Ideas@TheCentre
Lent for climate change?
The season of Lent began this week. Some Christians will mark the six-week period of preparation for Easter with prayer and fasting. Others will take this opportunity to renew their commitment to what they consider important moral causes.
One moral cause spruiked this year has been the call by leaders of Christian churches in the United Kingdom for repentance and a ‘change of direction’ to fight the dangers of climate change.
The campaign has been organised by the Christian environmental lobby group Operation Noah, which was founded in 2001 to promote ‘the urgent need to address climate change.’
The group recently launched a declaration called ‘Climate Change and the purposes of God – a call to the Church.’ Predictably, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is one of the signatories.
Operation Noah’s convenor, Anglican bishop David Atkinson, has even gone so far as to describe climate change as ‘the most significant moral question facing us today.’
Australians absorbed by the implosion of the federal government will remember a similarly extravagant claim made by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who said climate change was ‘the greatest moral challenge of our time.’
Rudd blinked when the political cost of attempting to meet that ‘moral challenge’ became apparent. It eventually cost him his job.
Now Bishop Atkinson has out-Rudded Rudd by declaring that the theory of man-made carbon dioxide-induced climate change ‘is not mostly about science. It is about something deeper – how we see ourselves in relation to God, to others, to the whole of creation.’
He may well be right. But by moving the terms of the debate from the realm of science to the apparently higher ground of moral theology, Atkinson has displayed a disordered sense of priority.
Those looking for great and greater moral challenges in the contemporary world don’t need to look too hard. The Syrian government is slaughtering dissidents and foreign journalists. Iranians are threatening to immolate the ‘Zionist entity’ in the Middle East. And criminally corrupt governments in Africa are starving their people.
Faced with moral challenges such as these, Atkinson’s claim may be audacious. But, then again, it might just be plain ludicrous.
Peter Kurti is a Visiting Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. He makes neither audacious or ludicrous remarks on Twitter.
