Hot Tempers in a Warming World

Will a Changing Climate Make Us Even Crazier?

After several weeks of heat waves all over the world, I find that the first thing I end up talking with anyone about, no matter where the person is from, is the weather. And then, almost every time, the conversation will turn to how “crazy” and angry everything seems right now—whether in the world, the nation, or the church.

But what if those two conversations turn out to be strangely related? That’s the argument of a new book called Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval, which has prompted me to ask some different questions about what’s next for the church.

The book caught my attention because it is written by Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins, whose insight has proven itself repeatedly. When the consensus seemed to be that the world was headed toward an inevitable secularization, Jenkins pointed to the data to show the surge of Christianity in the Global South. When others downplayed secularization in an American context, Jenkins warned—and proved to be right—about the emergence of the religiously unaffiliated, often called the “nones.”

Now Jenkins asks us to pay attention to something else most of us have noticed: that a changing climate just might change religion.

In making his case, Jenkins points to world history regarding climate-driven crises. Some have referenced previous epochs of warming and cooling to suggest that our current climate situation is merely cyclical, not caused substantially by human activity. Jenkins does not hold this view, instead accepting the reality of human-driven climate disruption. However, he holds that we can predict some of what is to come based on what we’ve seen before.

Of course, this has implications for housing, food supply, migration, population density, geopolitical tensions, and so on. But Jenkins points out that it also has key implications for religion. For Jenkins, understanding religion in a historical sense means understanding crisis, because crises often prompt religious change.

Yet even a crisis is rarely seen all at once, he writes. Sometimes changes are under the surface, remaining almost unnoticed for long periods of time, before they accelerate quickly. Think of the decline of the Roman Empire, for instance, followed by its seemingly sudden collapse. And think of the way that event prompted Augustine’s City of God.

Often, Jenkins argues, religious transformations happen in times of stress and anxiety. At times such crises have benefited religion—prompting people to reconsider their priorities and their dependence on God and one another in light of their felt mortality. Other times, though, crises have prompted waves of apocalyptic enthusiasm, messianic cults, and societal conflict.

This is where Jenkins, drawing from historical precedent, offers some warnings that might make us wince.

He contends that catastrophes and upheavals, including those prompted by climate, frequently result in an uptick in conspiracy theories and scapegoating. When food or land or jobs become scarce, someone will almost always arise to suggest who is to blame.

From these sorts of conspiracy theories, Jenkins demonstrates, have come riots, civil wars, militia movements, persecutions, and pogroms. And, he writes, these groups typically “define themselves in religious terms and justify themselves by attacking not just rival faith communities but also other members of the same faith who are seen as deviant or less committed. Attitudes and actions that would once have been unthinkable gain mass support at a time of hunger, social stress, and political breakdown.”

As I read this, I immediately wondered how much more conspiracy theorizing and scapegoating we can take. And by “we” I’m referring specifically to the United States and Bible Belt evangelical Christianity more than to the world and human society at large. Almost every church, family, and friend group, sometimes even marriages, seem to be under stress by the sorts of conspiracy theories and culture wars that stem from social media conflicts.

Foreign policy analyst Andrew Bacevich argues in his recent book, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed, that the pervasive sense that things are falling apart or coming undone is not just a feeling. The events of 2020 in particular, he maintains, were indeed apocalyptic: from the plague of a viral pandemic, to economic volatility, to extreme weather, to political institutions that seemed to be breaking down. In his view, these events pointed to the horsemen described in Revelation 6 and what they are said to convey.

“Rancor, pestilence, want, and fury: These are the Four Horsemen comprising our homemade Apocalypse,” he writes. “Each exposed weakness and rot in institutions whose integrity Americans had long taken for granted. Each caught members of the nation’s reigning power elite by surprise.”

Could extreme weather make this far worse? Jenkins argues it could—and not just in those regions most directly affected. What happens, he wonders, when a migration crisis means waves of refugees and exiles who will “bring their memories of parched ground, failing cities, and dying landscapes”? Jenkins suggests history shows us that apocalyptic realities tend to prompt people to look for messiahs.

“A society constantly rent by extreme forest fires or dustbowl conditions, where famous cities are sinking under the waves, offers ample opportunities for preachers and prophets of all shades,” he writes.

Jesus, of course, warned of this precise dynamic. He spoke of wars and rumors of wars, of political breakdown as nation rises against nation, of “famines and earthquakes in various places.” Contrary to some prophecy-mongers of the past, Jesus explicitly said he was warning us not of the actual endpoint of history but of “the beginning of birth pains” that will happen throughout the time between his first and second comings (Matt. 24:6–8).

These natural and political upheavals, Jesus predicted, would be accompanied by religious communities split apart as “many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate one another” (24:10). The love of many, he foretold, would “grow cold” (24:12). And against this backdrop, Jesus said, there would always be people falsely claiming to be the messiahs who could fix it all (24:5, 11).

