Preach for a greener and fairer land

The Church of England should be more radical when campaigning on the environment, says George Pitcher.

By George PitcherPublished: 7:11AM GMT 02 Nov 2009
I hear that the Grand Mufti of Egypt will today announce in the unlikely setting of Windsor Castle that Mecca is going to become a model green city. Leave aside the prospect of three million or so pilgrims to the Haj this month being told not to fly to Mecca next time, to slaughter ritually only locally produced animals and kindly to use the bike rack before kissing the Black Stone. The real worry for the Church of England must be that this announcement could steal the show for Green Islam.
It's the Christians who are the biggest hand-wringers about the environment and they're certainly out in force at Windsor, where they're cosying up to the United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. It's all under the auspice of something called the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC), founded by the Duke of Edinburgh. It's a sort of religious eco-fest ahead of the politicians' next stab at saving the planet in Copenhagen next month.

The Church of England, as ever, is pitching up with a seven-year "Climate Change Action Plan". This involves lots of worthy activities like "eco-twinning" with church communities in the developing world, building 4,700 "sustainable schools" by 2016 and cutting the Church's carbon footprint by 42 per cent by 2020, which is actually a decade away but I suppose a seven-year plan sounded more scriptural.
I have to say I'm increasingly annoyed by the Church of England's environmental campaigning. It's not so much the twee tokenism of little booklets with titles like How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb? and their injunctions to walk everywhere, though that's irritating enough. It's the docile acceptance by our bishops that man-made global-warming is threatening God's creation and bringing doomsday forward by a few millennia. I have no idea whether global warming is real or not, but I have yet to see any analysis of the competing sciences from the Church of England. It's just an article of faith that we're poisoning the planet with CO2.
Then it dawned on me. Reading the C of E's submission to ARC, I had something of an epiphany. It was suddenly seeing all the references, as if for the first time, to "global justice" and "solidarity with the poor and most vulnerable" and "sustainable ways of living". This isn't really about saving the planet at all. Or, rather, that is a secondary objective to attacking the way we've lived in recent decades, the excess and the global free markets and idolatry of the capitalist way. These are the powers and principalities of our new century and the Church is surely hinting that these too must pass away.
There are plenty who will say that I'm rather late to this conclusion. They bark that the Church of England is now in the grip of the full Leftie gamut from woolly liberals to hardcore neo-Marxists. I don't buy that. Many bishops are actually thoroughly orthodox and highly conservative. Some are even friends of the Prince of Wales, who must have bent his father's ear about today's gig at Windsor. They're no more communist wreckers of civilisation than the Prince is.
What they are is in the fine tradition of the social gospel, interpreters of their Christian faith in the context of the world in which we're really living. Like Archbishop William Temple, or further back, the Victorian philanthropist Archbishop Charles Gore (and you don't get much more patrician than him), they should stand up for the poor first and worry about the planet second. Given the revolting spectacle of bankers throwing themselves back into their state-subsidised troughs and our elected representatives wailing about theirs being taken away, an alternative proffered by our religious leaders should gain some public traction. A model for sustainable living does not, presumably, include today's bankers and MPs and I wish our bishops would say so.
Some of them do, of course. But a lot more time is spent hiding under the altogether safer carapace of environmental activism, where they can point at something amorphous like global warming and talk about social justice in the remote terms of a carbon footprint, rather than censuring the rich and powerful who are doing the damage.
I just wish our bishops would be more honest. They offer an alternative world view to politicians and, instead of talking about reductions in carbon emissions and hoping that these help the poor, it would be good if they started with social justice and economic sustainability and those who stand in the way of them. And the planet might get saved as a bonus.