On (Finally) Having Enemies and (Starting to) Love Them at the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai
License: Shutterstock, 2.29.24
by Lowell Bliss
Director of Eden Vigil Institute of Environmental Leadership at WCIU
Co-founder and Co-director of the Christian Climate Observers Program
Leader in Climate Intercessors prayer network
On the day this article is published, I will be boarding a plane in Toronto to fly to Dubai for the COP28 UN Climate Summit. Upwards to 70,000 people from 195 countries will be there in the final month of the hottest year in human history to help negotiate and implement the voluntary good-will initiative known as the Paris Agreement. I will be helping lead forty emerging leaders from under-mobilized constituencies as part of the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP). Many of them are university students, almost all are attending a COP for the first time. When they don their yellow badges, they will be official Observers which grants them access to the “Blue Zone” where all the negotiations take place, and all the pavilions are arranged. Oil money from the UAE is reportedly helping build a Blue Zone that will be slightly less than twice the size that the Blue Zone at COP27 in Egypt was (which itself was enormous!) Our CCOPers will feel like they are walking into what will seem like the World of Discovery itself. I envy them their first blast of excitement.
This will be my seventh COP. My first was COP21 in 2015 when the Paris Agreement was adopted. What keeps an aging introvert like me going back to these events? The answer in a word is: discovery. For example, each year the CCOPers are a new group, and they represent new constituencies (churches, campuses, denominations, NGOs, professions, regions, Global South nations, etc.) They are endlessly fascinating people. Additionally, each COP is new, and not primarily because each year the host country is different. Climate change advances. The Paris Agreement evolves. The zeitgeist of planet Earth shifts. Each year I discover something more about this journey that we all share. This year however, I’ve been tipped off about discovery, and am proactively planning it into my experience of COP28. This year, I intend to: 1) discover that you and I and every living creature who cares about our planet have enemies; 2) discover that “loving your enemies” introduces us to a new type of Christian love, a kind we never learned in the Sunday Schools of our dominant culture; and 3) test the validity of Martin Luther King’s assertion: “if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.” Planet Earth could use a little redemption. The climate movement could use a new type of power. Our enemies seem to be winning.
We have enemies.
Al Gore, co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, is as angry as I have ever seen him. He’s red in the face, raising his voice, pounding his fist, and biting nails. Admittedly, it’s hard to know with seasoned politicians and skilled communicators. They can modulate almost perfectly into the required tone and de-escalate out of it just as quickly, as if they were classical actors removing a mask. Nonetheless, the biggest sign to me that Al Gore is genuinely angry is that he is violating the formula of his famous climate change slide show, a formula that has been tried-and-true since the days of An Inconvenient Truth.
I have been a student of Mr. Gore’s presentations ever since I first rented An Inconvenient Truth in 2007 from a now-defunct Blockbuster video store down the street from my in-laws in Saint Catharines, Ontario. He trained me (along with some 900 others) in how to give the presentation ourselves in a Climate Reality Leadership Corps conference in San Francisco in 2014. His slide show is updated on almost a weekly basis, incorporating in the latest weather disasters and the latest signs of hope. Often, he is asked to give his show at a COP and I try not to miss them. At the risk of name-dropping, may I also say that I once assisted him, in that I sat on a panel with him at Union Seminary in New York on the topic, “The Gospel and the Climate Crisis” as we trained clergy that his daughter Karenna had assembled. In other words, I’ve been in a position to track his presentation and I’ve analyzed more than his communication; I’ve studied his spirit.
Following An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s slide show has adopted a standard structure: he asks and answers three basic questions regarding climate change: 1) “Must we change?” (Answer: Yes, the current litany of suffering from climate impacts presents a moral basis for changing our policy and behaviors); 2) “Can we change?” (Again: Yes, the technology coupled with market conditions exists so that change away from fossil fuels is possible); and 3) “Will we change?” (Finally: Yes—and here Al Gore gives a brief pep talk that always ends with some variation of the statement “I believe political will is a renewable resource.”)
