Not too long ago, I was caught up in a political discussion on social media—something typically avoided by people wiser than me—and I found myself going back and forth about global warming with someone whose views are to the left of mine. Neither of us was winning the debate, but I had a moment of self-awareness in which I realized that I did not really know what I was talking about. Sure, I was able to apply conservative talking points to the discussion to my own advantage, but that is not the same thing as the honest search for truth. Therefore, I resolved to investigate the question of climate change/global warming and see if I could find out what was happening.

This began an odyssey as I read about a dozen or so books about climate change from the perspective of people who take science seriously. It led me to a pretty dark place, and so I could well relate to Brian McLaren when he says early in his latest book, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart:

“…nearly twenty years ago, I researched and published a book on global crises. About two years ago, I felt I should return to the subject and immerse myself in the latest data. During my research, there have been moments when I felt like the ground was falling out from under my feet. I have thought about things I’ve never thought about before and felt things I’ve never felt before.” (p. 7).

This mirrors my experience, and it seems McLaren may have dug even deeper than I did. However, though not wanting to be too much of a nitpicker, I suspect McLaren, who is a pastor and former English professor, did not immerse himself in the latest data as much as he immersed himself in the literature, which is not the same thing. Like me, he would have been reliant on journalists interpreting the data, or perhaps climate scientists attempting to communicate the data to a general audience. He was not taking on the data unmediated—nor was I. More on this later.

Reading the literature led McLaren to conclude, as suggested by the book’s title, that we are doomed. He thinks that the collapse of industrial civilization is imminent, if not the extinction of the human species itself. Talking about his research for his 2007 book, Everything Must Change, he says:

“In that year of research and writing, I became convinced that human civilization as we knew it was destroying itself. It was on a suicidal, eco-cidal trajectory arcing toward the collapse of the global ecosystems on which we all depend.” (p. 17).

In this same chapter, “I Am Waking Up,” he goes on to discuss his frustration with religious leaders for not being as alarmed as he is about the situation. Toward the end of the chapter, he poses a series of questions for the reader to ponder, such as

“Because facing current available data forces us to think about our own deaths and the possible demise of our civilization or even the whole human species, how can we predispose ourselves to live well while we’re still alive?” (p. 19).

McLaren closes each chapter with questions for discussion for people who are reading this book in book clubs or reading groups. I suppose this grows out of his experience both as a professor and a pastor. He is a natural teacher, and he lays the book out almost as if it is intended to be a course of study. This might appeal to some people, but I found it off-putting. It seemed patronizing to me, as if he had the knowledge and wisdom and our job was to absorb it. He does not engage in an argument for his belief in the impending collapse of civilization so much as he just assumes the reader will accept that he has correctly analyzed the data and come to the right conclusions, and we are there for him to walk us through a process of thinking about what we should do in light of the truths which he reveals.

That process consists of four major steps as he lays it out in the four main parts of the book. First there is “Letting Go.” By this, he basically means that we must be willing to let go of the two main things which have failed us (and which he sees as intertwined): fundamentalist Christianity, and capitalism. He states:

“Watching how religious institutions have behaved in the years since [a conference he attended in 2004], I’ve come to see the degree to which the religious industrial complex is a wholly owned subsidiary of the global capitalist economy. I now suspect that our spiritual or religious identities take shape within an even deeper frame, our economic identity. It doesn’t have to be this way, and I wish it weren’t this way, but my seven decades of life have led me to believe that these days, economics more often shapes theology than theology shapes economics.” (p. 67).

Well, maybe, but people who live in a socialist economy are no less fallen than those who live in a capitalist economy, as historical experience bears out. In fact, advanced capitalist societies like the United States tend to have better environmental records than Marxist/socialist economies like the former Soviet Union, or even Communist China, which has the largest carbon footprint in the world right now and is emitting almost three times as much carbon as the United States, which is second largest—though our per capita output is still larger. I don’t say that to sacralize capitalism, but McLaren says several things which sound like he is just repeating leftist shibboleths. To be fair to him, he is not advocating industrialized socialist economies either. We will now proceed to what he does advocate.

The second section of the book is entitled, “Letting Be.”  This is where he begins to introduce his prescription for the situation, which is described in his chapter, “Seek Indigenous Wisdom.” Once you understand the inevitability of the collapse of industrial civilization, you are ready to seek wisdom and direction from those whose societies have already collapsed, such as native Americans. McLaren states:

“I’ve come to see that the conquest, domination, land theft, exploitation, and genocide of indigenous peoples that I associate with colonialism is one side of the gold-plated coin of our current civilization. One the other side is the conquest, domination, land theft, exploitation, and ecocide of the Earth and all her creatures.” (p. 102).

He continues:

“To put it bluntly, our civilization is colonialism, and colonialism is our civilization.” (p. 103).

McLaren says there is no way that we can address the issues of our rapacious and greedy civilization from within the civilization, as we are too formed by the presuppositions which characterize our culture: deeply engrained beliefs about progress, technology, and growth, to name a few. He then asks:

“So where might we find some outside consultants and guides who have not been shaped by our self-defeating economic assumptions? The natural answer would be among indigenous peoples who lived for millennia on their lands without overshoot and collapse.” (p. 103).

Yes, you heard correctly. McLaren is suggesting we should return to pre-industrial civilization. In essence, he has adopted a position indistinguishable from that of the Unabomber.

