The Eleventh Commandment : Avarice
Why so many far-right conservative christians deny the realities of climate change
Why do so many far-right conservative christians deny the realities of climate change?
This exploration began as a research project for an Environmental Communications Rhetoric course, but is something I had been pondering for a long time. If christians believe that god created the earth, wouldn’t they feel a moral obligation to take good care of that gift, and to respect what they believe is god’s creation? Why would they ignore the decades of science showing us that humans are the most significant cause of environmental damage, resulting in an anthropogenic climate crisis?
To be fair, there are absolutely christians who believe they should “be good stewards” of the earth and care for both their neighbours and their environment. Yet over the past 20+ years, Canada has been drifting towards a more American-style model of religiously infused politics and an active christian right. I was noticing an increase in climate denialism and conspiracy theories in religious Canadian right wingers, but I didn’t understand why — I wanted to better understand the history and politics behind this connection.
If you have also wondered how the hell we got from “love all of god’s creatures” to “fuck the environment, god wants us to be rich and prosper”, then grab a cup of coffee and join me on this bewildering journey. This is the second in a series of articles, so if you missed the first, I recommend starting there. I hope you enjoy!
The dawning of extractive populism
Darren Fleet, as well as McLean and colleagues, invoke Ernesto LacLau’s (2005) conception of populism as a set of equivalent demands employing various empty signifiers. In his 2005 book, On Populism, LacLau outlines the genesis of populist movements. They begin with a group of people dissatisfied with some aspect of governance, whether that be from an employer, a politician, or some other representative in a leadership position.
If the initial concern is not addressed, this group may discern that a number of others feel similarly, and come to realize they have several unsatisfied demands in common. Over time, the people in this group feed into and off of one another’s displeasure. According to LacLau, as their list of unaddressed issues grows, so does their resentment. If those in power are unable to individually resolve their complaints, they become unified in an equivalential relation.
As the chasm between the institutional system and the people grows, their various grievances consolidate into an equivalential chain through “the construction of a popular identity”. LacLau argues representation is required to provide consistency across diverse social issues, “to give successive concrete contents a sense of temporal continuity”, and these symbols become empty signifiers. They are “empty”, not because they lack meaning, but because their role is to bring together disparate elements under one umbrella; they are symbols unifying the varying identities within the populist discourse. Building on this premise, Fleet describes “average old stock Canadian evangelical folk” as employing various empty signifiers or political symbols, “in this case faith, nation, and the family”.
