned that the serpent Leviathan would cause the seas to ‘boil like a cauldron’. Leviathan’s back, only we call him climate change now.”
A wide array of media outlets across the world immediately repeated the warning of global boiling, and accompanied the warning with a spectrum of responses that citizens might care to mitigate it with, from giving up meat to adopting heat pumps and electric cars. But O’Neill sees this not as the responsible application of a set of scientific hypotheses but as a project that is intended to terrorise the masses.
“Let’s be clear: ‘global boiling’ is not a factual or scientific phrase. Rather, it represents yet another ramping up of the green politics of fear. It’s the latest addition to the already fat dictionary of eco-dread. Economic inflation isn’t the only problem we face today – there’s threat inflation, too. The catastrophism of climate change in particular is puffed up on pretty much a weekly basis. This is why we’ve gone from climate change to climate crisis to climate emergency. And it’s why we’re now going from global warming to global boiling. Language is used to terrorise the masses, to snap us out of our supposed apathetic coolness on the issue of climate change and force us to agree with the cranky elites that the end really is nigh, and it’s our fault.”
It is certainly true that when winter comes we will find that many more people have died of cold than have died of heat in the hot summer.
Fresh from the Covid debacle, anyone with democratic instincts ought to have their suspicions aroused and not placated when it emerges that there is world-wide pressure to present only one side of the scientific conversation and to rubbish and demonise the other.
When Brendan O’Neill wrote “It’s boiling anger we should feel, for this arrogant crusade of emotional manipulation,” his critique might alert Christians to the difficult task we face that comes with our commitment to the Truth, in a highly charged context when truth is so energetically contested.
There have been a number of highly charged occasions when the Church has confronted the state for its abuses of power and its manipulations of the truth. In the last century we have seen conflicts like the fight against apartheid, the White Rose protests against Nazism and the witness against the holocaust of children at abortion clinics as examples. But in each of these, the facts were beyond dispute, and there was no confusion or ambiguity.
The environmental eco-apocalypticism the media doses us with daily does not have the same clarity of agreed factual consensus. And that itself ought to make us hesitate before invoking the name, ethics and authority of God to support our political and environmental anxieties. “Taking the Lord’s name in vain” is arguably just as important a commandment as “Loving your neighbour as yourself”, particularly when loving your neighbour may require making a stand against politicised emotional and psychological manipulation. It may be that the elderly activist clergy who so publicly sport their Christian and clerical uniform should think twice about which commandments they are embodying.
People watch as police officers carry away an environmental activist from the group Insulate Britain | JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.