Climate catastrophe and the future of faith

Over the centuries, religions have been dramatically reshaped by sudden climate shifts. As the world faces an unprecedented ecological crisis, a historian sees the possible emergence of new religious movements and new faiths

Climate change and global warming are now an inescapable feature of the headlines, and that presence will only increase as the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, draws closer. Whether arising from titanic volcanic eruptions, growing or shrinking levels of solar activity, or from changes in the El Niño cycle in the oceans, disasters arising from sudden climate shifts have remade history – and have reshaped the world’s religions.

These climate shocks have had a terrifying impact on the lives of ordinary people. When temperatures fell and farming became all but impossible, the results were swift and devastating. Famines and attendant plagues killed millions, while terrified and angry people sought scapegoats to blame for the mounting horrors they saw around. Rebellions, civil wars and massacres readily followed such ­climate crises. The Four Horsemen of Revelation rode unchecked. History offers a stark warning of some of the consequences we are likely to face in the near future.

There have been climate emergencies every century or so, but some were especially harrowing. One occurred around the year 1320, at the start of the Little Ice Age. That era is best remembered for the wild flowering of paranoia and conspiracy theories directed against outsiders and imaginary enemies of all kinds – against Jews, witches, lepers and heretics. In Catholic Europe, this was the time when the Church formally approved the ­theory that witchcraft was not just an underhand kind of supernatural malice, but a whole alternate religion of evil, with its satanic pacts and sabbats. The first of what would become the standard model of witch trials occurred at Kilkenny in 1324. This was also the time that extremely pious critics of the Church’s wealth found themselves condemned as heretics to be sought out and slaughtered: inquisitors literally demonised groups like the Spiritual Franciscans and the Beguines. Meanwhile, Islamic societies decided that it was the Christians who were inciting divine anger, and they inflicted ruinous purges and persecutions on the once mighty Churches of Egypt and Mesopotamia. For societies around the world, the years around 1320 were unforgettably horrible.

Another time of catastrophe followed in the decade after 1675, when the world entered a time of terrifying cold, with all that implied for food shortages, epidemic disease and mass death. This was the darkest and coldest depth of that notorious Little Ice Age. Once again, different societies identified different people to blame for the ongoing disasters. The French government of Louis XIV decided that Protestant Huguenots were the culprits, and persecution followed.
It was in the British Isles that the readiness to believe the worst had some of the grimmest consequences. This was the time of the Popish Plot, which brought so many Catholic clergy and faithful laity to execution or imprisonment. The idea that Catholics were traitors and conspirators was of course nothing new, but it was in the appalling circumstances of the years around 1679 that anti-papist ­demagogues found credulous audiences. Of course the priests must be removed or killed: how else could God’s anger be sated? On the Welsh borders, we hear of Jesuits literally being hunted to their deaths in the deep snows of the dreadful winters of the time.

Beyond paranoia and scapegoating, such climate crises also inspired new leaders and religious movements that sought to understand the apocalyptic signs of the times, when God’s judgement was so overwhelmingly ­obvious. In terms of extreme cold, the years between 1739 and 1741 were among the worst of the millennium for the transatlantic world. This was the pivotal era of the mighty religious upsurge that is called the Great Awakening, when celebrity preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield created mighty movements whose descendants are still with us today, in the form of the evangelical Churches. Edwards told his hearers, unforgettably, that they were “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: and looking at the world around them in 1741, who could have doubted such a simple statement of reality?

Time and again, if you look at the great revo­lutionary eras that transformed religious life and thought, that spawned so many movements, you repeatedly find that these coincided closely with a climate-driven crisis. But however terrifying they were at the time, those past crises were fundamentally different from our circumstances today. Above all, they were transient and temporary, and ended when, for instance, the effects of a volcanic eruption had played themselves out. This time is different. Unless human beings take decisive action, and on a massive scale, our current climate trends are in one direction, towards ever warmer temperatures. The only real issue is just how bad things will get. Historically, we know that a sudden temperature change of only a degree or so Celsius can have catastrophic effects. By some scenarios, we might be looking at a three- or four-degree increase by the end of the century. The obvious and most often mentioned consequences include rising sea levels, the spread of deserts, threats to food supplies and drinkable water and growing confrontations between communities. Economically advanced states will find it easier to withstand or delay extreme crises; poorer and more fragile communities in the Global South will suffer most, and some are facing catastrophe.

