The ritual goes like this: Believers enter nature, such as in the woods or along lakes and rivers, until they sense that they are being chosen by some natural entities—rocks, plants, soil, birds, rain, animals, or the wind—to speak on their behalf or even to be spiritually possessed by them. Afterward, participants convene and testify to what the birds, rivers, soil, or wind have revealed about themselves.

This process is known as the Council of All Beings, and their website depicted one Council like this:

“The Council of All Beings is a communal ritual in which participants step aside from their human identity and speak on behalf of another life-form.”. . .

We arrived as other life-forms and elemental beings, and introduced ourselves as such. We spoke as oak tree and ocean, fire, forest and eagle and other nonhumans we felt called to represent. . . .

Each being began to describe how life is for us. The ocean spoke of its vastness, the trees of their steadfastness. Water spoke of how it feels to flow and cleanse.

We described the challenges and hardships of living in this ecological time. Ocean spoke of acidification and enormous islands of floating trash. Fire spoke of feeling misused to burn fossil fuels frivolously. . . .

In the end, humanity was given a chance to respond. There was deep grief and heartfelt apology.

The nonhuman beings each gathered the courage to offer gifts of support to humanity. The water offered cleansing, the eagle offered the gift of perspective.¹

Welcome to the world of eco-spirituality, a broad term covering a global array of groups and movements that meld religious faith with environmental/climate change activism. And though The Council of All Beings sounds like Greenpeace meets Sitting Bull, it’s just one manifestation of a growing phenomenon, that of environmentalism or, more recently, of climate change activism, becoming a “religion.” In fact, some have for a long time now been calling it a “Green Religion” or, even, “Dark Green Religion.”²

What is going on? What kind o “religion” are these movements? And what are the problems?

the crusaders

Whether one thinks that climate change is worse than what the most draconian doomsdayers predict, or that the whole thing is a Chinese hoax designed to weaken the West’s economy—it doesn’t matter as far climate activists are concerned. Convinced that our survival as a species, or all species even, is threatened by fossil fuel consumption and deforestation, some are on “sacred” crusade (they believe) to save the planet.

This sense of mission helps explain why the movement often expresses itself in spiritual language and why it manifests some elements—and not necessarily the best ones, either—of more traditional religion: fanaticism, messianism, dogmatism, chauvinism (We alone have it right!)—and intolerance. As Blaise Pascal wrote hundreds of years ago: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”³ Pascal didn’t specify what that religion was. It hardly matters. As some of their eco-spiritual activism (defiling artworks, blocking roads, interrupting sports events, etc.) has revealed, environmental true believers can be as fanatical as snake-handling, tongue-speaking Pentecostals casting out demons at a hootenanny revival in the Bible Belt.

However, if convinced that the world faces an ecological apocalypse and that you are among a select few who can save us—how open to dissent are you going to be? Or even should be?

the eco-spiritual hub

Not all of these activists are like that, of course, but one thing that many do have in common is this spiritual/religious component, as seen on the website The Ecospiritual Hub, whose members include groups such as Atheopaganism, the Center for Wild Spirituality, Creation Spirituality Communities, GreenSpirit, the Wild Church Network, Gaian Way, Earth and Spirit Center, Interfaith Power and Light, Religious Naturalist Association, the Center for Spirituality in Nature, World Pantheist Movement, the Mepkin Abby Forum on Contemplative Ecology, and more.

Each organization depicts itself differently. Gaian Way says that it “stems from the understanding that the Earth is a living system” and that the group “lifts up our spiritual power in knowing that we are part of this being, that it nurtures and sustains us, and gives our lives meaning.”⁴ The Wild Church Network says that “we feel compelled by love to invite people into intimate relationship with some of the most vulnerable victims of our destructive culture: the land, waters, and creatures with whom we share our homes.”⁵ The Center For Wild Spirituality says that though “rooted in the mystical Christ tradition, the vision for the Center for Wild Spirituality is a larger circle that includes and also transcends those who are rooted in the Christian story.”⁶

Whatever their theological differences, they all see environmentalism, or even climate change activism, as some sort of religious obligation.

the greening of religion

It’s hard to know when this “greening of religion” began. American naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), of Walden Pond fame, and environmentalist John Muir (1838–1914)—who helped establish both the Sequoia National Park and Yosemite National Park, and also founded the Sierra Club in 1892—are often cited as early proponents of melding spirituality with environmentalism. Some link it to Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which warned about the environmental danger of the commonly used pesticide DDT (and other chemicals), leading to DDT’s ban in 1972. And though the book itself wasn’t necessarily spiritual, it added the element of apocalypticism, an end-of-the-world fear, which made environmentalism a moral or even a spiritual concern.

