By Ned Remington
Exeter Cathedral is proud to be supporting 19-year-old Devonian, Ned Remington, as an Official Observer at this year’s COP29 Climate Summit in Baku. Ned’s placement is part of the Christian Climate Observers Programme (CCOP), which sends young observers from across the world to report back from the centre of negotiations to their local communities and churches.
A personal piece about the role religion has played for me in inspiring activism, and the power of faith to motivate constructive and effective change.
For the last two nights, I stayed with an old friend from my school, now living in the town of Passau, Germany. While I was there, we went up the town’s beautifully prominent monastery – it was the first time there for both of us. To enter, you had to walk up a seemingly endless and bending set of stone steps, stretching up hundreds of metres and climbing the rock face – except the stairs went up a high, immaculately painted white corridor, where the quietest voices echoed down to the bottom of the staircase. The most memorable thing wasn’t the stairs, or the echoes, but the walls – adorned from top to bottom all the way up by miniature paintings and sculptures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. We weren’t the only ones to be struck with some level of awe when making our way up. It is, apparently, very common for visitors to stop and pray when partway up the staircase, rather than in the chapel at the top.
There was something powerful, and the steep march to the monastery – a small pilgrimage to reach God’s place. It’s enough to cause anyone to do some serious reflection. For me, it led me to think properly about my reasons for doing this whole trip. I’m a Christian, and I’m heading to COP29 in Baku as part of the Christian Climate Observer’s Program, with other young Christians from around the world. Whilst I’m at the summit, I’ll be meeting with Christian leaders and representatives as well as secular political diplomats, and I’m hoping to show the role the church can play in these sorts of intergovernmental negotiations. It can feel very awkward to talk about faith openly, especially as a young person. Moreover, for progressive, liberally-minded Anglicans, finding the smoothest possible connection between modern secular society and Christianity seems to be a key ideological motivation for our whole ‘brand’ of faith. The concept of conventional evangelism seems very foreign to my type of Christianity, and I was always taught growing up that sharing God’s word meant showing kindness and acting in a Christ-like manner rather than speaking directly to atheists and others about Jesus. It’s almost a source of embarrassment to open up about your religion for those in my religious demographic, making this post very unusual for me, but I think it’s a vital topic to cover in some detail.
I couldn’t be doing any of this without the support of my local Church communities. Their moral, spiritual and financial support, from ordinary members of local congregations as well as from the Diocese of Salisbury and the place I feel I have grown up in in, Exeter Cathedral. I am very grateful for all the heartfelt demonstrations of human kindness I have experienced since announcing my participation with the CCOP program, and they are my key motivation for making a difference at COP29 and beyond. The young Christians I’ll be working with as part of CCOP will be another source of inspiration. Joining from across the world and a wide range of Christian denominations and communities, I’ve already been inspired by hearing some of their stories about how they’ve got engaged in climate action. The leaders of CCOP have links to a range of Christian climate groups, including Arocha, an international environmental network of church communities.
Outside of COP Summits, there are a variety of faith-based groups that form the backbone of environmental movements, from Christian Climate Action and Dayenu to IFEES, EcoSikh and the One Earth Sangha,as well as the interfaith GreenFaith movement. It’s clear that religion can be a key motivator for climate action, but every person of faith will have their own interpretation of scripture, and therefore their own unique religious inspiration for climate activism.
