How can the government use the Church to spread the gospel of saving the planet? The EPA has just funded a little project to study the Christian Church in the US to answer just that question. As an anthropologist might scan the habits and thoughts of natives, the EPA is concerned to try to understand how one might channel the spiritual energies of the Christian Church to service an environmentalist agenda.

The Church of Jesus Christ is on the defensive in the Western world, silenced by a love a comfort and a fear of offending increasingly militant unbelievers. And many of those new (un)believers follow the religion of environmentalism. Not common sense cleaning up and conservation, mind you, but an ideological way of thinking — a worldview — that somehow survived the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union.

Environmentalism is today the most popular and broad ideology in the West. Anyone who has been insulted by toxic odours or seen the effects of unrestrained industrial pollution can’t be unmoved by the consequences of humans behaving badly. On the other hand most of those who call themselves environmentalists seem strikingly focused on far more than just the practical problems of day to day pollution mitigation.

We see it in those like Al Gore with his enormous carbon footprint, or other elites, whose concern for the environment or the poor seems all too often simply an exercise in self-exhibition, a cheap way to accrue moral self-satisfaction. There are genuine environmental problems, such as malaria in Africa and Asia, or clean water around the world, or air pollution in China. But these serious problems hardly exercise environmentalists who seem intent instead on micromanaging your gas ration or trying to create rules for what temperature one’s house may remain at. Environmentalism seems less about a healthy and beautiful environment and more an excuse for busybodies to feel good about themselves by exercising power over others.

In the words of Theodore Dalrymple,

The one thing that many environmentalists seem not to care about is the environment. By this I mean its visual appearance. They would happily empty any landscape or any city of beauty so that the planet might survive. Like the village in Vietnam, it has become necessary to destroy the world in order to save it. And, of course, destruction of beauty has the additional advantage of being socially just: for if everyone cannot live in beautiful surroundings, why should anyone do so? Since it is far easier to create ugliness than to create beauty, equality is to be reached by the former rather than by the latter.

Environmentalism is a ‘total’ ideology, in that its solutions are not piecemeal. Environmentalism aims to ‘save’ the planet with detailed prescriptions every human being is expected to follow. Allegiance to Mother Earth is the roaring demand in every ear, daily increasing in volume… and religious fervency.

This is where sustainability comes in. “Sustainability” is a key idea in the Western world. To many, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word has come to mean something much larger: an ideology that demands new limits on economic, political, and intellectual freedom as the price that must be paid to ensure the welfare of future generations.

I should like to highlight the following report on the sustainability movement. The NAS published the full report Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism on March 25, 2015. This report is the first in-depth critical examination of the sustainability movement in higher education.

Another resource to explore efforts to insinuate green ideology in the Christian Church is my own book, Resisting the Green Dragon.