Jenkins writes that a warming world just might prove how definitively wrong the secularization experts who forecast “the end of religion within a century or two, a near-literal death of God” are. Such forecasts are rooted, after all, in the assumption that the world is becoming Sweden—an affluent, upwardly mobile society of stable institutions, relative economic prosperity, and technological progress. Right now, though, Jenkins argues, the “most vulnerable parts of the planet are already suffused in faith, and those religious beliefs and values can only grow in the face of worldly disaster.”

Yet to Jenkins, this is not necessarily good news for those of us who long for a revival of gospel Christianity. These upheavals have often led people, as Jesus warned, to find cults and leaders with easy answers that assign blame and with various types of prosperity gospels that promise a way out.

However, as Jenkins and several other observers of contemporary religion note, religious cults are on a distinct downturn, even in light of all the uncertainty around us. What we see now is a secularization even of apocalyptic sects.

In a column in Patheos this week, historian Daniel K. Williams examined the widespread Bible Belt phenomenon of white Southern Protestants who no longer attend church—and there are a lot of them. Williams writes, “If ‘lapsed evangelical Protestant’ were a denomination, it would be by far the largest religious body in the South.”

Again, contrary to the myths of progressive secularization, Williams mines the data to show that these de-churched evangelicals are not becoming like Swedes or even like de-churched northeastern cradle Catholics. Their politics haven’t changed (except by becoming more extreme), and neither has their sense of religious identity. The data show that they are liberalizing, to be sure, but only on the specific sins they want to commit—especially when it comes to premarital sex.

“When people leave church, they retain the moralism—at least insofar as it pertains to other people—but lose the sense of self-sacrifice and trust in others,” Williams writes. “They keep their Bible, their gun, their pro-life pin, and their MAGA hat, but also pick up a condom and a marijuana joint and lose whatever willingness they had to care for other people in community.”

Studies show that these de-churched Protestants are far more hyperindividualistic, cynical, and distrustful of others, Williams continues, and are more likely to say that most people try to take advantage of others. They are also much more likely to be lonely, disconnected, suspicious of institutions, and angry.

When the church is raptured from a person’s life and all that’s left are culture wars, the result is not good. It’s almost as though we were always meant to live and worship and serve in community—serving a Christ who is inseparable from his body, with a gospel that is inseparable from him.

This is the sort of environment in which all kinds of would-be messiahs can step in, peddling all sorts of alternative gospels. If life feels like an apocalypse, people will seek out whatever prophets are there in the wilderness, pointing the way home.

If, in fact, extreme weather and other challenges are in our future, we could experience trends that accelerate all the factors leading to the sort of anger, instability, and disconnection we see all around us right now—even in places where the churches used to be the center of the community.

Now, it may be that none of the worst-case scenarios come to pass, that some technological advance or political solution will avert them all. And it could be that even if these challenges do come, the Spirit will work through crisis to draw us to him, and back to one another, even as the crisis of famine prompted the prodigal to return to his father’s house (Luke 15:14–18).

In any case, the call to all of us is not to give in to the disconnection, the anger, or the cynicism but to hold fast to a gospel that matches all our apocalypses with an Apocalypse of its own. Whether the world is hot or cold, we must be a church that refuses to be lukewarm when it comes to the One we worship, the church we serve, and the people we see.

Whatever the future holds, we can remember that, on this side of hell, it’s never too hot for faith, hope, and, above all, love.

How Eugene Peterson Learned to Be a Faithful Failure

Right now, I’m about halfway through reading a collection of letters that Eugene Peterson wrote over the years to his son Eric: Letters to a Young Pastor: Timothy Conversations between Father and Son (NavPress). One theme that keeps emerging is that of failure—namely, the elder Peterson’s sense that he was one.

Some of this came from Peterson’s feeling of not fitting in with his fellow pastors, partly because he grew up Pentecostal, was ordained a Presbyterian, and was never altogether at home in either. He felt that he had “a basket of identity fragments” from many different aspects of his life, “gummed up with ill-defined anticlerical prejudices, plus a lot of other stuff that no longer fit together,” Peterson explained. “And I was trying not to get rid of any of it because all the pieces were really me, but not knowing how to do it.”

Part of his discomfort would happen in meetings with his fellow pastors. Everyone seemed obsessed with denominational politics and the mechanics of church maintenance and growth—a world that he observed was not “very personal or very reverent.” He wrote, “The more we handle holy words and holy things, the less we are aware of the numinous, the holy, the exuberant action of the Trinity that is the context for all that we do and are.”

The more he was around the context of “professional or institutional religion,” the more he found himself absorbing “that world of appearance and performance” and found that he just didn’t measure up. He discovered that the answer was not aloofness but detachment in the ancient monastic sense, in which we “maintain an intimate involvement and engagement but give up all control or concern about what happens or what people think of us.” Quoting a sixth-century monk, he described detachment as “‘being free from wanting certain things to happen’ and remaining so trusting of God that ‘what is happening will be the thing you want and you will be at peace with all.’”