You can still find this three-fold organizing structure in the TEDTalk that Mr. Gore gave in August of this year. However, one of the first changes you might notice is that he drops the word “change” (in must/can/will we change?) to the word “solve” or “succeed.” Can and will we succeed? It may be a subtle shift in language, but to this student of Mr. Gore and his presentations, it feels like an important one. Success presupposes the possibility of failure, just liking “winning” admits an aversion to losing, like “life” is aware of death and keeps an eye out for assassins. This also shifts the inclusive first-person pronoun “we.” Previously, when Gore asked, “Must we change?,” he was addressing all citizens of the world, much like how Pope Francis addresses his recent climate change encyclical Laudate Deum to “all people of good will”. In his TEDTalk however, Gore’s use of “we” is now juxtaposed against a “them.” Indeed, the talk is titled “What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know.” Al Gore seems to have an enemy.
“The crisis is still getting worse faster than we are deploying the solutions,” Gore says, and so, “Maybe it’s time to focus on the obstacles standing in our way.” The two obstacles he identifies are 1) “The unrelenting opposition of the fossil fuel industry,” and 2) “the global allocation of capital and the subsidies for fossil fuels.” On this second point, Gore reports that governments last year around the world spent more than a trillion dollars of taxpayer money subsidizing fossil fuels, five times larger than the amount in 2020. The sixty largest global banks have invested 5.5 trillion dollars into the fossil fuel companies since the Paris Agreement was adopted. Mostly though, his presentation focuses on the companies themselves, their executives, their boards, their shareholders. “For decades now,” Gore claims, “the companies have had the evidence; they know the truth, and they consciously decided to lie to publics all around the world in order to calm down the political momentum for doing something about it, so they could make more money. It’s as simple as that.”
You can watch his TedTalk for yourself and hear Gore’s case against them: about self-serving, about back-pedaling from net-zero pronouncements, about gaslighting the public with impossible claims of the scalability of carbon-capture-and-sequestration. Of more urgency is what he says about the upcoming COP28 in Dubai and the posture we should take towards it. He fears that “now they have brazenly seized control of the COP process, especially this year’s COP in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.” (Notice Gore’s use of the pronoun they.) “And concern has been building about this for quite some time,” he asserts. “I remember when there were so many fossil fuel delegates in Madrid [COP25 in 2019], but by the time we got to Glasgow a year and a half ago, the delegates from the fossil fuel companies [503 in total] made up a larger group than the largest national delegation.” He yells into the microphone: “And why? Why? Because they’re helping? They’re not helping; they’re trying to stop progress.”
The reported 636 fossil fuel delegates last year in Egypt meant “they had more delegates than the combined delegations of the ten most affected countries by climate. And now,” he pauses as he pivots to what we have to look forward to in Dubai, “this year’s host, which is a petrostate, has appointed the president of COP28 in spite of the fact that he has a blatant conflict of interest: he’s the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, owned by Abu Dhabi. Their emissions are larger than those of ExxonMobil, and they have no credible plan whatsoever to reduce them.” Gore reports on a plan by ADNOC to “increase the production of both oil and gas by as much as 50 percent by 2030,” and as his voice switches from anger to incredulity, he points out “which is the same time frame when the world is trying to reduce emissions, by 50 percent by 2030. And the same person has been put in charge of both of these efforts!”
“I think it’s time to say: wait a minute, do you take us for fools?” Gore says, “The fossil fuel industry has captured this process and is slowing it down. And we need to do something about it.” Climate activist Bill McKibben thought it was time to say something like this as early as 2012 when he published his famous article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” in Rolling Stone. The math has to do with temperature prevention targets, the gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions that we would have to limit ourselves to in order to hit that target (i.e., a carbon budget), the gigatons if we burned all the known reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas (a figure five times higher than our budget), and the trillions of dollars of stranded assets that we have to hope the profit-seeking shareholders of the fossil fuel companies will agree to voluntarily keep in the ground. McKibben quotes his friend, Naomi Klein: “Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices, but these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.”
“Wrecking the planet is their business model.” Her comment is evocative of a hymn in the Book of Revelation, as if Naomi Klein were a twenty-fifth elder in the Apostle John’s vision:
“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty,
the One who is and who was,
because you have taken your great power
and have begun to reign.
The nations were angry,
and your wrath has come.
