NPR describes seventy-eight-year-old Diane Ware, a “retired elementary school teacher” and environmentalist who got no satisfaction from the scuppering of a proposed natural gas pipeline in her Oregon hometown. The battle was won, but not the war, because “it may be too late to save a planet in deep peril.” Ware sank into depression and sought treatment for her “climate grief.”
Enter the eco-chaplain, “a new kind of spiritual adviser rising among clergy trained in handling grief and other difficult emotions.”
You can learn all about this peculiar quasi-spiritual therapist from the NPR story. More interesting to me than the treatment is the condition: climate anxiety, as Yale calls it, or eco-anxiety, or climate doom (!). This is not to be confused with worry; worry is “a good and healthy thing,” per Yale Expert #2, “because worry as an emotion is a motivator; if you worry about something, you are motivated to figure out what you can do about it. We actually need more people to be worried about climate change.”
That’s one way to think about it. But if we take the above quotation and replace “climate change” with “heaven and hell,” then we’re on to something. We really do need more people to wrestle with the Four Last Things.
After all, why do we need more people to be worried about climate change? So they’ll fix it, right? But how? How much? Where? What even are they trying to fix? And how will they know when they’ve succeeded, or failed?
None of these questions can be answered definitively. When it comes to this new phenomenon of climate change, there is no actual knowledge to leverage. We don’t know the ideal global temperature; there’s not even any such thing as a global temperature. (You want to average all the temperatures on earth—assuming you could ever do that—and then tell me the number means something? And we should act on it?) We don’t know which actions will solve the problem—which, remember, we can’t identify. Maybe abolishing gas-powered cars will do it. Pope Francis proposes a crusade on air-conditioning (see Laudato Si 55). But it’s impossible to be sure.
And so we all end up in a cloud of unknowing, with no idea what will appease Mother Nature and yet with vague instructions on how to appease. (The most popular ones involve spending lots of money on nothing in particular.) And if we mess it up, “some devastating tipping point” will kill us tomorrow, or twelve years . . . er, eighteen months . . . from now, or a hundred years from now.
This doesn’t look like light-bringing, mind-freeing Science. It looks like a grim religion, at once rules-obsessed and effete, groaning for redemption but incognizant of the redeemer.
We can see parallels between the religion of climate change and the state of Judaism just before the Messiah. The Jews had their Temple, and they had their manifold sacrifices, and they had their Day of Atonement, but they could never really be sure if God had absolved them of their sins . . . or if another conscience-cleansing seventy-year exile was around the corner. Likewise, the anxiety-ridden climatista can speak out, lobby, write letters, and splatter paint on art masterpieces until he’s blue (or whatever color Sherwin-Williams offers) in the face, and yet he can’t know if his work has improved the “global temperature” by one iota.
The Jews, at least, had a promise from the one true God. The religion of climate change has only the stabbing finger of Greta “How Dare You?!” Thunberg. And now eco-chaplains.
Christianity, unlike the Church of Climate, provides the certainty that the ancient Jews and the Diane Wares of the modern world could only grasp at. “Come to me,” Jesus exhorts us, “all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). His program emphasizes the good things those who follow him can expect, like comfort and inheritance and satisfaction (Matt. 5). And it’s not an unattainable goal, either: from the Ten Commandments to the Two Great Commandments to two rich millennia of the Catholic Church’s moral teaching, the Christian God gives us the Google map to our eternal happiness and the step-by-step directions on the left side of the screen.
Christians can be confident in a good outcome because Our Lord promised it to us—provided we follow the rules. In other words, Jesus authoritatively, reliably gives us both a clear goal and the means to achieve it—the exact two things the Church of Climate most needs and least has.
“No man knows the day or the hour” of the (climate) apocalypse, so anxiety at the thought of it is energy wasted. But every one of us can pursue the moral life, concretely, today. No eco-chaplain required—but a good spiritual director will help.