Global faith leaders worship the false god of climate change

What's really happening at conferences held by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum

I’ve never seen a golden calf or a statue of Baal in my town square, but idolatry is alive and well in the 21st Century. Our privileged culture daily bends the knee to the false gods of social media, status, sex, leisure, money, political correctness, and — perhaps a surprising threat to the gospel — climate change.

At the United Nations’ recent climate conference, interfaith world leaders held a “Climate Repentance Ceremony” initially planned for Mount Sinai, where God delivered the Ten Commandments to Moses, to unveil “10 principles for climate justice.” And a new World Economic Forum task force is brazenly named after the Greek goddess of the earth, Gaea: Giving to Amplify Earth Action.

It seems the phrase “climate cult” isn’t just a political dig anymore. Climate change has become a pagan idol our world leaders worship unapologetically — placing climate action on a pedestal at the expense of everything else, including humans. The consequences of caving to climate extremism may literally be measured in lives. 

The interfaith leaders offering their phony commandments may claim their ideas are godly or, at least, for the greater good. But they must have missed the words clearly laid out in Genesis 1: “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.” It couldn’t be clearer than that. Men and women are called to have dominion over the earth — to influence it, to shape it, to use it for good — not to make it (or its temperature) a god in itself. Even before the fall, Adam and Eve were given a job in the garden: “to work it and keep it.” Their calling was to serve God by making the land useful and valuable for his kingdom.

It’s a calling we carry on today. Christians are commanded to be stewards of all we are blessed with, including the environment, but to never make any of those blessings the be all and end all. 

But the problem with the climate leaders’ brazen caricature of God’s law isn’t just their sacrilege. It’s that their ideas will make the lives of our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world much, much worse, not better. 

Nothing in human history, beyond the resurrection of our Savior, has improved human lives more than access to energy. It’s no coincidence that the greatest improvement in the human condition sparked during the Industrial Revolution. Since then, life expectancy has nearly doubled, and extreme poverty has plummeted from nearly half the world’s population to less than 10% in the last 50 years alone. In fact, nearly every advancement that’s meaningfully improved lives would have been impossible without fossil fuel-based energy.

Yet even now, billions of people still have either no electricity at all or less than it takes to power the average American refrigerator. These billions are suffering needlessly from crushing poverty and all that comes with it — devastatingly short lives, rampant disease, tragic child mortality, violence and brutal oppression, little to no education.

It’s difficult to argue with a straight face that a few fractions of a degree would meaningfully improve the lives of our brothers and sisters in developing countries praying their children don’t die of famine, war, or pestilence during the night. And it’s hard to tell families in our own neighborhoods that they’ll just have to tighten their grocery budgets or skip their prescription refills again to make ends meet.

Yet ironically, even the most stringent climate rules and regulations wouldn’t affect the temperature anyway. According to the same climate data models used by the United Nations and those interfaith leaders participating in the ceremony to trumpet the apocalypse, even banning all fossil fuels nationwide would cut global temperatures by less than two-tenths of a degree. Destroying the energy industry that has powered our nation and the world to unprecedented prosperity for this measly result would be a waste indeed.

Respect for the earth and improving human lives aren’t mutually exclusive goals. Wayne Grudem puts it this way: “Do we really think God set up the earth to work in such a way that the more we do these morally right things, the more we will destroy the earth?” We can and should use our gifts and talents to build the kingdom of God. We can and should use our natural resources in a wise, respectful manner to do so. But God, not an arbitrary number of degrees on a thermometer, must always be at the center.

Climate change — like abortion, gender, marriage, and so many other critical issues in our culture today — isn’t complicated. It’s no longer a political issue at all. It’s a Genesis 1 issue — a battle over the meaning of life itself.