Pop novelist Michael Crichton on environmentalism-as-religion:

If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

And we can add more. Vegetarianism and veganism as religious diets equivalent to keeping kosher. Attending political protests as revivalism. Pamphleteering as evangelism (the similarity of PIRG workers to Mormon missionaries is uncanny). And, among the “truly faithful,” vicious infighting as petty local church politics. It seems environmentalism-as-religion is just the latest outgrowth of an earlier religious movement–Romanticism.

Crichton then goes on to present a portfolio of facts to argue that “we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.” He believes that “science offers us the only way out” of the politics of environmental religion.

It is an unfortunate characteristic of modern politics to decry the falsity of your opponent’s facts only to present a slew of your own facts. The problem is that it isn’t persuasive. (Crichton himself predicts that religious environmentalists won’t listen to his facts.) If, as Chrichton argues, environmentalism has become a quasi-religious movement, then what will be persuasive is a more compelling religious vision of the world. There are two common ways out of a faith tradition: radical disillusionment with your fellow religionists or conversion to another faith tradition. Crichton offers neither.

But there is a larger problem at work here. The belief that facts are persuasive is characteristic of another modern religious movement–the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment and Romanticism have been battling it out for decades now, one exalting the pure heart, the other the rational mind. Their sibling rivalry has become incredibly dull to the rest of us.

Crichton makes a classic evangelistic mistake: he seeks to convert others while speaking from within his own religious tradition. As Saul/Paul knew, to convert others you must become as a Roman to the Romans and as a Jew to the Jew. This is not manipulation. This is an act of empathy, of moral imagination. And not everyone has the knack.