The time has come for judging the dead,
and for rewarding your servants the prophets
and your people who revere your name,
both great and small—
and for destroying those who destroy the earth” (Rev 11:17-18).
What does that final phrase mean, about a wrathful God “destroying those who destroy the earth”? Modern commentators, fearing evangelical backlash, may shy away from interpreting that phrase in our current ecological crisis, but Calvinist expositor John Gill writing in 1748 before the Industrial Revolution identifies these destroyers as “meaning [the] antichrist and his followers; who destroy the bodies, souls, and estates of men, and not only the inhabitants of the earth, but even the earth itself; for through that laziness and idleness which they spread wherever they come, a fruitful country is turned into barrenness.” Whereas Gill identifies the vices of laziness and idleness, if he was writing in 2023, he might also add greed and extractivism.
Bill McKibben concludes his survey of Global Warming’s terrifying math by saying:
So: the paths we have tried to tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual, halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor [the racist sheriff in Birmingham, AL]. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.” And enemies are what climate change has lacked. But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.
Ten years later, McKibben published a sequel of sorts to his Math article, in which he writes:
“The fossil-fuel industry has continued to explore and prospect, and now controls reserves of coal, gas, and oil that, if burned, would produce 3,700 gigatons of carbon dioxide. That’s 10 times the amount that scientists say would take us past the temperature targets set in the Paris Climate Agreement.” He doesn’t use the word enemies again, but he does say, “Another way of saying this: If we are to meet the climate targets set by scientists, we have to leave 90 percent of the fossil fuels we have discovered underground. And at current prices that means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil. If you want to understand why the battle over climate progress is so fierce — why the fossil-fuel industry fights so hard, with all the political influence it can buy — remember that $100 trillion. That’s a lot of incentive.”
Finally, let me direct you to last month’s 2023 Production Gap Report entitled “Phasing down or phasing up? Top fossil fuel producers plan even more extraction despite climate promises.” Its focus is less on the fossil fuel companies than on the governments that allow them to operate, including the US, Canada, and the EU. The 2023 report finds that governments—all of them parties to the Paris Agreement and some of them quite vocal about amping up their own emission reduction targets (NDCs)-- plan to produce around 110% more fossil fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, and 69% more than would be consistent with 2°C. It’s like they are essentially saying, “Hey, we are going to pull this stuff up from the ground, but it’s your fault, not ours, if you decide to burn it.” This is a case of gaslighting that is too sinister to be dismissed as “no pun intended.” This is gaslighting turned into a flame-thrower, pointed by them in the direction of you and yours.
In McKibben’s “Do the Math” article in 2012, he went straight from calculation to logic: the fossil fuel companies have a business plan which will destroy us and those we love—therefore, we have an enemy. But he also makes another statement about enemies in a more strategic vein: not only do we indeed have them, but we need them. “A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies.”
It's hard to admit that nice people like us have enemies.
During my entire existence on planet Earth, I’ve not greatly thought about having enemies (except perhaps in Middle School). For one, I’ve always been ensconced in privilege. Here’s my list—which do you share? I’m white, male, straight, cis-gender, able-bodied, middle-class, Western, English as mother tongue, natural-born citizen. If you live—as I have all my life—in the inner circle of the castle, the thought of an enemy at the gates seems like a far-away fairy tale. Besides, if the $100 trillion of fossil fuel assets does end up getting burned, a good percentage of it is going to get burned—as it has since Day One—for my tribe’s own comfort and to protect my tribe’s own privilege. It's hard to think of fossil fuel industry men as enemies when you look over and find them at your own hip, together on the ramparts, whispering to you, “We’re doing this for us, you know, to keep the undeserving hordes at bay.”
A second reason why I haven’t given much thought to having enemies is because my conservative evangelical Protestant upbringing hasn’t taught me much about it. (There’s a reason why French Huguenot (Protestant) villages were so predisposed to rescuing Jews during the Holocaust while other European Christians were not, but that’s another story.) Instead, I was taught Ephesians 6:12 as a memory verse: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” I was taught to interpret this verse in such a way that only Satan and his other fallen angels were our enemies. Flesh-and-blood human beings like Sultan Al Jaber can’t be, or human-created institutions like British Petroleum can’t be. In fact, it feels vaguely sinful to consider anyone an enemy.
