Australia is massively unprepared for monster fires and the health impacts from extreme weather due to climate change. It's the stuff of nightmares and yet the bogey I find hard to shake involves the surreal political inertia of Australia's federal government led by a Pentecostal prime minister.
An insistence on business as usual represents such a huge values gulf, a point of conflict. I went in search of clarity by attending the first ever Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARCC) Conference held earlier this month. The timing of the conference could not have been more prescient. It began on Friday night 8 November with a welcome to country, as deep rainforest country near Lismore in northern New South Wales cried out from thirst with shouts of flame.
Kinship and ancient wisdom inspired people from around Australia to come together: Catholic friars, Muslim scholars, Buddhists, retired scientists and school teachers of Christian faith. Thea Ormerod of the ARCC told the crowd, 'We are struggling to maintain hope in the face of climate breakdown. We are here to show solidarity with others who care.'
Our warming planet is delivering what many forecast, reducing water and livelihoods. At the conference there was an acknowledgement of that; a lament, but also expectations of being recharged for the road ahead. 'We're not as strong as we thought we were,' one young man from the Uniting Church told me. An older gentleman with bright eyes, who practises Zen meditation, piped up, 'Don't forget meditation is a way to influence the world around you. Suffering can also be the agency for deep awakening.'
The barrier for me is the stubborn words and actions of a government that rants against 'indulgent and selfish practices' that threaten the mining sector and 'radical' activists of narrow dogma that 'pit cities against regional Australia'. Like many others, I am cranky about lost opportunity to act on the science, and about policies that condemn those living with poverty (those who will be hardest hit) and sacrifice our clean air. Surely, a man of faith wouldn't act this way?
His government (with an increasingly politicised media unable to help resolve an important national conversation) continues to support, with massive subsidies, extractive and exploitative industries that undeniably warm the planet and threaten the natural environment that underpins our life support systems.
How can this be a legitimate perspective as a publicly-confessing Christian? Why would this shepherd not want to move all of us to safer ground? How is it that, presumably, reading and grappling with the same gospel teachings, we come up with such different ways of seeing and knowing? Many might quickly conclude he has no genuine faith or that he is simply beholden to the minerals lobby, Australia's NRA, but that's too easy and dismissive. Where does the truth lie?
"Morrison is simply the end product of a decline in the kinds of engagements with people and society that was a mark of the Jesus of the gospels."
During a conference break I struck up a conversation with David Tutty, Executive Officer with the Social Justice Commission in Toowoomba. He'd travelled to Canberra from Queensland. 'The answer is found in the reality that Christianity intersects with culture and becomes different forms of missiology — faith lived out in society,' he said.
Our prime minister's own brand of Christian faith — conservative Pentecostalism of the prosperity gospel vintage — is 'a theology that gained new momentum in the modern era with a society increasingly focused on the individual offering a privatised God and personal salvation. It's a post-enlightenment theology that silos politics, the environment and economics as if they are not subject to the same overarching values.'
Former prime minister, Tony Abbott, a confessing Catholic, pointed to this artificial but calculated and pragmatic divide when he said, 'When climate change is a moral issue, we do quite badly. When it's an economic issue, we do very well.'
Stephen Pickard, head of the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture Charles Sturt University in Canberra, which sponsored the conference, observed that 'the all-pervasive impact of a highly individualised notion of society and the dominant divide between faith and the public domain (when it suits) is the air we breathe.
'When Christian faith is so infected with the host culture's pragmatic utilitarian values it forfeits its own prophetic voice and capacity to act differently. In this sense Morrison is not that unusual but simply the end product of a decline in the kinds of engagements with people and society that was a mark of the Jesus of the gospels.'
Tutty added: 'It results in a theology that siloes issues, creates hierarchies and puts profit ahead of people — look at the Coalition's approach to welfare with drug testing and cashless welfare cards that lay the ground for new commercial agendas. If the emphasis is on "God and me" — which exists in all Christian denominations to some degree — then it becomes harder to maintain a social and ecological connection. At its most glaring, the logic is, "If I do good and believe I will be blessed materially by God. People who are poor are not doing what God wants."'
Only holistic perspectives can help deliver a truly comprehensive and compassionate plan for the challenges ahead. As I heard afresh, all problems and solutions are connected, ontologically and spiritually. That means embracing a political vision that understands our deep interdependence.
If I am to remain concerned for what's happening here and now, people facing fire and flood, threats to livelihood and limb, understanding God as both transcendent and imminent, then I have to embrace a God directly involved with people who are suffering. I have to step out, despite and beyond the political inertia, and provide practical care and hope, with the grace and courage to persist.
Toni Hassan is a Canberra journalist and emerging artist. She writes an irregular column for the Canberra Times and is an adjunct research scholar with the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University. She is the author of Families in the Digital Age.