Do We Need a New Religion?

CS Lewis' Mere Christianity, and why the ecological movement is so boring

At the moment I am rereading CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity and toying with the idea that what we need to address our societal malaise as well as the approaching ecological catastrophe is something like a new religion. This thought often comes to me. It returned when I did a few interviews for Gaslands director Josh Fox’s radio show last week. We talked about various social movements to address the ecological crisis — seeking to install renewable energy systems and so on — and how these movements failed to reach critical mass.

The tonality of the ecological movement tends to be stridently materialistic, clamoring for people, governments, and the corporations to act immediately on the overwhelming scientific evidence that we are reaching the point of no return. But most people seem to find this incessant urgency off-putting. The technical solutions offered seem annoyingly cumbersome. People sense that they will make their lives more difficult in the short-term and may, in the end, turn out to be either unworkable or pointless.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the environmental movement is that it is boring. The Alt Right conspiratorial vision of a pedophiliac, Satanic “Deep State” taking technocratic control over humanity through Ahrimanic billionaires, the World Economic Forum, following the Georgia Guidestones and The Protocols of Zion, is exciting and interesting. The ecological proposition that we must stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere by restricting fossil fuel emissions and reducing consumption is, by comparison, dull and flat.

I am finding Lewis’ Mere Christianity a really enjoyable book to read, partly because I continually argue with his ideas while I read it. An atheist who converted later in life, Lewis sought to make a reasoned argument for the Christian faith. The book is based on radio broadcasts that Lewis made during World War Two, when England was at war with the Nazis, who were blitzing English cities. Through the lectures, he was defending the values of his culture and country as they faced immediate mortal peril, in an effort to build morale and resolve.

In this and subsequent essays, I intend to explore a number of ideas from the book. I think it could help us to conceive a new spiritual or religious initiative that “transcends and includes” Christianity while integrating a Leftist, ecological, unabashedly utopian or millenarian ethos into what might (let’s be bold) become a unified global movement.