In 2012, I was barely stepping into leadership in the evangelical creation care movement of the US and Canada, but I can say that, if we didn’t flatly reject McKibben and Klein’s strategic advice, we certainly ignored it. “Movements require enemies,” they told us. Ah no, that’s not how we evangelicals operate. We are nice people doing nice things. We “preserve the unity,” even if, as we are finding out, it might come at the expense of “doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God.” And we’ve been trained to never lose hope that the antagonistic can be converted, that Rex Tillerson, James Inhofe, or the whole Republican Party might have a Damascus Road experience. “See, Saul of Tarsus, who held the coats of those who stoned us, was, deep inside, the apostle Paul all along! If we had just ‘tailored our message from trusted sources’ sooner or given them one more chance…!” In Paris, during the COP21 summit, I remember discussing McKibben’s article with a veteran evangelical denominational leader. He in turn told me of a conversation that he had with an oil executive who happened to be a member of his local church. This executive told him, “Don’t turn the fossil fuel industry into an enemy. My colleagues are all good-hearted people who just want to feed their families. And if you are going to make any progress on this challenge, you are going to need us as allies, particularly when it comes to an energy transition.” I remember nodding my head in agreement. It was what I wanted to hear.
Scripture allows for having real enemies.
When it hasn’t been read as a predictive roadmap for a dispensational future, the Book of Revelation has traditionally been read by privileged evangelicals like me as “a classic story of the patterns of struggle between good and evil, …a mythical story that is told in different ways using different symbolism.” Consequently, we’ve been able to hold the enemies mentioned in Revelation at either a chronological or metaphorical arm’s length. The Whore of Babylon? The Beast out of the Sea? The Dragon? The murderer of the saints, witnesses, and martyrs? What does this have to do with ExxonMobil or ADNOC?
In a recent podcast interview,, scholar Robyn Whitaker explains her own approach to Revelation, “I would say this is a deeply historically located text, and we have to read it as addressing particular concerns for a minority Christian group in the Roman Empire, who are trying to navigate their relationship with that empire, and what it means to be a Christian living in that kind of world. A world that is sometimes quite hostile to them.” In other words, in John’s writing, Babylon is code for “Rome” and much of what seems like futuristic symbolism is simply an imagistic tableau for what was actually happening to an oppressed minority RIGHT THEN AND THERE in the First Century when John was writing. The author himself was exiled by the Roman empire on the Isle of Patmos. What we call “martyrs,” he remembers as flesh-and-blood friends. Whitaker also allows for certain “timeless truths” in the Book of Revelation: “one of the things I think that’s really important in the book of Revelation is it gives us a way to think about good and evil, and how that’s kind of manifest in worlds and systems and systems of injustice and oppression.”
John and the First Century victims of the Roman Empire had no compunction in identifying flesh-and-blood enemies. They even felt it strongly. For instance, here’s how Whitaker’s interviewer, Pete Enns, comments on the unsettledness we might feel about the violence depicted in Revelation. He writes,
And I think what’s helpful is, … people who are oppressed or marginalized might hear this text differently. And, you know, people who don’t experience that kind of violence or oppression, we might look at this book and say, “Oh, this violence, it’s all bad.” And I’m not advocating for violence. But what would I do if I were in Syria or something, and ISIS was breathing down my neck? Would I be evangelizing them? Or would I be asking God to smite them? And I probably would be doing the latter. Whether that’s right or not, I have no idea. But it makes some sense, you know, when people living in privileged settings, where we’re not really touched by the violence that you rightly said is all around us, we just might not experience it. We might have a different impression on the book; it’s a reminder it might not be written to me, and I just have to deal with it and try to understand it from different angles and hearing different voices.
Scripture is realistic about the existence of enmity and enemies. It even allows for our human responses of anger and fear. When in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus commands “Love your enemies,” that command is nonetheless predicated on the existence of real, live, identifiable enemies to whom we direct our love. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28). Jesus’s words would make no sense if there weren’t, in fact, enemies, and people who actually hate you, curse you, and mistreat you. Jesus reinforces the idea that you legitimately might one day have flesh-and-blood enemies with the bit of rhetoric that follows: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them…. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back” (Luke 6:32-35).
