Bad Religion
As I plod my way back and forth to and from work I occasionally think about climate change. While I would obviously yield to the statisticians regarding the overall heat of the summer, it just doesn’t seem that hot to me this year. Maybe that’s just me getting used to brighter sun than I’ve seen anywhere else, maybe I’m just flat out wrong, or maybe it really is statistically not so hot outside this year.
My point is that it doesn’t matter. The observation is that global warming has become akin to a counterproductive, corrupt religion.
Probably coinciding with Al Gore’s activism, global warming reached a state of what I might call “institutional acknowledgement.” Christianity reached this when Constantine had his battlefield conversion (link mainly for the shout-out to Hagia Sophia mosaics).
As is the case with any controversial ideology, institutional acknowledgement is both raw potential and raw danger for its faithful. In Cosmo terms, what’s out instantly becomes what’s in. So what are you as a leader going to do with that shift of energy?
Acknowledgement will generally introduce a lot of greenhorns, relatively incompetent members. When it’s not cool to be you, chances are “you” are well-informed and convicted about your beliefs. At the point MTV decides you represent the preferred norm, the relative fanaticism and involvement of your adopters begins to drop.
So, influx of idiots is one danger. You never know what they’ll say or do on your behalf but not at your behest.
Another danger is that your key apologists will become defensive rather than offensive, more focused on holding position than developing understanding. If you look at articles around unseasonably cool summers and cold winters, as well as (unbelievably enough) discussions about the Icelandic volcano, you see apologists in a reactive mode, attempting to frame each new development as proof or confirmation.
While many a good Christian could frame the sunrise as a daily miracle, putting out a God-confirming press release every morning is not the way to operate. This puts you on your heels. Institutionalization focuses the critical public eye on your framework, and any mass media event becomes a challenge to the norm.
Being defensive often forces you to compromise your primary message.
These pressures tend to weigh down your leadership. This is really where the integrity of your movement is tested. As we saw with the Climate-Gate bunch, sometimes it’s just so much pressure you start to bend the rules so your house can remain in order. And you will get caught, somehow, no matter how popular you remain. The more flexible your methods and beliefs become, the more inherently political your movement will become. Definitions and regulations become the operative bastions and weapons of power. Instead of promoting moderation and conservation, you begin fighting over the proper modeling techniques for “urban heat islands.”
While there must be boundaries, politicization nearly guarantees these discussions will drift from their original ideological basis.
It seems to me that Christianity has had or is having equivalents to all three of these problems. The Dark Ages had all of them at once.
Christianity was provided with a very simple message: one must love God, self, and neighbor in an outpouring of the enabling grace of Christ’s sacrifice, so that we might reconnect ourselves with God despite the obstacles of our past failings.
I can assure you that entire weeks of politico-philosophical conversation could chatter on without a single mention of this simple axiom.
The fact is, while convictions can run all the way through a person, perfect verification is an elusive goal. We believers have personal reasons to be sure of our faith. Quoting regulatory doctrine rarely comes into play in these discussions. Global warming “believers” have a lot of good reasons to be confident in what they see as fact.
And like any juicy, contentious doctrine, the only chance at receiving objective proof for either of these probably comes too late to reap the benefits of believing.
Stepping slightly back from my previous perspective on the faith, the important thing is not to shun politics. As said, reaching a level of acceptance has its own power, which must be managed rather than forsaken. Rather than getting elected to city council, note how Jesus played the powers of the Romans against those of the Pharisees throughout his ministry. This is leveraging the stick without wielding it.
And, above all, don’t let the fundamentals of your message become marginalized by the external pressures of visibility. It’s a sure recipe to gain numbers and lose integrity.