For me though, I think there are two main ways in which I am motivated by my faith to take action. One is the sense of collective human responsibility for God’s creation. I remember well debating the supposedly contrasting notions of ‘stewardship’ and ‘dominion’ over the planet, with both concepts having biblical evidence to support them. Genesis is the key source for those who argue God has given humanity the freedom to exploit the earth for ourselves, as we were told to “…fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over… every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)
The notion of ownership of the planet, however, doesn’t have to mean we have the freedom to do treat it however we desire. Perhaps we should take the approach to ownership of the inheritor nature reserve, or rare artefact of historical value- where the owner has responsibility to preserve their property in as close to its original state as possible. This type of ownership would certainly be more in line with most other parts of the Bible – with God putting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden ‘to work it and keep it’(Genesis 2:15), whilst a Psalm of David reminds Christians that, ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,’ (Psalm 24:1), whilst Jesus reminds his followers, ‘Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them,’ suggesting that the any hierarchal superiority of humankind doesn’t give us any greater right to life than other creatures. In Ezekial, God appears to himself directly criticise exploitative practices, asking, ‘Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture; and to drink of clear water, that you must muddy the rest of the water with your feet?’ (Ezekial 34:18). There’s even an ominous warning in Revelations that a time will come for ‘destroying the destroyers of the Earth’ (Revelations 11:18).
I’m just one person with one interpretation. It would be wrong to condemn other interpretations of the Bible as less accurate, or to accuse fellow Christians of not correctly practising the faith. However, it seems strange to me that despite that final warning from Revelations, the Christian groups that most cite the concept of divine retribution in the modern day also seem most likely to be opposed politically to strong climate action. This ties into one of the key difficulties when trying to explain my faith to my young, atheist friends: The charge of continuous hypocrisy of a group that seems only to create a new moral high-ground for itself, rather than change the world for the better. I’m in no place to rank or judge the legitimacy of different Christian traditions, but I don’t believe for a moment that headline-grabbing viewpoints from individual Christian groups should be representative of our religion as a whole, when it comes to environmental issues. It’s up to climate-conscious Christians then, to commit to their environmentalist interpretation of God’s Word and achieve meaningful change, including at COP29.
But what role can religious groups play in climate action? They can take action to make their own buildings and land more environmentally sustainable, obviously. And they can promote environmental stewardship through sermons, rituals and prayers with their local congregations. Institutions like the A Rocha foundation and other alternatives for different faiths are vital for achieving these aims internationally. But in Western secular democracies at least, the church, mosque or synagogue shouldn’t be telling people who to vote for. When attending international events like COP Climate or Biodiversity summits, religious representatives quite rightly don’t get a vote or a veto on any part of the proposals. At first glance, the presence of religious groups at the political decision-making table seems performative, even unsuitable.
So why are they there, and why am I joining them at COP as a Christian Climate Observer? Firstly, I believe it’s part of the multifaceted approach to connecting with people about the climate emergency. Building personal relations with ordinary people all over the world is crucial for consensual radical climate action. For some people, talking about their children will make them think more about our planet’s future through the lens of protecting human prosperity. For others, a strong sense of moral and political justice will motivate them to push for a fairer world, where those who didn’t cause climate change aren’t facing environmental catastrophe because of the actions of richer nations. For some, however, it is the Abrahamic notion of stewardship, or the more scientifically accurate theme of interconnectivity with nature that is found in Buddhism, Sikhism and Franciscan Christianity. I believe religious groups should be there to represent and feed back to those who rely on them for environmentalist inspiration, just as youth movements and climate justice campaigners are there too. It’s also important to remember that religious communities can have a very powerful influence over the political decision makers as well – often far more so than secular political campaigner and lobbyists, but in a private and delicate way. In short, the presence of religious groups of all kinds adds another vital dimension for inspiring politicians and the public to take climate change seriously – and at the moment, we need all the help we can get.
Once you reach the top of the staircase at the Passau Monastery, you face a blank white courtyard, lit brightly by sunlight. A quick exploration of passageways will take you to a thin room with a set of candles for the deceased, and a view famous for showing the merging of two distinct colours of water at the confluence of the rivers Danube and Inn. The green hue of the Inn and the bluer Danube clash for a while, forming rocky waves, and one attempts to overpower the other. Eventually though, they give up on fighting, and merge into a bold turquoise. Consensus can be radical, and it doesn’t have to be about power-play and trade-offs. When held to account by higher powers than ourselves, hopefully we can shrug off the tribalism and end the trade-offs, tackling our collective global emergency together.