(A Brief Little Exercise)
Bill McKibben declared publicly as early as 2012: “But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.” I haven’t heard McKibben disavow this conclusion since. Let’s you and I try it on for size. Read McKibben’s statement out loud. Say to yourself—experimentally: “COP28 has an enemy.” “The Paris Agreement has an enemy.” “The vision I have for shalom in and through climate action has an enemy.” “The climate vulnerable nations with whom I am claiming solidarity have an enemy.” “As a climate activist, I am up against enemies.” How does that feel with those declarations coming out of your mouth?
We dare not rush too quickly away from this realization. As we saw, Jesus didn’t let his disciples rush away into sentimentalism, lest they lose a sense of love’s great challenge and power. Love the Lord your God? (Okay, got it.)Love your neighbour as yourself. (Yep.) Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Sure, an enemy is just a neighbour in disguise.) No! An enemy is an enemy. Enemies hate you. They curse you. They mistreat you. But “the love of God poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit given us” (Romans 5:6) is up to the challenge.
MLK, one of those “different angles, different voices,” offers three reasons WHY to love our enemies.
What do we do with Ephesians 6:12’s admonition that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood”? What do we do with our privileged habituation that only Satan is our enemy? Here, I believe we can trust someone like Martin Luther King to shepherd us through this, bring us to the end of this article, and be part of the great cloud of witnesses around us at COP28. Rev. Dr. King had enemies. He was reviled, beaten, jailed, and eventually murdered by the hand of his enemies. He claimed that he tried to preach a sermon at least once a year from Matt 5 and Luke 6 on the topic of “Loving your enemies.” Fortunately for those of us contemplating COP28, the tape recorder was running at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, on November 17, 1957. “But far from being an impractical idealist,” King says, “Jesus has become the practical realist. The words of this text glitter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies.”
In the second half of his sermon, King argues that the greater strategic choice than simply identifying an enemy, is the choice to love him or her. In other words, whereas King might affirm McKibben’s claim that “a rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies,” and whereas he may have smirked knowingly at JFK’s comment that “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor,” he also firmly believed that a movement would be able to effect “transformative change” only to the extent that it loved its enemies. What’s the point of building a movement, if the movement abandoned its best means for bringing about the transformative change it so deeply longs for? He preached three reasons why we should love our enemies.
“I think the first reason that we should love our enemies,” he says, “and I think this was at the very center of Jesus’ thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe…. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil…. Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love.” There is certainly enough hatred here in 2023—enough antisemitism, enough islamophobia, enough violence in Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, South Sudan, Yemen, etc. We don’t need to introduce any more in and around COP28. Do the fossil fuel companies hate us? Probably not. They just don’t see us. They just don’t love us. They don’t love us as much as they love their profits, as much as they fear the stranding of their underground assets. It’s the age-old debate about intent vs. impact. The fossil fuel companies might not intend to curse us and mistreat us, but the impact of their policies and behaviors do. What about climate-denying religious and political extremists? Do they hate us? Yes, I believe some of them do, even those who used to call us brothers and sisters. According to King, we “must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.”
The second reason Dr. King says we should love our enemies is “because hate distorts the personality of the hater.” In 2012, the same year that McKibben declared ExxonMobil part of Public Enemy Number One, its CEO Rex Tillerson said this about climate change: “We have spent our entire existence adapting, Okay? So, we will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around — we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.” Eleven years later—years that included a stint for him as Trump’s Secretary of State, pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement—Tillerson himself has helped prove that climate is not an engineering problem; it’s a love problem. Nonetheless, Tillerson does make an accurate point about adaptation. Adaptation happens. It happens naturally. Nonetheless, there is no guarantee that the path that an adaptation takes is going to be a good one. (That’s why at the COPs we talk about a “Just Transition” away from fossil fuels, not just a transition, left up to the cruelties of market adaptations.) We must take a pro-active approach to adaptation, according to the Paris Agreement.