So much is well known, but the religious dimension to the coming crisis is often neglected. One key moment in the public acknowledgement of the climate crisis came in 2015, when Pope Francis made environmental and climate threats a central theme of his encyclical Laudato Si’. What was less widely noticed at the time was just how closely this concern was related to the world’s ­emerging religious geography. Over the past half-century, the proportion of the world’s Christians living in the Global South, and especially within the Tropics, has grown enormously. By 2050, Africa alone will have over a billion Christians, around a third of the world total. The southward drift is all the more marked for the Roman Catholic Church, which currently finds its largest centres of population in Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines, and with explosive centres of growth in African countries such as Nigeria, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The ­emerging Christian world coincides exactly with the territories most sharply and immediately affected by climate change. The climate crisis is a human nightmare, but it has a particularly Christian – and Catholic – tinge.

Based on historical precedents, one near-certain consequence of a climate-driven disaster will be a quest for the malefactors thought to be responsible. In most African societies, witchcraft is a deeply established cultural reality, one that has not vanished with modernisation and the growth of cities. In recent decades, witch-hunts and persecutions have been just as likely to erupt in sprawling cities and shanty towns as in ­villages. There is no reason to believe that such paranoia would be any less in a decade or two, particularly if economic circumstances are as badly affected as is commonly believed. Perhaps the great age of literal witch-hunts lies in our future, not our past. Another inevitable consequence of climate-driven catastrophe would be a steep rise in interfaith tensions, most obviously between Muslims and Christians, but also affecting Hindus and Buddhists in their respective countries. Social or environmental collapse will not come overnight, but it is not hard to contemplate the structural impact of diminishing resources. In multiple nations, we would expect violent tugs of war over the remaining fertile lands and water supplies. Across Africa’s Western Sahel, throughout the vast region of Africa’s Great Lakes, environmental crisis threatens to provoke calamitous waves of religious wars and persecutions and pogroms.

Communal tensions contribute to the rise of militias, movements and parties, which become revolutionary challenges to states. Commonly, those groups 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. Just look at the spread of extreme fundamentalist and jihadi ideas across West Africa in the past two decades, in a region already very hard hit by warming and threats to water. From the point of view of the Global North, such conflicts in tropical regions have often been viewed distantly, at best as problems demanding charitable outreach or relief. But matters will be very different in our near future because of the role of mass migrations on an unprecedented scale. If and when tropical lands succumb to ruin – when the deserts spread and the cities sink – their former ­residents will not simply remain in place to die. They will move, in their hundreds of millions.

Almost certainly, the coming crises will produce new religious movements, and even, conceivably, whole new faiths. As in earlier times, we would expect a powerful thirst for religious explanations of the ongoing disasters, and a fresh openness to apocalyptic and ­millenarian preaching. As in the colonial America of 1741, the evidence for God’s furious judgement would be plain to see, as would the utter inadequacy of human solutions.

So what messages will those humbled sinners be willing to accept? Repeatedly in earlier crises, the Book of Revelation has seized the attention of Christians. In the closing chapters of that work, the visionary of Revelation promises his hearers a glorious future when “there was no more sea” and that much-wished consummation heralds the coming of the New Jerusalem. The time may yet come when believers would so dread the rising seas that they would grasp desperately at promises that those lethal dangers might cease or even vanish altogether. That biblical narrative is also fundamentally concerned with escape and exodus, migration and exile, which will be very familiar to this near-future world.

Migrants and refugees from those regions will increasingly carry their ideas and beliefs, their visions and dreams, far beyond the region, to Europe and worldwide. Already, population movements have had a very sizable religious impact on the Global North, through the spread of Islam across Europe, and at the same time the global diffusion of African patterns of Christian belief and practice. Global South patterns increasingly join the religious mainstream of the North and will eventually dominate it. At the least, newer waves of religious refugees and exiles will continue and accelerate those trends, and they will bring their memories of parched ground, failing cities and dying landscapes. What remains to be seen is just how novel and radical will be the beliefs of those refugees from apocalypse.

My own interest in these matters predates the emergence of global warming as a critical menace. In saying that, I am claiming no status as a prodigy, still less a prophet. I just read a great deal of science fiction, and I was stunned by J.G.Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World. This legendary book imagines a twenty-second-century world in which global temperatures have soared, the glaciers have melted and what civilisation does survive chiefly exists in the Arctic and Antarctic. Once-temperate lands such as Britain have been engulfed by rising seas and have ­succumbed to tropical conditions. The point of Ballard’s story was to imagine how human consciousness changes in that radically changed environment: if climate change reshapes the world so thoroughly as to make, in effect, a new kind of humanity, what will those future generations think and feel? What kind of faith, or faiths, will exist in a drowned world? Many years later, those questions are more pressing than ever.

Philip Jenkins is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and the author of Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval (Oxford University Press, £22.99; Tablet price, £20.69).