The Climate Movement Has Named Its Enemy. Religious Traditions Can Help
In May, anonymous attendees reported on a meeting at the Mar-a-Lago Club between Donald Trump and some of the U.S.’s top oil executives. The former president apparently asked the executives to raise $1 billion for his re-election, telling them it would be a “deal” because of the taxes and regulation they would avoid. Oil tycoon Harold Hamm reportedly took on this challenge, calling 2024 “the most important election in our lifetime.” He has been aggressively raising money from people in his industry, hoping that a Republican administration will open more lands to drilling, limit enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, curb the Environmental Protection Agency, and discourage wind energy.
This story, and the blatantly transactional nature of the conversation in it, is sobering. The assumption that a democratic election should be shaped by huge sums of money is saddening. The apparent unwillingness to consider why regulators want to limit fossil fuel extraction and tax the most profitable industry in the history of the world is infuriating.
However, the conversation between Trump and oil executives is, sadly, not surprising. For the last forty years, the fossil fuel industry has shown its willingness to use political influence, half-truths, and brute force to sustain business as usual. Reporters proved that #Exxonknew about climate change for decades during which it actively blocked public awareness and political action. While rebranding itself with rhetoric of moving “Beyond Petroleum” at the beginning of the twentieth century, BP continued its investments in extraction and shifted blame for climate change to individuals. Peabody Coal clandestinely spent millions to weaken 2014’s Clean Power Plan. They have proven they will do whatever it takes to continue extracting fossil fuels and making huge sums of money. So, the fossil fuel industry is an enemy of anyone who wants to take climate change seriously, respond to it meaningfully, and work toward a more just world.
It took me a while to embrace this idea. I’ve spent decades trying to understand the kind of planetary thinking this blog emphasizes, and in so doing learned to be suspicious of stark “either-or” choices. My academic background trained me to focus on ambiguities, uncertainties, and complexities. It feels simplistic to just name villains and try to defeat them.
But, when there is a clear villain, there is no shame in calling them out. When the truth is simple, there is virtue to stating it simply. I learned this from the movement for climate justice. Twelve years ago, Bill McKibben suggested this when he riffed on one of the most famous quotes in environmental history: “we have met the enemy and they is Shell.” This informed the work he and colleagues in 350.org and Third Act do calling for widespread divestment from the fossil fuel industry. Last year, Christian Figueres, a diplomat who worked closely with fossil fuel executives to secure the historic Paris Accords, said that she had changed her mind, and told the oil and gas industry that they are “facing your expiration date. Because we no longer need you.” The global movement for climate justice is vast and diverse; but it is increasingly united by direct and explicit opposition to the fossil fuel industry.
As a Christian ethicist, I can’t help but think of Jesus’ instruction to his followers to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Like most Christians, I have been taught for most of my life to focus on the call to love and pray for others. There is a generosity to this instruction, a commitment to a moral high ground and a refusal to descend into spite. This is helpful and it is powerful. But it is not the only wisdom in Jesus’ words.
In addition to calling for love and prayer, Jesus also assumes that his followers will have enemies. He warns them they will face threats and calls them to stand up publicly against their opposition. He came from and taught a people occupied by an empire, and he never contradicted the natural impulse to treat that empire and its representatives as enemies. He referred to those in his own tradition whom he saw as selfish and overly legalistic as “vipers.” When he saw people making profit from religious ritual, he yelled at them and turned over their tables (Matthew 3:7, 12:34, 21:12, 23:33).
Jesus had enemies. And he taught his followers to, in the helpful phrase of Melissa Florer-Bixler, “have enemies well.”
I admit that Christian talk of enemies can be dangerous. It has been tainted by the traditions of crusade and colonialism that indiscriminately labeled anyone who was not a European Christian as an enemy. It is also abused today by fundamentalisms that dismiss as enemies anyone who disagrees about sexual morality or economics. These Christians have enemies poorly; their methods and their theologies should be rejected.
But other Christians have had enemies very well indeed. Martin Luther King named as his enemies the “triple evils” of racism, poverty, and militarism and his movement developed creative strategies to expose and oppose segregationists, plutocrats, and war-mongers. He managed to love the people trapped in these systems while working to defeat them. Christians concerned about climate change should learn from this history, and the thousands of other movements that have had enemies well. We have powerful models for the contemporary climate movement.
My own recent research has focused on the work of Walter Wink, a New Testament scholar and activist who thought deeply about how Christian traditions might contribute to a more just and peaceful world. Wink uses ancient language of the “Powers and Principalities” to argue that big institutions —including corporations like Exxon, Shell, and BP— are meant to serve the good of all creation. Remembering this can help us to love —or at least respect— the people working for those institutions. It can also remind us that, when institutions do not serve the common good, they must be opposed until they are reformed or replaced.
Wink’s greatest insight is that the institutions that shape human life —including fallen fossil corporations— are spiritual as well as material entities. They have an internal identity, a relationship to the holy and the rest of creation. This means they can never be defeated if they are opposed only on economic and political grounds. We must understand that the fight is against not just pipelines and investment portfolios, but also spiritual corruption. Wink writes: “Humans can change things, but not if they are so naïve as to think that they are only changing human things.” My forthcoming book explores this idea and other lessons that Christian traditions offer to scholars and activists who understand that the fossil fuel industry is an enemy.
Many Counterpoint readers are less invested in Christian traditions than I am, but most of us are interested in religion in some form. So, I ask: what does the tradition you hold most dear teach about how to have an enemy? What do Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Neopaganism, dark green religion, or spiritual-but-not-religious teachings and rituals offer to the project of naming and opposing the institutions that are defiling the atmosphere? What lessons can we draw that might help the movement for climate justice?
The struggle against fossil fuels, the struggle for a just future on earth, is as much spiritual as it is political. And so those of us who take spiritual traditions seriously have a vital role to play. We need the climate justice movement to name and oppose the enemy defiling the atmosphere. At the same time, that movement needs scholars and traditions that can help them to have enemies well.
Donald Trump’s meeting with oil executives shows that they have a developed, well-funded strategy to sustain their profits and bulldoze over any limits to climate change. They are our enemies. As we work to develop strategies to oppose them, we should remember that we study and worship in traditions that have had enemies for centuries. What can we learn from those traditions about how we can face our enemies and win?
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Kevin J. O’Brien is Professor of Christian and Environmental Ethics at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. His teaching and research focus on environmental ethics and climate change, stressing the intersections of ethics, religion, nonviolence, and social justice. Recent books include the 3rd edition of Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology, co-edited with Whitney Bauman and Richard Bohannon (Routledge, 2024); Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty: Wrestling with Wicked Problems, with Whitney Bauman (Routledge, 2020); and The Violence of Climate Change: Lessons of Resistance from Nonviolent Activists (Georgetown, 2017). His next book, to be published in February, is Meeting the Enemy: The Fossil Fuel Industry and the Power of Christian Resistance (Fortress Press, 2025).
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