This applies to our own souls. When COP28 talks about adaptation (and finally takes up the Global Goal on Adaptation in earnest on its agenda), the negotiators will primarily be focussed on physical features: building seawalls, researching drought resistant crops, easing human migrations, etc. As Christians, we will participate in these practical projects with as much love as we poured into the mitigation campaign to prevent the need for such projects in the first place. But we need to understand that EVERYTHING is going to undergo an adaptation with climate change, including the Christian faith. The Christian faith of the Anthropocene will be different than what the Church was as birthed and nourished under the Holocene. Religious historian Philip Jenkins argues this in his book Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval (Oxford UP, 2021). He begins his book by claiming that the context for Jonathan Edward’s preaching and the Great Awakening is often overlooked: “namely, that Edwards and his audience had in just the previous two years lived through a horrific period of extreme weather and glacial cold. Across Europe and North America, nations recorded some of the most alarming death rates seen in several centuries, while New England itself suffered the worst weather recorded since the time of European settlement.” He writes, “Similarly, throughout history, when other climate-related disasters have occurred, they have commonly had wide-ranging religious consequences.” Then he notes that it is not the change in climatic conditions that are responsible, as much as the human responses to those changes.
As in the case of the Great Awakening, this does not mean that climatic conditions directly caused such outbreaks or currents; rather, they created an atmosphere in which those changes could manifest themselves, and in historical terms this happened very suddenly. Depending on the circumstances, the response to climatic visitations might include explosions in religious passion and commitment, the stirring of mystical and apocalyptic expectations, waves of religious scapegoating and persecution, or the spawning of new religious movements and revivals.
Adaptations happen. Faith adaptations that happen without reflection or choice often devolve into tribalism and barbarism. But there can be faith adaptations that are governed by Scripture, aspirational of love, and re-committed to our baptismal vows. I would argue that a sizeable portion of the hate that we see in Christian and religious extremists, some in our own tribe, is an adaptation to the fear of loss (and the fear of loss of control and privilege) in the face of climate change. As an extreme example, one might even call Brenton Tarrant a climate activist when he was writing about the reality and urgency of climate change. At least that is what he wrote in the manifesto he published on the day before he went into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand during Friday prayers on March 15, 2019, and gunned down 51 Muslims. He called himself an “eco-fascist.” If climate change was going to make resources scarce in New Zealand, then they needed to be reserved for European Christians like himself, he thought. Part of Tarrant’s “spiritual formation” (and let’s call it that) was trips he made to Europe from 2012-2019, touring battle sites between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire. He opposed NATO’s intervention in the 90’s on behalf of Albanian Muslims because he saw the Serbian military as "Christian Europeans attempting to remove these Islamic occupiers from Europe."
Hate is a spiritual and religious adaptation to climate change. Love can also be one, but only if chosen, and planned for, and free to take new expressions. I will be the first to grant that Love has played a key role in the creation care movement (a term used widely for faith-based environmentalism.) I myself have preached, “Creation care is as much a function of the Greatest Commandments as it is of the Creation Mandate,” namely to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself (Mt 22:36-40). We have maintained that loving our neighbour--and seeing the Bangladeshi as a neighbour as surely as the (good) Samaritan saw the Jewish victim of terrorism on the Jericho Road as a neighbor—is the basis for all our efforts in mitigation, adaptation, loss-and-damage, and finance. Now, Philip Jenkins is arguing that that love is going to undergo an adaptation; which adaption do we choose? The second reason why we choose to love our enemies is because to hate them is counterproductive to the adaptation we want for our own souls, our tribe, our church, and our Christianity. “Hate at any point is a cancer,” King says, “that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life. So, Jesus says love, because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated."
King implies that love cannot only be a climate adaptation that we choose, but also a climate movement strategy that we employ. Love has always been the basis for our faith-based creation care strategies, but it can become the very strategy itself. Without abandoning the first two loves, we now need to take up a third: loving our enemies. King says, “Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.” He says something we all intuitively understand: “There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive.”
MLK even ExPlains how to love your enemies.
Reportedly, even in the audience at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1957, there were those who thought King was naïve and they seethed when he said, “Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love, they will break down under the load.” And yet, I am not in any position to judge whether this is naïve or not; I suspect few of you are either. King claimed, “at the very root of love is the power of redemption,” but understanding that statement is a “discovery,” and it is a discovery only “if you love your enemies.” Without recognized and identified enemies, we in the faith-based creation care movement have mainly been exercising power, albeit power motivated by love, and lovingly exercised. The thing about finally recognizing that you have enemies is that you also realize the extent of your powerlessness. The CEO of ADNOC is setting the agenda for COP28; you are not. The likely 636+ fossil fuel delegates going to Dubai have budgets that would make the accountant of your puny NGO weep. A Christian nationalist with the US Speaker’s gavel in his hand can crush your longings with a flick of a wrist.
Of course, this then leads to the question of how to love your enemies, especially if you are new to the game. That’s actually what King addresses in the first half of his sermon, and I’ll let you listen yourself to the sermon as you wish. He gives three ways: 1) begin by analyzing yourself; 2) look for the good in your enemy (there by virtue of being created in God’s image) and be ready to confront your temptation toward hatred by meditating on the good points; and 3) “When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it.” Meaning: “There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love.”
“In the final analysis,” King says, “love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.” This is how, I believe, we resolve the interpretation of Ephesians 6:12 about our struggle not being against flesh and blood, the interpretation that so many of us grew up with. King, with theologians like Walter Wink and William Stringfellow, have long taught that systems and institutions, some with identifiable names like corporations and political parties, are those rulers and authorities and “powers of this dark world” that we are called to struggle against. There is no force at play in the world that doesn’t have a spiritual component, and that can’t be co-opted by evil, or by good. There is no square-inch of this warming planet that isn’t intimately juxtaposed to the heavenly realms. I am not trying to argue you out of believing in the literal existence of Satan and his fallen demons, but I will challenge you here—seven COPs after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, in the hottest year in recorded human history, when the Production Gap has never been more sinister—how exactly do you think Satan operates in this world, if not through systems and institutions?
Speaking in 1957, King said, “One of the things that concerns me most is that in the midst of the revolution of the world and of the revolution of this nation, that we will discover the meaning of Jesus’ words.” (There’s that word discover again.) He continues, “History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors. And there are three ways that individuals who are oppressed can deal with their oppression. One of them is to rise up against their oppressors with physical violence and corroding hatred.” A second way is to acquiesce, to give in, to resign ourselves to our fate. But King says, “that too isn’t the way because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”
And then, as we all know, King proposes a third way: “And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love.” Back in the early months of 2020, Brian Webb, a veteran creation care leader, CCOP’s co-founder and a co-director, asked Bill McKibben to join us on a call, to explore whether Christ might be inviting the creation care movement into mass non-violent resistance. The immediate context was a Stop the Money Pipeline campaign scheduled for April 23, a strike against Chase Bank, Liberty Mutual, and BlackRock, the largest investors, insurers, and asset managers of new fossil fuel development projects. McKibben was patient with us, knowing that we are little experienced with non-violent resistance. It’s okay: if we don’t like how Extinction Rebellion or other groups engage in more radical climate action, we can figure out how to do it in a manner keeping with our faith. One of the first steps, however, will be to understand that it is not our faith, but the religious culture that we grew up in, that has made us so timid. In the end, our participation in the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign of April 2020 was cancelled by the pandemic shutdowns of March 2020. But just last week, here in the fall when the average global temperatures of the planet experienced their first breaches of the 1.5°C and 2°C targets, Brian concluded an e-mail to a group of us by asking, “So... when are we going to mobilize a mass Christian civil disobedience movement?”
Discovery is the theme. “We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love,” King said, “And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make [people] better. Love is the only way. Jesus discovered that.” And Jesus discovered it the same way we will: by admitting our enemies, first to the reality of the climate crisis, and then to the embrace of our love.
Receive the benediction of Martin Luther King:
Oh God, help us in our lives and in all of our attitudes, to work out this controlling force of love, this controlling power that can solve every problem that we confront in all areas. Oh, we talk about politics; we talk about the problems facing our atomic civilization. Grant that all men will come together and discover that as we solve the crisis and solve these problems—the international problems, the problems of atomic energy, the problems of nuclear energy, and yes, even the race problem [and yes, even the climate crisis]—let us join together in a great fellowship of love and bow down at the feet of Jesus. Give us this strong determination. In the name and spirit of this Christ, we pray. Amen.