Yesterday was Earth Day and Canadian Anglicans were encouraged to celebrate it with the usual mélange of sacred circles, unnamed traditions and spiritism all spiced with a dash of Gaia:
Creator God, we acknowledge and give thanks that:
In Jesus we know we belong to a Sacred Circle with the Gospel and Baptismal Covenant in the centre.In this Sacred Circle:
We are all related;
We live a compassionate and generous life;
We respect all life, traditions, and resources.
We commit ourselves to spiritual growth, discipleship, and consensus.
Amen.
As it happens, I agree with Roger Scruton, that not despoiling our environment is a conservative value; sadly, the Anglican Church of Canada has gone a few steps further and made environmentalism a substitute for the worship of God the Father. Note the reference to “Creator” rather than “Father” in the above prayer.
The ACoC’s fascination for greening everything had its origins in the actions of Ira Einhorn, one of the founders of Earth Day. Einhorn made a name for himself by murdering his girlfriend and composting her. We cannot accuse him of not living up to his convictions, unlike the Anglican Church of Canada.
I await the day when exanimate Anglican clergy are put to rest by composting.
I don’t celebrate “Earth Day”. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objection to acknowledging the Earth as our home in space and thus, by extension, agreeing that we ought to be considerate (within reason) of our relationship to it.
What I cannot do is allow myself to be co-opted by the ideologues of the environmental movement: celebrating “Earth Day” is thus of the same piece as being cajoled into using the silly personal pronouns some clearly mentally ill persons have invented for themselves.
On the theological front, “Earth Day” in the context of Gaia-worship is pure paganism of course. We are supposedly Christians, not Wiccans and Druids.