When a cult attempts to infiltrate and change a religion
For These Young Evangelical Activists, Facing the Climate Crisis Is an Act of Faith
A few years back, William Morris came to realize just how he could be a light unto the world. Before this precise moment in time, his visions of a missionary life had involved foreign climes, distant shores, desecrated wastelands in desperate need of redemption. Then he had looked around at his native L.A. At the church he’d grown up attending. At the faith community he’d always considered to be his home. When it came to the climate crisis, he realized, his own flock were still living in darkness. Perhaps, with God’s grace, he could help bring them to the light.
Growing up in a conservative evangelical Baptist church, Morris, 25, had been the beneficiary of proper conservative evangelical indoctrination: “You know, evolution is a made-up political thing, and climate isn’t really changing,†he says. “LGBTQ people are sinful. All these different checking off of all those boxes, basically.†Yet he’d gravitated toward science, especially once he got to middle school and the labs and experiments had proven to him that rather than being “trickery,†what he was learning was undeniably true. Such a realization didn’t cause a crisis of faith per se, but it did lead to a mental bifurcation, a sense that God and science could coexist, but in two separate realms, largely divorced from each other.
In college, where he majored in environmental science, Morris found that he was often in a group of one — the only science major in class who openly identified as Christian and the only person in church who was a science major. Then one day, sitting in on a congregational meeting on mission work, he heard one of the speakers talking about environmental missions. “I was like, ‘What the heck is that?’ †Morris tells me. “It was the first time I heard someone who was Christian explicitly doing environmental stuff. I went up to him right after and was like, ‘Hey, we need to talk.’ â€
That conversation eventually led Morris to spend a month doing volunteer work with a Christian conservation organization in Kenya, cataloging rare bird species, mapping mangrove forests, and collecting data on coral reefs. His meals and his free time were shared with other Christian environmentalists and scientists, most of whom were Kenyan and notably did not share his evangelical American hang-ups. He marveled at how their faith was not only integrated into their environmental pursuits but was in fact integral to them.
Well, see, there’s the reality of environmental concerns and then the mule fritters of climate apocalypse. BTW, how did he get to Kenya? You know it wasn’t through walking, biking, and sailing ships.
Morris also began to see this holistic view all over scripture: in Genesis, where the mandate to have dominion over creation did not seem to imply callous exploitation but rather a call to wise stewardship, and throughout the Gospels, where Jesus didn’t assuage people’s suffering with promises of the afterlife but actually tended to their physical needs in the here and now. So, Morris pondered, wouldn’t loving one’s neighbor mean protecting their habitat? Making sure they could grow food, have clean air and water, not be subjected to forced migration or the “threat multiplier†that he knew climate change to be?
In other words, the climate cult beliefs are hijacking the actual religious beliefs, demanding that he use those beliefs to force Other People to comply with the climate cult beliefs.
In integrating his faith with his environmentalism, Morris came to have a new understanding of what that faith entailed, one that he actually felt was deeper and more authentic. Before the world could be healed by the church, he reasoned, maybe the church needed healing through its engagement with the world. He would go home and preach the message of environmentalism.
It’s a cult. Definitely a cult. Once which is attempting to change the Christian religion from within, making Biblical beliefs secondary to Cult of Climastrology beliefs.
As one would expect with a Rolling Stone article, it’s full of crazy, climavirtue signaling, belittling Christianity, and long.
Teach
You nowcagree that in fact the world is warming but you refuse yo yell is why
You only say CO2 is a minor cause
What is the major cause ?/
Change in orbit?
Volcanic activity?
Increase in sun radiance?
Meteor impact ?
Hairy explain why a world that is 1-2 degrees warmer is such a huge concern?
How’s things in that giant concrete metropolis that poured zillions of tons of Greenhouse gases into the atmosphere working out for you?
Why do you want flyover country to support your Concrete Drug addiction in New Jersey?
Why do you want to be rid of Cows and chickens and buffalo and yet know what the price of a BIG MAC is in NYC?
In the grand scheme of things give us please the AGW talking points of why a warmer planet is so evil, and how an essential building block of life is so life threatening?
I would love to hear your take on this rather than AGW talking points and a HOW DARE YOU meme to the OP of this blog.
Rolling Stone wrote:
If Mr Morris environmentalism is inextricably bound together with his religious faith, shouldn’t we expect him to be one of those who is most greatly concerned about changing his own life, his own consumption, as he tries to change that of others?
It’s all well and good to note that warmunists like Al Gore and John François Kerry and Joe Biden are hypocrites, because they are Democratic politicians, who are by definition hypocrites. But young Mr Morris is an evangelical Christian, from a “conservative evangelical Baptist” denomination, and he is telling us that his whole life is, or should be — no Christian is perfect, after all — guided by his faith.
Thus, along with dancing, premarital sex, and alcohol — note the use of the Oxford comma there, and why it’s vital — we must expect him to similarly eschew plastic bottles, hamburgers or steak, fossil fueled transportation, cell phones, the internet, leather belts and shoes, food not locally grown and transported to farmers’ markets by ass-drawn carts, and vaccines transported by modern conveyances.
His religious faith demands such! If he demands such of us, and his faith in God demands it, then he must demand such of himself as well.
Teach mocks an Evangelical Christian for volunteer work on the environment in Kenya. “He could have biked, boated or swam”.
Even Evangelical Christian are not permitted to understand science according to members of Cult45.
Since Mr Morris purports to understand global warming Teach considers him to be a captive of a cult rather than a thinking individual.
The increasingly childish Mr Dana questions whether Mr Morris is even a real christian by perpetuating the logical fallacy that anyone not perfect MUST be a hypocrite, the worst of crimes!! Does Mr Dana consider himself a Christian?
The obviously annoyed Mr Dowd wrote:
Perhaps Mr Dowd needs some reading glasses, given that he seems to have missed the clause, “no Christian is perfect, after all,” in my comment.
In no place did I state that Mr Morris isn’t a “real Christian.” I did note that Mr Morris ought to be bound, by his own words, to live the life he wishes to inflict upon others.
So-called ‘evangelicals’ lacking faith in God to fix the problem?
As fortold?
Rev. 11:19.
Ultimately God doesn’t “fix the problem”, we do. God just gives us the wherewithal to do it. But ya gotta get off your ass and do it for yourself.
BTW, once again The Elwood projects. We Christians expect no one to be perfect. We don’t even expect them to be perfect Christians since we realize if that were possible Christ would never have come to save us. Only non-Christians expect those who profess Christianity to always be pure and always perfect. It’s the basic misconception of heathenism. Just so The Elwood is no longer confused Christians are not perfect, we are however, forgiven.