Sounding the Alarm on Climate Alarmists

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic . . . and act as if our house was on fire.”1

So said Greta Thunberg, the then 16-year-old Swedish prophetess of doom in an impassioned plea for humanity to step up and do whatever it takes to save what is, in her view, a rapidly dying planet.

At the UN Climate Action summit in 2019, Thunberg lamented, “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. . . . If you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil.”2 Such claims might motivate listeners to join her cause. Even some Christians might see environmental activism as falling in line with the biblical creation mandate to steward the earth. But before we ring the alarm bells, we should discern the false religious message of climate activists and act according to God’s Word.

The Religious Language of Environmental Activists

Thunberg’s exhortation to save the planet is a religious message. It presents the planet as defiled and in need of salvation from humanity’s sins against it through their exploitative deforestation, oil drilling, and coal mining. Climate alarmists view the earth as a living organism and see mankind as an infection upon it. And if humans have sinned against the earth, then they surely must repent of their sin and remedy their harm. In 2019, students at Union Theological Seminary in New York City confessed their sins to plants. The seminary tweeted,

Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.3

And in October 2021, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, made booths available for people to confess their climate sins.4 On the final day of the COP26 climate conference, Population Matters, a UK-based charity, advocated for smaller families for the sake of the environment. They displayed the message “Smaller Families, Cooler Planet” on a giant inflatable baby. How should we reduce the size of families? A study published by PubMed.org asserts, “No nation desirous of reducing its growth rate to 1% or less can expect to do so without the widespread use of abortion.”5 These activists view abortion as a means of reducing the world’s surplus population to regulate carbon emissions.

The Rise of Neo-Paganism

It is bound in the hearts of men to worship something. If we don’t worship God, we will worship idols—false gods. The twentieth-century religious commentator David Miller stated, “At the death of God, we will see the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.”6 Miller described the so-called death of God in society not as the victory of atheism but as the return of spiritual paganism. We are already seeing this in our culture today.

In October 2021, a church in the UK opened a Gaia exhibition to show our responsibility for taking care of the environment—Gaia being the name for the Greek goddess of the earth.7

In April 2022, Yale Divinity School held its first non-Christian service in honor of Earth Day. The 80 attendees participated in a chalice lighting ceremony in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, then prayed to the Hindu fertility god, Prithivi, the personification of the earth. Master of Divinity student Tasha Brownfield led the event and claims that she is “trying to launch and curate ‘pantheistic mysticism’ as a religious practice.”8

The Bible outlines only two worldviews: worship of the Creator or worship of the creature. (Romans 1:25)

The Bible outlines only two worldviews: worship of the Creator or worship of the creature (Romans 1:25). God is not what he created. Rather, what he has created reflects who he is. When you observe an oak tree, a rainbow trout, or a toadstool, you do not observe God—you observe what God has created (Psalm 19:1). The Creator and the creation are two distinct things. The Bible teaches, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Since the universe had a beginning, it cannot be God, as God cannot both have a beginning and have no beginning. Therefore, the universe is not God.

If the Creator/creature distinction is blurred, then a sort of pantheism results. Pantheism worships that which is unworthy of worship: creation (Romans 1:22, 25). This is because pantheism is the result of a natural theology (a view of creation) that rejects divine revelation (the Word of the Creator). Rather than worship the Creator God, they worship creation, mother nature, earth.

This transfer of worship from Creator to creation has resulted in a new spirituality: neo-paganism. But whereas ancient paganism named their abundance of false gods, neo-paganism focuses on a vague spirituality and unnamed powers. The neo-pagan worldview finds its roots in eastern mysticism such as Confucianism and Buddhism—religions that do not acknowledge an infinite personal God who transcends the physical world and governs history. Because both secularism and pantheism deny a transcendent Creator, atheists find that they can accept and even practice mystical spirituality. Atheists are open toward a generic “spirituality” if it doesn’t involve a God who rules over them.

