Chesterton and Voltaire gave us due warning. “He who does not believe in God will believe in anything,” stated the former, while the latter said: “and if God did not exist, we would need to invent him.”
And together these aphorisms may explain why modern campaigning groups are beginning to look not so much like religious movements as like cults.
It’s the apocalyptic elements that seem to provide the shift from immature religiosity gone wrong to something more extreme. Weather changes, organisations fail, civilisations collapse, but there seems a particular heightened anxiety that draws people into fundamentalist activism.
This may have something to do with displacement. It may be because, lacking an authentic religion in a post-Christian society, people’s implanted longings and instincts for God have been relocated in a vacuum to any god – or many gods.
The public behaviour of the medical activists in the NHS, accompanied oddly and similarly by the overt and cult-like religiosity of Just Stop Oil, to which we can add the fervent Gaia devotion of eco-activists, is all marked not only by swivel eyed political certainty, but additionally by a pronounced religiosity.
Just Stop Oil recently suffered a well-publicised mole, when an activist went undercover to get access to their plans and try to sabotage them in the same way they are sabotaging the public.
The act of sabotage designed to turn the tables on them led to helium balloons being released and rape alarms being sounded to disrupt one of their motivational banquets. But the whole mole strategy proved to be fascinating. It involved a filming of their early morning preparation meeting during which the JSO activists were planning subversive disruption. Just like a conventional group of Protestant evangelicals they huddled in a pious circle and addressed prayers of invocation and placation, addressed not to God, but a sub-deity; to the “City of London”. They even ended with a breathy and pious “Amen”.
The eco-agitators have along with both the NHS and JSO comrades developed a very acute sense of imminent apocalyptic disaster. Rather like the Jehovah’s Witnesses who perpetually moved their end of the world predictions from 1877 through to a variety of dates between 1916 and 1984, Greta Thunberg has been making and then revising firm dates beyond which eco-disaster becomes unstoppable.
For a long time in the secularised narrative, “religion” in general and the Catholic Church in particular have been criticised for exemplifying dogmatic certainty and spawning fundamentalisms among the credulous.
But it turns out that this is not an exclusive activity of the Church. If you remove both the Faith and the Church, the same circumstances are being replicated. Ecology has morphed from being a science into a political movement and from there into a religion.
The view of Catholic anthropology is of course that human beings being made in the image of God cannot escape our inbuilt religious instincts. We have a homing instinct for God, something which Voltaire gave some expression to when he wrote, “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him”.
For the eco-zealots, God does not exist, and so they have indeed invented him – they have invented him in the image of their highly sensitised ecological apocalypticism.
Paradoxically this appears to involve yet another clash between science and religion, but not in a way we might expect. Pretending to believe in science, the activists impose an emotional and dogmatic certainty that seems to mirror what most people would normally associate with religious fervour. Anxious dogmatism triumphs over the scientific method of testing hypotheses to destruction.
But what lies at the root of this universal apprehension of an imminent apocalypse?
Psychologically, it may be that a repressed fear of mortality is given some external expression in transferring the anxiety to a different kind of traumatising threat of extinction. What we can’t deal with “in here” we might at least transfer to “out-there” where perhaps it can be brought under human control.
It is hard for Catholics who have a vivid two-way relationship with God not to feel some real pity for those who have chosen to put their trust into the NHS. This is a distortion of the religious instinct and is doomed to lead to profound disappointment.
That pity extends to wonderfully pained bourgeois activists who walk with a pronounced long-suffering piety in front of traffic at one mile and hour, inconveniencing their neighbours out of a misplaced political strategy (it backfires) and a displaced religious zeal. Critics fail to dent their determination when they point out that far greater numbers of the poor die from cold each year than from heat.
Not everyone feels confident in placing uncritical trust in coordinated agencies who appear to have ulterior motives in the way they present statistics and massage science with the apparent intention of stoking fear.
There are of course reasonable forms of apocalypticism.
The “unveiling” of St John’s writing in the last book of the New Testament works better as theology than it does as history. And as theology it acts as a powerful spiritual preparation for the promised eschatological climax.
And not all fear of impending disaster is neurotic.
During my childhood reading of Asterix, I became acquainted with the Gaulish village chief Vitalstatistix. He was notoriously terrified of the sky falling on his head (always tomorrow, and never today). This was a terrific running joke through the books. But it turns out that was it based not on the ridiculing of the superstitious and neurotic, but on actual Celtic history.
In 335 BC an embassy of tall Celts arrived to greet Alexander the Great during his Balkan campaign. He famously asked them if they were afraid of anything (hoping they would diplomatically say “only Alexander”). In fact, they answered, they were afraid only of the sky falling on their heads. And it seems that at least once in recent European history the sky actually did fall upon people’s heads.
As it happens, recent geological explorations has discovered that between 465 and 350 BC a comet entered the earth’s atmosphere above Germany. About half a mile in diameter it broke up about thirty miles above the earth. The debris comprised of large fragments that smashed into the earth (creating the bunkers that formed the lakes between Salzburg and Munich). Physicists calculate the force would have been equivalent to 80 one-megaton hydrogen bombs. The associated methane fumes would have caused suffocation and widespread fire storms.
It is not unreasonable to be alarmed at potential natural disaster (remember the dinosaurs). As the climate changes, argument over cause and effect will and should continue and responsible ways of living across the skin of the planet will be encouraged. But what appears oddly unreasonable to practicing Christians is to promote nature or organisations into minor deities (or in the case of Gaia a major deity) and then seek to appease them. It is effectively a reversion to paganism.
We converted Europe and the West from a brutalising paganism once before. We may have to do it again.
(A Just Stop Oil demonstrator sprays an orange substance on an Aston Martin store in Mayfair on October 16, 2022 in London, England | Hollie Adams/Getty Images)
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