Don't Even Think About It (34 page)

Like Hayhoe, he says that his religious belief and his scientific research are entirely compatible. God, Houghton tells me, creates the laws, and his role as a scientist is to discover them. He recognizes that scientists talk about the evidence base rather than the belief, but then, for Houghton, religion is also evidence-based. “Even if there are aspects that you do not understand, it all fits together in a way that you cannot escape from and there are laws of evidence to support it.”

People of religious faith have understood all along that there is actually no clear dividing line between the rational and the emotional brains, but rather a conversation between the two. As the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew said, “We know what needs to be done [about climate change] and we know how it must be done. Yet, despite the information at our disposal, unfortunately very little is done. It is a long journey from the head to the heart; and it is an even longer journey from the heart to the hands.” This is another expression of the challenge of converting the rational-brain understanding of climate change into the emotional-brain commitment to action.

For the purposes of this book, though, what makes religious belief so relevant to climate change conviction is that both struggle against the same cognitive obstacles. As I have already discussed, climate change is extremely challenging because it requires people to accept that something is true solely because of the authority of the communicator, it manifests in events that are distant in time and place, and it challenges our normal experience and our assumptions about the world. Above all, climate change requires people to endure certain short-term losses in order to avoid uncertain long-term costs.

Religion faces every one of these obstacles, but to an even greater degree. It is even less certain, has none of the objective proof of science, is based on evidence that is remote from people’s ordinary existence, and requires people to accept rules governing their most intimate lives—their sexual activities, diet, and child rearing. It has, I grant you, the major advantage of offering personal reward in an afterlife, though this too is based on extreme uncertainty.

As the Reverend Sally Bingham, an Episcopalian preacher and renewables advocate, put it to me: “We believe that Mary was a virgin, that Jesus rose from the dead, that we might go to heaven. So why is it that two thousand years later, we still believe this story? And how can we believe that and not believe what the world’s most famous climate scientists tell us?”

Religions also call on people to constrain their wordly desires. The tradition of abstinence and self-restraint works through all the world’s great religions: Eastern and Western. To quote Muhammad: “What have I to do with worldly things? My connection with the world is like that of a traveler resting for a while underneath the shade of a tree and then moving on.”

Religions embody long-term thinking, encouraging their members to accept responsibilities and invest in a legacy that extends far beyond their own lifetime on Earth. The tagline of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, for example, is “protecting creation, generation to generation.”

Above all, religions have found ways to build strong belief in some extremely uncertain and unsubstantiated claims through the power of social proof and communicator trust. Few are less certain, or more successful, than Mormonism, which has becomes the fastest-growing religion in the United States.

Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, was the first Mormon—a ward bishop, no less—to run for the presidency. He was also the first candidate to openly repudiate climate science. Which raises a very interesting question: What are the key differences that can lead a highly intelligent and worldly man to say “I am uncertain how much of global warming is attributable to man” and yet accept as
certain
that a transcription of tablets found buried in a hillside contains the word of God. I am not seeking to mock Mormons, just asking a legitimate question: What is it that makes one irrelevant and fraudulent and the other the rock of a man’s life?

Maybe the question, then, is not whether climate change is too much like a religion, but whether, in our determination to keep the two apart, we have ignored the most effective, tried, and tested models for overcoming disbelief and denial.

40

Climate Conviction

What the Green Team Can Learn from the God Squad

The images on the video
screens start in familiar documentary style with some low bass tones, a plinking piano, a sun rising, and a slow-motion hand running through the sand. It feels strangely reminiscent of the opening to
2001: A Space Odyssey
—not, I imagine, a favorite film of the twenty-five thousand evangelical Christians who are now rising to their feet, clapping and cheering, as the bass riff picks up and the thirteen-piece rock band rises through the floor of the stage. “Do you hear that beat? Do your
hear
that
beat
? That’s the beat of the FREEDOM!” “YAAAAAAY,” we all go.

Lakewood Church, the largest church in the United States, offers a great package. Great venue. Great tunes. Great gift shop. Pastor Joel Osteen has a toothy bonhomie and offers folksy feel-good sermons. His feisty blonde wife, Victoria, has a rather more animal appeal as she struts the stage in her pencil skirt and stilettos, intoning breathily, “When you grow in love, you grow in
me
. Let it get deep. Deep in
you
. That love is growing—so PUSH into God more.” Crikey.

Nobody there wants to talk about climate change. The Osteens have no desire for an interview despite repeated attempts to get one. When I approach people after the service, many turn away and refuse to talk at all. Others claim ignorance or indifference.

Bob and Michelle from Nashville, though, are trapped alongside me in the pew, palms outstretched to absorb the blessings raining down on them. What do they think? Michelle turns away, unwilling to even discuss it. Bob reckons it’s all a natural cycle, but he’s sure God is in control. Later on I complain that it’s freezing in the air-conditioned basketball stadium that passes for a church. “Yup,” he says chuckling, “not much global warming in here.”

The question on my mind—a reasonable one really—is to ask what Lakewood might have that the world’s greatest crisis does not. Every week Lakewood Church achieves a level of mass mobilization that climate change activists can only dream about. Consider it this way: In February 2013, sixty environmental organizations pulled out the stops to mobilize forty-five thousand people for the largest-ever climate change rally in Washington, D.C. That week, just as many people came to this one church. And just as many came the next. Six times more people will watch this service on television and on the Internet than watched
An Inconvenient Truth
in U.S. cinemas.

If climate change campaigners complain about the lack of foundation funding or media coverage, they should try running an evangelical church. Churches generate their own media, raise their own money, publish their own books, and sell themselves entirely through the quality of the experience they offer converts. They are, as it were, real-time experiments in what moves, excites, and persuades people.

Ara Norenzayan, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia, is determined to identify the winning psychological qualities that have created the world’s dominant religions. After all, he tells me, there are ten thousand religions in the world, so there must be strong reasons why two-thirds of people have come to follow just three of them: Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. These are, he argues, “the descendants of just a few outlier religious movements that have won in the cultural marketplace through two thousand years of successful experimentation.”

Norenzayan is something of an outlier himself, exploring areas that other psychologists consistently ignore. He was one of the researchers who created the acronym WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) and has concluded that these same inward-looking assumptions have led psychologists to seriously underestimate the relevance of religion. He observes that experimental psychologists look around their small subculture and say, ‘No one who is important to me is religious, so this must not be very important.’”

He strongly agrees when I suggest to him that the same criticism could be leveled at the climate change movement. “These people are ignoring the largest social movements in the world and the ones that have proven time and again to have the power to galvanize people into action,” he says.

So what, I ask him, could the climate movement learn from his work on the psychology of religion? He thinks for a moment, and his answer is fascinating.

“From a WEIRD perspective,” he says, “climate change appears to be hopeless because people will never be prepared to make a sacrifice because of the rational calculation. But this is not the case in religions, which contain sacred values that are so fundamental that they are entirely nonnegotiable. They cannot be bought or sold, and people will make any sacrifice to defend them.”

Sacred values are not just about religion. Brain scans have found that the parts of the brain associated with sacred values are those associated with other moral choices. Sacred values are embedded throughout our culture—the defense of our children is a sacred value and we would not sell them at any price. Torture is considered to be wrong and is not subject to any temporal discounting—it will be just as wrong ten years from now as it is now. National parks are a sacred value to Americans—you could never sell Yellowstone.

For Norenzayan, a radical solution would require turning action on climate change into a non-negotiable sacred value. But could you mobilize sacred values without a religion? Absolutely he says—and in any case, a religion “is not like a thing; it’s an assembly of features that become a group called religion. You could co-opt these successful qualities and use them in other contexts.” His view echoes the work of the American sociologist Robert Bellah who argued that religion “is transmitted more by narrative, image, and enactment than through definitions and logical demonstration.”

So, what are the features of the great religions and how might they be mobilized to create sacred values around climate change?

First—and I do not wish to be an apologist for the violence and coercion that often accompanied this process—they have all invested heavily in gaining new audiences through missionary outreach and proselytizing. Much of the growth of Mormonism is due to the high status given to missionary service. Churches have constantly experimented with ways to engage new cultures. Consider, for example, how Catholic missionaries adopted different tactics for working in China. The Franciscans charged in, declaring, “Here is the new God.” The Jesuits, under the instructions of their leader, Matteo Ricci, wore Chinese robes, adopted the Chinese language, and avoided all contact with Europeans.

As religions recruited new members, they developed institutions to maintain a community of shared belief through ritual and shared worship. For the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim, religion was not just a social creation; it was, he said, society made divine. The reward for belief comes from belonging to the community of belief—and the cost of disbelief is social rejection.

Lakewood Church, by any standards a roaring success in the cultural marketplace, is fueled by the irresistible enthusiasm of its mass gatherings. Its critics, of which there are many among traditional Christians, see it as being little more than a weekly rock concert. But it is more intelligent than that. Pastor Joel Osteen focuses on relevance—giving people something to take away. He preaches around simple themes that are directly relevant to people’s lives. Above all, he is upbeat: talking about self-esteem, confidence, and, taking a line from Jesus, how you can “become what you believe.” Go higher in life, he urges, rise above your obstacles, live in health, abundance, healing, and victory. And this is why Bob from Nashville loves him so much—“you always feel so much better afterward,” he says.

Receiving God’s blessing and feeling good need not exclude talk of environmental responsibility or climate change. Northland Church in Longwood, Florida, approaches the scale and showmanship of Lakewood while embracing the message of climate change and caring for God’s creation. Under the leadership of its charismatic pastor, Joel Hunter, Northland has grown into one of the thirty largest churches in the country. It is unusual for its experimentation with new communications technologies. Hunter describes his new forty-two-million-dollar church as a “communications device with a sanctuary attached,” which enables Sunday services to be beamed to a live congregation of more than fifteen thousand people in three churches and services held in people’s homes.

Hunter is warm, considerate, and funny—with his silver hair and broad smile, he looks rather like Jack Palance. I can fully understand why President Obama is glad to have Hunter as a friend and spiritual adviser.

This does not make Hunter into a liberal by any stretch. In his book
A New Kind of Conservative
, he outlines the central authority of the Bible against gay marriage and calls for personal responsibility and smaller government. Hunter likes to describe himself as an independent, deciding on his position issue by issue.