At the same time, various Eastern religions, as well as nature-worshiping faiths, began to catch on in the West, which, though varied in their beliefs, made the preservation of nature all but a sacred imperative. Many of these groups—Gaian, Paganism, Wicca, Pantheists, Novasutras, et cetera—would, of course, be concerned if what they worshiped and loved were being threatened.

the Christian and ecology

Where is Christianity in all this? The last book of the Bible, Revelation, was written about 1,700 years before the world’s first coal-fueled power plant began spewing greenhouse emissions into the air, so ecological concerns haven’t exactly dominated the Bible’s pages. Some critics, however, have argued that Christianity itself—by making a sharp and very defined distinction between nature and the God who created nature—has paved the way for the exploitation of the earth and its resources. The Western world has gotten most of the blame, yes, but that’s only because it has been the most heavily industrialized and not because it’s “Christian” (besides, look at how exploitative China and India are of natural resources).

As far back as Eden, Adam and Eve were told to “fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28).⁷ Whatever that meant, in the Edenic environment, before sin and death, having “dominion” over the natural world surely didn’t include the kind of despoiling and exploitation happening today.

Scripture does talk about crop rotation (Exodus 23:10, 11; Leviticus 25:2–7). Then there is this astonishing text: “If a bird’s nest happens to be before you along the way, in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs, with the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young; you shall surely let the mother go, and take the young for yourself, that it may be well with you and that you may prolong your days” (Deuteronomy 22:6, 7). Also, during war, the Israelites were not to cut down their enemies’ fruit trees. “When you besiege a city for a long time, while making war against it to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them; if you can eat of them, do not cut them down to use in the siege, for the tree of the field is man’s food” (Deuteronomy 20:19).

Admittedly, these few verses are not much. But that’s because the Bible is not an ecology handbook. Its concerns are spiritual, theological, and moral. But morality would certainly include a concern for the natural world. In this sense, Scripture does teach stewardship—the responsible management of what one is entrusted with. This truth helps explain why, in recent years, more Christian churches have become involved in ecological concerns and have become sensitized to managing the natural resources that have been entrusted to us by God.

Perhaps the best known of these Christian “conversions” to eco-spirituality has come from Pope Francis, who, in his encyclical Laudato si’, published May 2015, warned that the earth, our sister, “now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.”⁸ He calls for changes that can greatly intrude on how people live, even if many question whether or not the changes called for will, indeed, make any difference in the climate anyway.

consider the lilies

The natural world has been called “God’s Second Book,” in the sense that, besides the Bible, it reveals truths about the Creator.

But now ask the beasts, and they will teach you;

And the birds of the air, and they will tell you;

Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you;

And the fish of the sea will explain to you.

Who among all these does not know

That the hand of the Lord has done this,

In whose hand is the life of every living thing,

And the breath of all mankind?” (Job 12:7–10).

And Jesus Himself, by saying—“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? (Matthew 6:28–30)—used the beauty of nature in order to make a spiritual point about trusting in God.

Christians, of course, should love, appreciate, and care for the natural world. They just shouldn’t worship it. They worship the One who made the world, not the world itself, which is exactly why Scripture condemned those who “worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen” (Romans 1:25, NIV).

Nature can and does speak to us. But, in contrast to what the Council of All Beings teaches, nature tells us not what trees and birds and rivers reveal about themselves but what they reveal about the God who created “the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them” (Exodus 20:11). And “all that is in them” includes the trees, the birds and the rivers, and more, which sing praises to the one Being who made, and sustains, them all.