By Lewis Loflin
In 2008, I pegged modern environmentalism as a pseudo-religion, a mishmash of socialism, spiritual yearning, and anti-Christian bile—science be damned. My digs at eco-hysteria, from Y2K flops to global warming rants, show it’s dogma dressed as reason. This piece unpacks its roots: ex-Marxists railing at capitalism, “unchurched” atheists seeking purpose, and a 1967 screed blaming Christianity for progress. In 2025, with eco-zeal still loud, it’s clear: this isn’t about facts—it’s faith with a green tint.
Modern environmentalism in 2008 has several origins—a syncretism of varying beliefs with three broad influences. It’s a social and religious movement, indifferent to science but eager to wield it for dogma. To grasp its core, we must dissect its main drivers.
Economically, it’s socialism redux. Since communism’s 1990s collapse, disgruntled Marxists swelled its ranks, bashing capitalism for an “ecological crisis.” Yet, while the U.S. and Europe catch flak, the *New York Times* (Nov. 14, 2008) notes “brown clouds” of toxic muck dimming Asia—communist China and third-world polluters skate free. The eco-left’s capitalist fixation betrays their agenda.
Then there’s the spiritual void. Christianity’s wane left the “unchurched” adrift—atheism and Humanism couldn’t stir their souls. Socialism, a pseudo-religion for the “godless,” flopped, and atheism alone didn’t fill the gap. They craved purpose, not just cold logic.
In 1967, Lynn White’s *The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis* laid the religious groundwork. Since the ‘60s counterculture, eco-doomsayers have churned out flops—ice ages in the ‘70s, Paul Ehrlich’s *The Population Bomb* (1968), ozone holes, acid rain, now man-made warming. Like Christian prophecy hacks tweaking Hal Lindsey’s *The Late Great Planet Earth*, they reprogram their models when reality bites. Ronald Bailey (*Eco-Scam*, 1993) asks of Ehrlich, Lester Brown, Carl Sagan: “As soon as one predicted disaster doesn’t occur, the doomsayers skip to another… why don’t they see… things are getting better?” Crisis sells; reason doesn’t.
White defines environmentalism’s religious base and its anti-Christian edge:
What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny—that is, by religion.
The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture… Our daily habits… are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress… rooted in… Judeo-Christian theology.
White contrasts ancients’ “cyclical time” (Aristotle) with Christianity’s linear arc—progress from a start to an end. In Judeo-Christianity, God transcends nature; man, His image, rules it:
Christianity… established a dualism of man and nature… insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends…
The Greek East, White says, stagnated—mystical, not scientific—preserving Greek texts but not advancing. The 1054 East-West split was more than theology:
The Greeks believed… sin was intellectual blindness… salvation… in illumination… The Latins… felt… sin was moral evil… salvation… in right conduct… in the Greek East, nature was… a symbolic system through which God speaks… essentially artistic rather than scientific… science… could scarcely flourish…
The West saw nature as a machine to decode, revealing the “mind of God”:
…modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology… modern technology… an Occidental… realization of… man’s transcendence of, and rightful master over, nature. But… science and technology… joined to give mankind powers… out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.
Guilt for what? Vaccines? Printing presses? White, an atheist veering pantheist, scorns the Judeo-Christian God, equating humans with bugs:
What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and… technology are not going to get us out of… [this] crisis until we find a new religion… [to] depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God’s creatures.
For a rebuttal, see j.p.richardson/lynnwhite.html.
Lynn Townsend White, Jr. (1907-1987), a medieval history professor at Princeton, Stanford, and UCLA, led Mills College (1943-1958). He tied Western tech supremacy to medieval Christianity’s “activist character,” arguing in his 1967 *Science* article that it sparked the 20th-century ecological crisis. Wiki
Moving Beyond Kyoto: A Responsible Approach to Climate Change, US Senator Chuck Hagel, September 7, 2000:
We must view climate change… with… perspective… interconnected in every way… a… balance… so… developing nations… create… growth and prosperity… assist… emerging democracies and market economies… productive capacity… will require energy resources… The Kyoto Protocol is more about energy than… environment… restricting and controlling energy… As nations prosper… [there’s] less conflict, poverty, hunger and war… climate change decisions by a few… [must not] impede… progress… This will only produce a more dangerous… world.
Hagel’s reason cuts through White’s mysticism—energy drives peace, not eco-utopias.
Acknowledgment: Thanks to Grok, an AI by xAI, for aiding this draft. Final edits are mine.
John Nelson Darby
Christian Premillennialism