It’s not uncommon to hear younger generations say, “I am not religious, but I am spiritual,” meaning that they are not part of a church or organized religion but are open to spiritual practices such as transcendental meditation, positive thinking, and witchcraft. A 2021 survey by Springtide Research Institute discovered that 71% of Americans ages 13–25 identified as “religious” while 78% claimed the label “spiritual.”

In an interview in the UK newspaper the Times (April 2019), Gail Bradbrook, a molecular biophysicist and the founder of the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion, said,

I don’t believe in God, like there’s some person there organising everything. I think there’s something inherently beautiful and sacred about the universe and I think you can feel that just as well as an atheist. A bit of me thinks, “Is there a way to have some form of dialogue with the universe?”9

Discerning the Truth

Unlike biblical morality, neo-pagan spirituality offers no right or wrong answers to life’s questions. Because nature, not God, is their standard for living, many people are confused about the identity of the planet. The more spiritual they become without God and his Word as a foundation, the more spiritually confused they become.

In the biblical worldview, there is no need to panic about the future of the planet. God created the earth about 6,000 years ago to be inhabited, and he has promised to keep the earth for life until the consummation of all things (Genesis 8:22). Our responsibility is to care for creation, not worship it.

Nowhere in his Word does God tell his followers to limit how many children they have because a higher population will destroy the earth. In his first charge to mankind, God said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Psalm 127:3 affirms, “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.”

When we neglect God’s mandate for us to steward the earth, we sin against God, not the planet. We learn our responsibility to care for the earth from God and his Word, not a pagan deity or even from the earth itself.

God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26)

The responsibility that God has given to humans to care for the planet is not exploitation of the earth. It is for the good of human life. God created plants to be food for humans and animals.

And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.” (Genesis 1:29)

And after the flood, God said,

“Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” (Genesis 9:3)

Environmental activists have “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). When we make the intentional choice to exchange God for a lie, we will be judged for our choice.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. so they are without excuse. (Romans 1:18–20)

Biblical Response to Climate Alarmism

Climate alarmism is the result of an evolutionary worldview of history and creation. In the evolutionary worldview, the earth’s history spans billions of years and was formed by random processes. Therefore, it is up to people to understand it and fix it. If there is no creator guiding history, then humans are responsible for the fate of the earth.

Until Jesus returns, God has promised that “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22)

But Genesis and the genealogies in the Bible show us that the earth was created by God only about 6,000 years ago. Until Jesus returns, God has promised that “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22). It’s true that the earth’s climate has gone through cycles of change since the catastrophic upheaval of the worldwide flood of God’s judgment. But we must not fear that the planet will die and everything on it perish.

Ultimately, fear of climate catastrophe grows from a lack of the fear of God. Climate alarmists are those who “hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord” (Proverbs 1:29).

Our job as believers and obedient followers of God is to speak the truth with love and authority to a lost and confused world—the truth of earth’s origin, its coming end, and eventual renewal along with the necessity of trusting Christ for salvation and confessing sin to him, the only one who can forgive.

That doesn’t mean that we can desert our God-given responsibility to steward the earth. But we must keep our stewardship in perspective. We should prayerfully discern and mindfully practice biblical stewardship not in praise of the earth but in obedience out of love for God and our neighbors.

Biblical stewardship may look different depending on where people live. For some, it could mean resisting the temptations of materialism and being content with what we have. It could mean maintaining an awareness of where our materials come from, careful that we aren’t contributing to the exploitation of human beings made in God’s image. It could mean looking for ways to meet human needs without contributing to pollution that gratuitously harms ecosystems and causes serious illnesses and cancers. It could mean showing compassion to farm or factory animals and pets within our care (Proverbs 12:10). It could mean turning off electronic devices and spending more time appreciating God’s creation and worshipping him for it. But it most certainly means keeping a right perspective of the earth and exercising godly discernment when it comes to extreme calls for panic over the changing climate.

Though climate alarmists like Greta Thunberg inspire a false religion of despair and alarm, believers in Christ can offer the world the true hope of the gospel and an all-powerful Creator and Sustainer who has not left us to our own devices but offers salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ.