MESSIAHS, ATHEISTS AND DEEP GREEN RELIGION

Dr Rachael Kohn AO is a familiar voice for thousands of ABC listeners as the former long time presenter of The Spirit of Things – programs about religion on the ABC, Australia’s national broadcaster. A collection of her essays on many of the topics her program discussed has now been published in her new book The Other Side of The Story. On Tuesday 17 May 2022, Rachael Kohn addressed The Sydney Institute to tackle a modern and historical phenomenon – the psychology and motivation behind popular myths and cults and the way these developments differ from enduring faith and religious belief.

MESSIAHS, ATHEISTS AND DEEP GREEN RELIGION

Rachael Kohn

Messiahs appear when faith is dimmed, to inspire hope when the woes of the world overwhelm and the old ways of responding do not seem to work anymore.  They are most in demand when ‘We don’t feel safe.’ And we look to someone or something to make us feel strong.

Today, our world is in such a time, and it is therefore no surprise that strident beliefs, rallying around unlikely figures, have spread like a bush fire in what some punters believe is a secular society that left religion behind. I wrote an earlier essay on this very topic which is included in my new book, The Other Side of the Story: Essays on Jews, Christians, Cults, Women, Atheists and Artists.   

It was called “faith in a post-secular society”, which is how I configured our world in 2005, when studies were being published on the spirituality of Generation X & Generation Y (also known as ‘Millennials’); and the ‘No religion’ category was rising in the census.

The predictions of a religion-free society that began in the 1960s did not eventuate. In fact, a massive growth of novel cults and the new age flourished because faith found new objects, new causes, new ideals.

That reality, however, was not accepted by atheists who declared that secularism was an incontrovertible fact and the way of the future.  They did notice that it was challenged by various fundamentalists, who were dismissed as merely a reaction to the proven fact of secularity.  Yes, it was a circular argument.

I argued then, as I will argue now, that the spiritual hankering of human beings is an ongoing process; it changes, it develops, it deepens. It also grows thin, ‘waxes cold and fades away like the morning dew’ – to quote an old song. It fastens on to strange ideas, conspiracy theories, and strong figures, and it finds new life when hitched to fashionable new agendas.

In other words, faith is precocious, flirtatious, and mesmerising when it promises the world. And sometimes, it returns to the old books and traditions when the promised redemption of the new faith fails to materialise. We’ve seen that in the rise of the Russian Orthodox Church after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is not long past Easter, when the Christian world commemorated the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, whose messiahship is the foundation of the Church. Yet it is worth remembering that the Christian Messiah has been subject to waves of interpretation: from ‘reclusive mystic’ to ‘radical Marxist’, from ‘’crusader against infidels and heretics to ‘pacifist and social-justice campaigner’.  We’ve seen how the Russian Patriarch Kirill has reinstalled Christ as the crusader against the Ukranians, when he presented the head of the Russian Guard with a precious Icon.[1]

Despite the different interpretations, faith has some abiding features:  it needs to identify its enemies, punish evil doers and promise to save the righteous.  I don’t believe best-selling author Yuval Harari’s prediction that as human beings we are evolving away from religion and toward a robotic existence. But if he is even half right, then the messianic figure may well have robotic features, just he did in the 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Made at the beginning of the Cold War – the Christ like figure was a Humanoid Martian, played by the handsome Michael Rennie, who was accompanied by a powerful Robot. He came bearing a life-or-death message for the human race which would prevent its annihilation from atomic weapons.

I would like to comment on some of the messianic movements that have taken root in our day and venture some reasons for their rise, as a person who’s examined, studied, and reported on religious currents of our time.  First as an academic specialising in religious studies, later as a researcher-producer-writer-presenter of programs on religion for the ABC.

Since December 2018, when I retired from 26 years of making about 1700 programs on religion, the world has lurched into a new phase:

• We’re into the third year of a pandemic that not only continues to morph but has had an unprecedented effect on the world’s economy and on our individual lives, with now an estimated 15 million dead worldwide.
• We face a belligerent China, the second largest economy in the world, which not only unleashed the pandemic, but refused to take responsibility for it; And because our Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called China to account, it has adopted “wolf warrior” tactics, blaming the West with outlandish stories of contaminated frozen chicken dinners, and imposing punitive tariffs and blockades on Australian goods;
• Simultaneously China is growing its war machine and rattling its armour, along with its heavily armed puppet state North Korea, as China prepares to invade democratic Taiwan;
• Its comrade in arms, Russia, is prosecuting a similar move and committing genocide in democratic Ukraine, Europe’s second largest country;
• Despite Western countries’ sanctions on Russia and assistance to Ukraine, they fall short of stopping the war because of Russia’s looming nuclear threat.

  Despite Western countries’ sanctions on Russia and assistance to Ukraine, they fall short of stopping the war because of Russia’s looming nuclear threat.

• International organisations such as the UN, WHO and NATO, were slow and frustratingly limited in their responses to these multiple threats to the West’s foundational values.
• Natural disasters in Australia–which are not new or unprecedented—have contributed a sense of urgency combined with economic and human suffering.
• At the top of this list is a belief that global warming, which is now relabelled “climate change” since some regions experienced very severe winters, is going to bring the cataclysmic end of the planet, and as a result we must reach zero emissions by 2050 at any cost.

All these together paint a world of gloom, where “prophets of doom”, who proclaim “the end of the world is nigh” gain a huge following, most of it extremely critical of our society’s history, institutions and religion, but most of all our government.

Fierce critics of “the powers that be” are not new. They first appeared in ancient Israel with the 17 prophets of the Hebrew Bible – Hosea, Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Mica, to name a few – who predicted a bleak future if the prevailing order was not overturned.  In their wake, the Messiah would come, with his promise of salvation to his followers.

The West has seen many such prophets, but in the 1960s the most famous one was Baptist pastor, Martin Luther King Jr, who held the attention of a nation with his brilliant oratory and timely message to give up racial segregation. His assassination in 1968, opened the way for a host of others mainly fired by Marxism. From Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Caesar Chavez, and Malcolm X to “Danny the Red” who led the 1968 student protests in France.[2]

Their scathing denunciations of capitalism, neo-colonialism, and the church, were in stark contrast to Martin Luther King Jr’s hopeful sermons and stirring vision of a better America, where people would unite under the seminal message of the Bible, that all people were created equal and in the image of God, and were judged by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin.

All this took place during the Vietnam War against Communist takeover. But when the War finally came to an end in the mid 1970s, with hundreds of thousands dead, including nearly 60,000 Americans and more than 500 Australians, the Vietnam War had failed.  In its wake many students fell for Chairman Mao’s propaganda to “Let a hundred flowers bloom”, ignorant of how millions of Chinese died as a result of Mao’s “so called” Great Leap Forward. Mao became a kind of “Red saint”

Rather than politics and war, personal spiritual transformations and visions of utopia took hold.  That was my era on campus, where I witnessed a tidal wave of spiritual teachers – cults, sects, self-styled new-age miracle workers, Indian gurus, swamis and yogis, Buddhist monks and nuns from a variety of different Asian sects and countries – all together offering a vast array of spiritual paths that would lead their followers out of the degraded, sullied, corrupt, wealthy world of the West, into the pure, simple, love-filled communes, ashrams and intentional communities.

As if…

It didn’t actually work out that way…. My articles on this phenomenon, which are reproduced in my book, examine the methods whereby cult leaders not only promoted themselves as enlightened beings with supernal powers, but attracted large numbers of followers who were keen to adopt a new way of looking at reality:  students, widows, professionals, public servants, young couples – all kinds;

I also document how they were abused, exploited, defrauded, and in some cases, murdered; as well how cults hounded, silenced, terrorised and at times killed their critics and innocent civilians.

But what is most surprising about this tale, is that many if not most of these groups, which practised militant collectivism, had the support of a large number of the most prominent academics, who were keen to re-badge the phenomenon as an expression of “authentic faith”. Some cult members, like Tim Anderson of the Ananda Marga cult, became academics.

Anderson “taught political economy from an anti-imperialist perspective” but in late 2018 he was dismissed from the University of Sydney[3] after repeated warnings to desist from provocative and offensive social media activity, but in August 2021 a federal court upheld Anderson’s right to free speech.[4]

Academics who simply re-labelled the cults “new religions” even applauded the groups for providing so-called ‘chaste’ and regimented lives to students who might otherwise have got involved in the drug scene of the 1970s.

In a strange way, university academics set themselves up as quasi-prophets, preparing the ground for the new messiahs, while turning a blind eye to the absolute control they exercised over the lives of their followers:  Here are just a small selection of these new self-styled messiahs:

Yogi Bajan of 3HO, Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, who later claimed that both he and his wife were messiahs, Moses David Brandt Berg, of The Children of God, David Koresh, of the Branch Davidians, Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate, Shoko Asahara of Aum Shinri Kyo; Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh of the Rajneeshies or Orange People (a real favourite here in Australia and Oregon where they relocated after being expelled from Poona, India),  L Ron Hubbard of Scientology, Werner Erhard of est, Forum and Landmark Education; Swami Prabhupada of Hare Krishna, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of TM, Anne Hamilton-Byrne of the Family, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar of Ananda Marga, Sai Baba of the Sathya Sai Organisation,  and just to throw in a recently deceased female messiah, Amy Carlson, who was the incarnation of Marilyn Monroe, Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ, but known as Mother God, of the cult ‘Love Has Won’ (which sells “magical colloidal elixirs” on line). Of course, the one who put this entire phenomenon on the map in 1978, was Jim Jones of People’s Temple, who led more than 900, mainly Black Americans to their deaths by a suicide ritual in the jungles of Guyana, where he established his dystopia.

Not all academics and the legal fraternity exonerated these self-proclaimed messiahs and God-men, but enough of them did breach the rules of impartial observation and conflict of interest; they blocked the publication of critical, refereed articles on these groups, and significantly prevented government regulation, investigation, and prosecution of them, arguing they were just part of the “spiritual rebirth of the West”.

So what is their relevance?

When I see so-called secular movements, headed by self-proclaimed experts, using extreme language to promote patently irrational beliefs, which brook no criticism, and corral young people, world leaders, some very wealthy individuals, and aspiring local politicians, with threats of dire destruction, then I see strong similarities to the kind of rhetoric and methods of intimidation that cults employ.

Here’s a quote from someone who has almost reached messianic status: “Apart from climate, almost nothing else matters.”

It would certainly appear so, to Greta Thunberg, who made that public statement, and whose protests, strikes, speeches, and Instagram posts predicting planetary doom as a result of climate change has marshalled a world-wide following, including some very wealthy enablers like Simon Holmes a Court, who has funded a group of independent candidates in our election on the grounds that they have pronounced climate as the number one emergency and strenuously deny that they are a political party.So what are they? A religion seeking influence?  Presumably, they are ready to adopt Thunberg’s austere personal regime which she outlined for the rank and file, including giving up air travel.

That last requirement reportedly destroyed her mother’s career as an opera singer, and turned her parents’ lives upside down. But they aren’t the only ones. Greta’s campaigns that are as far afield from her Swedish home as impoverished Bihar, India, resulted in her image being burned in effigy by farmers protesting in Delhi.

Yet, three Norwegian lawmakers and two Swedish Parliamentarians nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize.

What is remarkable is that this privileged Swedish teenager, whose ‘selective mutism’ allows her to adopt a ‘vow of silence’ when she elects to, has become a kind of Joan of Arc symbol for millions of people who have come to believe her message that climate change is an “all or nothing” phenomenon.  

Their demands reflect what I would call “Deep Green Religion” where outlandish gestures and urgent time-frames have truncated the thousands of years of human habitation on this planet into an “emergency extinction movement”.  As if there were no other serious threats to our human existence.

Let me divert for a moment to an earlier time, just over 20 years ago.  Do you remember 1999?  I do, because apart from reading the hysterical articles in the press about Y2K, which was set to cause a world-wide shutdown in our computer programs, I attended a conference on millennial movements at Boston University.  Over the course of five days, theologians, sociologists and historians discussed the history of apocalyptic thinking, conspiracy theories and cult-like behaviours during the period just preceding the year 1000 and the year 2000. Out of it, I made a ten-part series called “Millennial Dreams”.

As we all know, Y2K didn’t happen in 2000, even though the Founder and Director of Millennial Studies at Boston University, Professor Richard Landes, was summoned to brief the White House on his well-publicised warnings.  What really brought the world to a stand-still occurred a year later in September 2011. It seemed “out of the blue”, Osama Bin Laden’s Al Queda attack on the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon, and the foiled, but planned, third target, the White House.

Extremist Islam, not computer programming, unleashed horrendous tragedy in America and the world. But it actually had started long before then, with the truck bomb in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre on 26 February 1993.

A long and wearying anti-terrorist defensive and offensive campaign followed 9/11, the focal point being Afghanistan, but also around the world as Western democracies attempted to thwart copy-cat terrorism.  And it is still not over.[5]

We know that war and terrorism is brutal and bloody, and its success is not guaranteed, as we are witnessing today in Putin’s genocidal war on Ukraine. There is no precise prediction for war’s outcomes and no sure prevention of terrorism.  In a word, you are likely to get killed. Which is why prosecuting a war on climate change that claims to predict accurate outcomes, is a lot more attractive. No one gets killed and it is firmly believed to be entirely in our control. 

This naivete is something that the West particularly falls prey to because we are problem solvers, and the tendency to believe that we are the centre of everything, translates into thinking we can also control everything.  And it follows that when we don’t, we are guilty.  The attack on the World Trade Centre was a case in point, where, almost instantly, a chorus self-blame explained the Al Queda attack.   Such thinking purports to be driven by a moral conscience, but I think it is symptomatic of a solipsistic illusion, where all solutions to life’s trials are in our hands.

So what are individual believers doing to prevent climate change? They wear pre-owned clothing, eat organically grown vegetables, and give up meat for veganism.   Also, they install solar panels, even if they do end up in land-fill within 25 years.  Usually, it does not involve giving up computers, ipads, or smartphones because they are used to recruit masses of people into the cause.  Most of these goods, including solar panels, are produced in China, which is the largest emitter of CO2 in the world at 31 per cent, compared to America’s 13 per cent and Australia’s 1.1 per cent.

Why did the Greens Senator, Jordan Steele-John, recently assert that China does not pose a threat to Australia? Perhaps the Greens cannot bear the thought of living without China’s solar panels, smartphones and computers.

And yet the Greens also wish to end all coal and gas exports, which would not go down well in China, which has 1,110 coal-fired power stations on the mainland – and growing – and many more in its client states.

“Deep green religion” is not new.  The German and Austrian blood-and-soil movements in the 1920s and 30s promoted earth spirituality, animism, nature-religions, and veganism while it poured scorn on the Bible and the church.  Similar movements in America emerged in the 1970s, and here in the 1990s, when paganism, wicca, and indigenous spirituality grew in popularity, and was signalled by wearing natural fibres, donning indigenous clothing, and living in mud brick houses.

Fashions come and go, and mud brick houses don’t last, and they’re hellish to build to-boot, but the championing of indigenous practices and beliefs has soared, and it shows no signs of abating.  Once again academics were at the forefront, seeding romantic ideas of a pristine indigenous past.  Some were writers penning fake memoirs.  The Education of Little Tree was an American best-seller, even after the author, Forrest Carter, was exposed as lying about being a Cherokee Native American.

In the 1970s Carlos Castaneda, captured a whole generation with his so-called ethnographic accounts of a Yaqui Indian, Don Juan Matus, a “Man of Knowledge”. Castaneda’s books became spiritual manuals, in which he claimed that he had been declared a “seer” of unusual perception into another reality.  People believed Castaneda’s claim that the path to spiritual self-discovery was paved with indigenous traditions, peyote and a host of other hallucinogens.[6]

The Teachings of Don Juan, and all of Castaneda’s subsequent books, were promoted as authentic, when in fact they were fiction. An academic scandal around his work, is ongoing, because of the alleged involvement of university lecturers who helped him, and his own claim to be an anthropologist. Also false.

A similar phenomenon has occurred in Australia with Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 Dark Emu, which won the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Prize, and Pascoe was bestowed the Australia Council’s Lifetime Achievement in Literature Award in 2018. While different in its thrust from Castaneda’s shamanistic tales, it is an equally ideologically-driven effort to extoll indigeneity at the expense of falsifying the historical record and claiming that the Aborigines were farmers and not hunter gatherers before Europeans arrived. The Australia Council called it a “monumental achievement” but, as someone wryly remarked, “we love comforting fictions more than we love the truth”. And there are some very uncomfortable truths about indigenous practice, which did not provide sufficient sustenance for its people and resulted in too many cruel deaths, especially of babies – but that is another well documented story.[7]

Today, the nexus between indigeneity, “deep green religion” and the climate change movement is growing exponentially.  It does not usually result in coherent positions, and sometimes it creates grassroots conflict.  For example, when the climate change movement demands the de-investment in fossil fuels and the closing of coal mines it runs counter to the interests of many Aboriginal groups in Australia, who benefit (1) financially from mining royalties and employment, as well as (2) socially through the provision of infrastructure, healthcare and education by the mining companies.

Ted Nordhaus, the American co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute,[8] is an eco-modernist, who has stirred up the climate change movement with his seasoned view that apocalyptic thinking about environmental catastrophe is not helpful or useful because it distracts from the ways in which humans need to adapt their infrastructure and habits of living to changed temperatures and conditions. For example, many Californian urbanites, like him, have sought pleasanter natural surroundings up the coast, yet it is a fire hazard and prone to earthquakes –and always has been.

