When the Light for a Christian is the planet, and not Jesus Christ, something has gone wrong.

The BBC Sunday programme is rarely a place for hard-hitting analysis of topics of serious religious import. The programme, invariably, discusses its matter through a secular, liberal lens, and highlights various examples of religious people who seem to have adapted the demands of their faith in such a way as to fit in comfortably with the views of the progressive bien pensant. Treat it as such, and it provides a rather wonderful window on the way in which its editorial team would like all religious people to conduct themselves.

However, even I double-took, this week, hearing the interview with the Episcopalian Bishop Mark Strange. In the course of his interview, in which he was talking about how to encourage the government to make more climate change commitments in advance of COP26, he began using increasingly religious language, culminating in this extraordinary statement:

... and I think that people, having seen that darkness, might now want to be looking for the light; and the light, for me, is the planet, which is still ours, and beautiful, and which we're not destroying [at the moment].

Coming from a professed Christian, this seems to me to be an extraordinary statement. That his light in darkness would be anything or anyone other than Jesus Christ demonstrates that something has gone spiritually out of kilter - and this points us to a spiritual danger in the climate movement.  

The Catechism of the Catholic Church recognises the Christian imperative of caring for God's creation. 

Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things which would be in contempt of the Creator and would bring disastrous consequences for human beings and their environment. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §339)

As such, Catholics do have a moral duty to consider their role in adding to environmental damage through global warming. However, at the same time we need to recognise that this is a home made for us by God - it is not ours, we are mere stewards - and it is a temporary reality.  As Jesus Himself tells us "[h]eaven and earth shall pass away, but my words will not pass away" (Matthew 24.35, Mark 13.31, Luke 21.33). St Paul was conscious that as Christians "we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Cor. 4.18).

If our concern for the environment leads us to begin to find in it the source of human salvation, then we have gone wrong. For us, there is only one light in the darkness and it is Jesus Christ; and the salvation which He promises us is not to be found in this world.

Perhaps some key questions to examine the Christian nature of my environmental concern/activism are these:

Am I acting in response to the call of Jesus Christ? Is it causing me to grow in love of Him? Do I find in it a response to the call to deny myself, take up my Cross and follow Him? Am I acting out of concern for the poor? Are my actions, or those which I support, in accord with true justice and the moral law? Do they amount to loving my neighbour as myself? Am I looking to the future with hope? Do I see my work here as pointing towards heaven?

If the answers to the above questions are 'yes', then your climate activism is probably in a good, Christian place, and I would suggest it is likely nurturing your spiritual life. However, perhaps some of the dangers to look out for are:

• Climate activism which becomes angry or resentful towards others.
• Aggression in promoting my view.
• Hypocritical activism which demands big changes in societal lifestyles, before being willing to change my own.
• Adopting anti-life solutions to the climate, such as limiting birth through abortion, contraception or sterilisation.
• Adopting unjust attitudes to the legitimate desire of poorer nations to improve their people's lifestyles, even at the expense of climate targets.

In the end, there have been very few examples in history of human beings, en masse, coming together and putting aside vested interests for the sake of a greater good. My suspicion is that it is unlikely to occur now, either; and that we will have to accept the consequences of that failure. Welcome to the experience of living among fallen humanity.

However, for the Christian, even that bleak assessment should not be a cause for panic, less still an excuse for sin. We know - or we ought to - that God is in control of human history; and in that assurance, we are certain we will always have light in any darkness - it is Jesus Christ.

The full interview with the Most Rev. Mark Strange is available here, beginning at 1:40. The title image is used under a Creative Commons Licence, available here.