When a cult attempts to infiltrate and change a religion
For These Young Evangelical Activists, Facing the Climate Crisis Is an Act of Faith
A few years back, William Morris came to realize just how he could be a light unto the world. Before this precise moment in time, his visions of a missionary life had involved foreign climes, distant shores, desecrated wastelands in desperate need of redemption. Then he had looked around at his native L.A. At the church he’d grown up attending. At the faith community he’d always considered to be his home. When it came to the climate crisis, he realized, his own flock were still living in darkness. Perhaps, with God’s grace, he could help bring them to the light.
Growing up in a conservative evangelical Baptist church, Morris, 25, had been the beneficiary of proper conservative evangelical indoctrination: “You know, evolution is a made-up political thing, and climate isn’t really changing,†he says. “LGBTQ people are sinful. All these different checking off of all those boxes, basically.†Yet he’d gravitated toward science, especially once he got to middle school and the labs and experiments had proven to him that rather than being “trickery,†what he was learning was undeniably true. Such a realization didn’t cause a crisis of faith per se, but it did lead to a mental bifurcation, a sense that God and science could coexist, but in two separate realms, largely divorced from each other.
In college, where he majored in environmental science, Morris found that he was often in a group of one — the only science major in class who openly identified as Christian and the only person in church who was a science major. Then one day, sitting in on a congregational meeting on mission work, he heard one of the speakers talking about environmental missions. “I was like, ‘What the heck is that?’ †Morris tells me. “It was the first time I heard someone who was Christian explicitly doing environmental stuff. I went up to him right after and was like, ‘Hey, we need to talk.’ â€
That conversation eventually led Morris to spend a month doing volunteer work with a Christian conservation organization in Kenya, cataloging rare bird species, mapping mangrove forests, and collecting data on coral reefs. His meals and his free time were shared with other Christian environmentalists and scientists, most of whom were Kenyan and notably did not share his evangelical American hang-ups. He marveled at how their faith was not only integrated into their environmental pursuits but was in fact integral to them.
Well, see, there’s the reality of environmental concerns and then the mule fritters of climate apocalypse. BTW, how did he get to Kenya? You know it wasn’t through walking, biking, and sailing ships.
Morris also began to see this holistic view all over scripture: in Genesis, where the mandate to have dominion over creation did not seem to imply callous exploitation but rather a call to wise stewardship, and throughout the Gospels, where Jesus didn’t assuage people’s suffering with promises of the afterlife but actually tended to their physical needs in the here and now. So, Morris pondered, wouldn’t loving one’s neighbor mean protecting their habitat? Making sure they could grow food, have clean air and water, not be subjected to forced migration or the “threat multiplier†that he knew climate change to be?
In other words, the climate cult beliefs are hijacking the actual religious beliefs, demanding that he use those beliefs to force Other People to comply with the climate cult beliefs.
In integrating his faith with his environmentalism, Morris came to have a new understanding of what that faith entailed, one that he actually felt was deeper and more authentic. Before the world could be healed by the church, he reasoned, maybe the church needed healing through its engagement with the world. He would go home and preach the message of environmentalism.
It’s a cult. Definitely a cult. Once which is attempting to change the Christian religion from within, making Biblical beliefs secondary to Cult of Climastrology beliefs.
As one would expect with a Rolling Stone article, it’s full of crazy, climavirtue signaling, belittling Christianity, and long.
Read: Young Evangelists Are Super Concerned About Other People’s Carbon Footprints »
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