Nordhaus recommends spending more on burying power lines that have caused and exacerbated destructive fires, planting drought-resistant crops, rebuilding old dams in preparation for floods and improving crumbling roads for easy egress. He says big emissions-reduction will not change the conditions any time soon, and as he knows, fires alone, not to mention earthquakes and volcanos, create pollution on a scale that exceeds a bad day in Beijing.

So, the challenges of climate, whether it’s hotter or colder, dryer or wetter, should be focused on alleviating and adapting to its inevitable consequences, as populations grow.  This is what human beings have always done.  The Dutch built their dykes, the Judeans built their cisterns in ancient Israel’s arid deserts, the Romans built their aqueducts over long distances and difficult terrain, and the engineering requirements for all those environments were met with ingenuity, technology and most of all the imagination of Western civilisation.

But the deep green religion that has gripped our current world sees itself primarily as a spiritual and “social justice movement”, which is exactly what the critics of Nordhaus claim he lacks—a social justice motivation.  Other so called “social justice causes” adopted by green movement, also include the anti-Israel BDS movement and the “peace and disarmament movement”, that you may recall the Soviet Union so generously funded through so-called peace groups from the 1950s onward.

Eerily similar, we now see that Australia’s Greens are taking positions that align with Communist China’s aims, declaring that “they pose no threat to Australia”, which is curious, given China’s record of being the worst emitter, by far, of CO2 into the atmosphere.  Similarly, the deep green religion brigade seems unperturbed by the alarming human rights abuses of China’s totalitarian regime.

To summarise, I see the dangers of Deep Green Religion as:

First, and foremost, it poses as a scientifically based movement that aims to occupy the seats of power and government, yet relies on stoking irrational fears, extreme language and naïve polices that appeal to desires for a pristine existence that leaves no human footprint on the environment.

Second it ignores the real and present dangers to our lives in the immediate short term, which owe nothing to the predicted 1.5 degree rise in temperatures.

Third, it leaves us unprepared to meet those dangers, whether they are wild weather events, economic hardship, or international warfare.

Fourth, by demanding the massive de-funding of Australia’s natural-resource-based economy, Deep Green Religion is willing to throw a robust economy under the bus, where the standard of living and a strong tax-base funds our healthcare, our education, our research, and among other things, our defence capabilities. Of course, defence is not important to Deep Green Religion, which advocates de-militarisation, that is, dismantling of our defence force.

Deep Green Religion denies the necessity of human warfare, unpleasant as it is, and also buries the historic achievements of European civilisation and its religious traditions, by imposing mandatory formulas which all but erase them from the public square. Nothing could be more heinous in the Deep Green Spiritual Universe, for example, than acknowledging the brilliance of Captain James Cook, the eternal truths of the Bible, and the cultural riches that Europeans brought to Australia.

All three are foundation stones to Australian society, yet every public event begins with an infallible dogma that invokes indigenous elders past and present as if they alone form the foundation of our society, our beliefs and our civilisation. I don’t wish to silence Aboriginal people or erase their culture, but neither should we silence and erase what has built up this nation as one of the finest and most successful in the world.

I would like to end by referring to the former Member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly for Stuart, Bess Nungyari Price. I interviewed Bess and her husband Dave, in their home in Alice Spring. Bess said: “Aboriginal culture and beliefs are not some ‘Disneyland paradise’, the way outsiders like to imagine it.”  Her daughter, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, an advocate of Aboriginal reform, who was my guest on the very last Spirit of Things agree. But we prefer comforting fictions to uncomfortable truths.

[1] The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/putins-war-in-ukraine-is-blessed-by-church-icon-says-kremlin-boss-t9lr6hfkl  March 14 2022.

[2] ‘Danny the Red’ (Dany le Rouge aka Daniel Cohn-Bendit) later became co-president of the European Greens/European Free Alliance in the European Parliament.

[3] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/court-backs-academics-free-speech-in-swastika-dismissal-case-20210831-p58ngf.html

[4] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/court-backs-academics-free-speech-in-swastika-dismissal-case-20210831-p58ngf.html

[5] After 27 years at Boston University, Professor Landes is at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv writing about what he now considers the most dangerous millennial movement in history, the global jihad movement.

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/science/peyote-s-hallucinations-spawn-real-life-academic-feud.html

[7] https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/09/the-incidence-of-cannibalism-in-aboriginal-society/

[8] https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/11/19/ted-nordhaus-on-how-green-activists-mislead-and-hold-back-progress