Catholic Church today is divided and enmeshed in scandal. The formerly dynamic evangelical movement is losing adherents in the developed world. Across the board, America, once considered an exception to the global secularizing trend, is now rapidly “unchurching.”3 The millennial generation in the United States are leaving religious institutions at a rate four times that of their counterparts three decades ago; almost 40 percent of people ages 18–29 have no religious affiliation.4
The trend is even more pronounced in Europe, where well over 50 percent of those under age 40 do not identify with any religion. The big loser here is Christianity. In the United Kingdom, there are as many Muslims now attending weekly prayer as Christians attending church. Since 2001, the country has seen the closure of some five hundred churches.5
This does not mean that religious belief is disappearing; many people reject organized faiths but maintain some spiritual values.6 Today, fewer people than ever attend church, but two-thirds of unaffiliated Americans polled by Pew still believe in God or a universal spirit.7 These individuals may be looking for some new spiritual rock upon which to rest their hopes or their search for meaning.
The Church of “Social Justice”
There are new religious currents emerging within some long-established faith traditions. In Catholicism, Reform Judaism, and various mainline Protestant denominations, orthodox beliefs are being supplemented or even supplanted by what could be called a gospel of social justice activism.8 This trend reflects the changing character of universities and theological seminaries, where faculties lean heavily to the left. In religion departments of top liberal arts colleges, liberals outnumber conservatives by 70 to 1.9
The “woke” members of today’s progressive churches are changing religions from within, and the churches most committed to the progressive course are in the most serious decline. Mainstream Protestant denominations have lost five million members in the past decade.10 The Catholic Church, now under a reforming and politically progressive pope, is losing adherents not only in North America and Europe, where the pope’s views are widely applauded, but also in his homeland of Latin America. Today roughly one in four Nicaraguans, one in five Brazilians, and one in seven Venezuelans are former Catholics.11 In contrast, the more conservative faiths—including some evangelical churches, Orthodox Judaism, and fundamentalist Islam—are still robust, thanks in part to higher birth rates, particularly in the developing world.12
Despite the vitality of some denominations, it is entirely possible that the traditional, mainstream religions in the West will be doomed to cultural irrelevance within a few decades. According to Pew, for example, Christianity will be the minority faith across Britain and in some other European countries by 2050.13
The Green Faith
As traditional faiths are waning, environmentalism is coming to resemble a faith for the new age. Christianity offered guidance for how one should live and conduct one’s personal affairs in a manner pleasing to God, but the green movement seeks to steer people toward a life in better harmony with nature. Environmentalism, says Joel Garreau, has become “the religion of choice for urban atheists.”14
Like medieval Catholicism, the green faith foresees impending doom caused by human activity.15 To people in the Middle Ages, wrote Barbara Tuchman, “apocalypse was in the air.” The Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent. St. Norbert in the twelfth century predicted that the event would come within the lifetime of his contemporaries.16 Similarly, the environmental movement—whether religious, scientific, or leftist—routinely traces a direct line from human materialism to looming catastrophe.17
In his highly influential 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich claimed that humanity would “breed ourselves to extinction” if birth rates were not severely curtailed. A widely hailed Club of Rome report in 1972 predicted massive shortages of natural resources unless there was a shift to lower birth rates, slower economic growth, less material consumption, and reduced social mobility.18 Often such pronouncements are accepted uncritically in media, academic, and political circles.19 Yet these apocalyptic predictions, like those in the Middle Ages, could turn out to be exaggerated or even plain wrong.20 Contrary to environmentalist dogma from the 1970s, for example, natural resources, including energy and food, did not run out, but became more readily available.21
This is not to say that real environmental crises do not need to be confronted, any more than Christianity’s critique of human sin and selfishness should be considered irrelevant to our lives. But today as in the past, there is an element of hypocrisy among some of those who tell others to be content with poverty or extol its virtues. In the Middle Ages, most parish priests and their communicants suffered great material hardship, while many bishops lived in luxury, “loaded with gold and clad in purple,” as Petrarch put it.22 Similarly, environmentalists aim to impose austerity on the masses while excusing the excesses of their ultra-rich supporters.23 Even as they urge everyone else to cut back on consumption, the “green rich” buy a modern version of indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices.24 This allows them to save the planet in style. Recently, an estimated 1,500 GHG-spewing private jets were flown to Davos carrying people to a conference to discuss the environmental crisis. Few of the high-profile climate activists seem willing to give up their multiple houses, yachts, or plethora of cars.25
Perhaps most disturbing, some in the green movement have become highly dogmatic in their views, often denigrating or even persecuting those who dare dissent in any way. Today, open discussions on the environment and how best to preserve the planet are about as rare as open debate over God’s existence would have been in the Catholic Church of the eleventh century.
Some veteran climate scientists—such as Roger Pielke and Judith Curry, or the Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, or former members of the UN International Panel on Climate Change—have been demonized and marginalized for deviating from what Curry has described as an overly “monolithic” approach to the issue of climate change.26 Some climate activists even seem ready to take dissenters to court in an effort to ban their ideas by legal means. Not only energy companies but think tanks and dissident scientists have been targeted for criminal prosecution.27
These tactics are all too reminiscent of the medieval Inquisition.28 It is a very poor way to tackle a complex scientific issue, where open inquiry and debate are needed, observes Steve Koonin, President Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science.29
Transhumanism: The Faith of the New Ruling Class?
Another contender to be the new faith of the oligarchy is “transhumanism,” the search for eternal life through technology. “The rise to power of net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal,” writes Jaron Lanier.30 Potentially the most radical and far-reaching of the emerging creeds, transhumanism is a distinctly secular approach to achieving the long-cherished religious goal of immortality.31 The new tech religion treats mortality not as something to be transcended through moral actions, but as a “bug” to be corrected by technology.32
Although it sounds a bit like a wacky cult, transhumanism has long exercised a strong fascination for the elites of Silicon Valley. Devotees range from Sergei Brin, Larry Page, and Ray Kurzweil (of Google) to Peter Thiel and Sam Altman (Y Combinator). Kurzweil celebrates new technologies that allow for close monitoring of brain activity.33 Y Combinator is developing a technology for uploading one’s brain and preserving it digitally.34 The aim is to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”35