Adjusting to this perspective, Peterson wrote his son, is how he learned to keep “a sense of reverence, an attentiveness to the holy God and the holy souls around us, while living vocationally in the noise and clanking of gears in the ecclesiastical machinery of church and denomination.”

As I read Peterson’s words, I recalled similar thoughts from a very different source—the very secular leadership and marketing expert Seth Godin. Godin writes that “emotional detachment” is the “only way to thrive in the work.” For Godin, as with Peterson, detachment is neither disconnection nor lack of commitment; in fact, it heightens both our connection and our commitment because we “remember that we are not our work.”

“Being detached doesn’t mean you don’t care,” Godin writes. “It simply means you’re focusing on the work and those you serve, not on your own narrative.” That sort of commitment can’t happen if we are paralyzed by risk, he argues, because every failure then becomes an existential crisis.

For Peterson, the key to thriving in ministry was to give up thinking he would amount to anything. He could resist comparing himself to others when he realized he was neither good at nor cared about “what Presbyterian pastors considered important.”

More significantly, he wrote, “I settled down to be a failure. I hoped that I could be a faithful failure, and I hoped that I could keep a small congregation together while my pastoral identity was being formed out of all those fragments.” That realization freed him to be ordinary.

He went on, “It doesn’t look like I did much of anything except continue to go about my work, trying to be responsive to the Spirit’s work.”

These thoughts from a man now with the Lord prompted me to reflect on how best to follow that path to “faithful failure.” It’s the only way, in this kingdom life, that anything worth happening happens at all.

I’m curious: Have any of you faced a situation like the one Eugene Peterson described? How did you learn to fail faithfully?

Adopted for Life, 20 Years Later

As I write this, Maria and I are marking 20 years since we walked out of a Russian orphanage as new parents. Two decades ago today, after a long process of legal proceedings, we were, suddenly, a family—with two little one-year-old sons, leaving behind a tiny mining community in the former Soviet Union.

Twenty years. When people say that your children’s growing-up years will “go by so fast,” they really do know what they’re talking about.

I’ve written elsewhere about what the adoption process taught me concerning my understanding of the gospel, of vulnerability, and of identity. Today, though, I think more about parenthood in general than adoption in particular. With our sons who came along later in the more typical way, there was something of an easing-in time—those early days of a (mostly) predictable pattern of sleeping, crying, feeding, repeat. But in our first attempt at parenthood, we skipped all of that, adopting not just one but two energetic boys who could immediately crawl, soon toddle, and then walk.

We were busy but didn’t realize how much so. We were ignorant but didn’t realize how much so. And the ignorance was itself a blessing. Parenting, after all—like almost every other human relationship—is not an object over which we have control. The scariest part of parenting (or any other human relationship) is that we do the best we can without ever knowing what the future will hold.

Wendell Berry gave advice to parents who were hyperattentive in making sure their children never watched television or ate fast food. Berry—no fan of either one himself—wrote that parents should of course care about their children’s nutrition, whether physical or mental. Still, he counseled, no plan or program can turn children into the perfect result of certain inputs and outputs.

“Children, no matter how nurtured at home, must be risked to the world,” Berry wrote. “And parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible.”

A “vexed privilege and a blessed trial.” Isn’t that what all relationships are, whether marriage or friendship or church communion? One of the blessings of life—and one of the things that scares us to death—is that in every relationship we are pledging to love even where we don’t have control. The couple at the altar don’t know about the dementia they will face together in a nursing home in their old age. The church plant doesn’t know about the financial crisis they will face ten years from now. The young couple outside the orphanage, the ones fumbling around learning how to work umbrella strollers, don’t know how to be parents.

In all of this, we are reminded that we live in a world of providence, not of computation—a world that is, at its root, personal, not technological. We go out into the future not after we are perfectly ready but when we are called to do so, pledging only that, no matter what comes, we will still love each other at the end of it all.

That—all of it—is grace.

This week’s submission comes from reader Rebecca Vincent, who writes, “I look forward to the Desert Island Bookshelf and the list of what you’re reading in each newsletter. My ‘to-be-read’ pile is out of control. Our family recently moved to a different state, and I had a good opportunity to pull books out of boxes and weigh their contention for my own hypothetical bookshelf.” Here are her selections:

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

The Wrong Side of Paris by Honoré de Balzac

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Streams of Living Water by Richard Foster

Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle

The Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King Jr.

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson

The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry

God and Politics in Esther by Yoram Hazony

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Thanks, Rebecca!

Readers, what do you think? If you were stranded on a desert island and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you for the rest of your life, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like.

Quote of the Moment

“Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!” said Bilbo.

“Of course!” said Gandalf. “And why should not they prove true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”

“Thank goodness!” said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

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Onward,
Russell Moore