He goes on to equate indigenous people with the meek, whom Jesus says will inherit the Earth. However, he omits the fact that there was violence among the native people in the Americas before the Europeans arrived, and he conveniently overlooks practices like human sacrifice in Mesoamerica. Speaking of Jesus, McLaren says:

“I shouldn’t be surprised Jesus would see things this way. After all, he was an indigenous man, part of a people rooted in the land who had resisted arrogant tyrants and colonizing civilizations since Pharoah.” (p, 106).

He goes on the frame the history of the Hebrews in the same terms one would employ to describe the experiences of the Native Americans, even referring to the exiles to Egypt and Babylon as “trails of tears.” He concludes this passage by saying:

“I feel I have begun to see what the Bible actually is and has been all along: the collective diary of an indigenous people who saw what the colonizer mindset was doing to humanity, to the Earth, and to her creatures.” (p. 107).

I will not be recommending Life After Doom to anyone for its theology. However, at the time I finished reading it, I was still stressed about global warming, and I want to talk about that for a bit before I end this review. There is more I could say about the McLaren book, but from a Biblical perspective it does not get better. That said, even if McLaren has wandered away from historically Christian views (and he has), that alone may not mean he is wrong about global warming. I was still left with my concerns about what is happening with the climate. Fortunately, I stumbled upon a book that helped me put things in perspective scientifically: Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, by Steven E. Koonin. This is a book that the Cornwall Alliance – For the Stewardship of Creation, an organization I recently learned about, also recommends in their Book Review: Unsettled by Steven Koonin.

Koonin is a theoretical physicist by training, with a B.S. in Physics from Caltech (1972) and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from MIT (1975). He was an assistant professor at Caltech, Chief Scientist at British Petroleum, and Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy during the Obama Administration. I am not doing a review here of Unsettled—though I do recommend it—but reading it had the effect of letting me relax a bit. Although Koonin is not a climate scientist, his work on computational physics (he wrote one of the early textbooks on it in 1985) gives him some insight into the weaknesses of climate models. Basically, it boils down to this: modeling the climate is very hard to do. We cannot precisely predict the rate of climate warming, so we should not rush into solutions without understanding the problem’s severity. Koonin acknowledges that the planet is warming, and human activity contributes to it. However, he states that it is challenging to determine the extent of human influence compared to natural processes. Koonin suggests that further study is required to understand the issue more thoroughly—an unsurprising position for a scientist to hold.

I don’t think Koonin’s book is the last word on the issue, and he has predictably come under fire from other scientists. Some say that his book is based on out-of-date data. The arguments quickly become quite technical, and it is difficult for a layperson who is not an expert in statistics to avoid getting overwhelmed, which is why I think a non-scientist like McLaren was not persuaded by the scientific data but was instead persuaded by how somebody interpreted the data. However, in Koonin’s case, he tries to walk his readers through why he thinks many people are misinterpreting what the data says.

It is possible I may be engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning here. I want it to be the case that we have time left to adjust to the changing climate, and that focusing on adaptation as much as mitigation is the way to go. Both McLaren and Koonin concur that many of the effects of human emissions of greenhouse gases are inevitable at this point. Koonin speaks of his reflections upon his return from a Science and Technology in Society forum in 2004:

“Virtually all of the policy discussions focused on mitigating emissions, but it is the concentration of gas in the atmosphere that influences the climate…But the concentration is the result of cumulative emissions, and as we saw earlier, the CO₂ we’ve added to the atmosphere doesn’t go away when we stop emitting it. Emissions accumulate in the atmosphere and remain there for centuries as they are slowly absorbed by plants and the oceans.”

Therefore, Koonin argues that we need to think about how we will adapt to the warming planet more than we focus on reducing emissions, especially when reducing emissions imposes severe economic burdens on society. Fortunately, according to him, we still have time to do so. On the other hand, another organization I am just becoming familiar with is the C02 Coalition which suggests that we are on 140-million-year trend of dangerously decreasing CO2.

The oceans may be rising, but if so, this change is occurring gradually. It is not necessary to panic or to immediately evacuate all coastal cities. However, it would seem prudent to begin carefully considering zoning regulations regarding future development of beachfront properties.

But I digress. Maybe McLaren is right about the science, and we really are doomed. However, if that is the case, it is even more reason to get the theology right, and I am afraid he falls short on that score. Ω

Doug Duncan, MS, LPC, is a former member of a cultic, Bible-based group in Dallas, Texas. After he and his wife, Wendy, left that group, Doug returned to graduate school to earn a Master’s Degree in Counseling and became a Licensed Professional Counselor while Wendy wrote an excellent memoir of their experience in—and painful separation from—their cultic group, I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. Since that time, they have co-facilitated a support group for former members of cultic and spiritually abusive groups, and have recently started a second support group for people looking to rebuild their relationship with God after experiencing spiritual abuse. Also, they each contributed chapters to Wounded Faith: Understanding and Healing from Spiritual Abuse, edited by Rev. Dr. Neil Damgaard. Doug also sees people recovering from abusive groups in his private counseling practice, and Wendy sees people for recovery coaching. Their website is www.dallascult.com, and you can email them at info@dallascult.com.

These days they enjoy spending time with friends and family, and worshipping at their home church, St. Matthew’s Episcopal Cathedral in Dallas, TX

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