Religious thinking pervades our supposedly secular age, from the purity-obsessed “clean eating” fetish, to the unforgiving online lynch mob, with its public shamings and demands for penance. The Greta Thunberg phenomenon will fascinate future sociologists – and for similar reasons.
Thunberg, with her apocalyptic warnings and Pippi Longstocking plaits, has become a global icon in a matter of months. More striking than the ubiquitous crowds accompanying her, however, is their quasi-religious reverence. She is portrayed as a child-prophet, a modern-day Joan of Arc in her ability to inspire a movement. Senior broadcasters call her “Greta” as though they enjoyed a direct connection with the teenager.
A seemingly hyperbolic comparison, but there are religious echoes to Thunberg’s doomsday activism, and parallels with the child saints credited with supernatural qualities and praised for their innocence and moral clarity. Thunberg describes her autism as a “superpower”. She depicts a fallen world, whose only hope of salvation lies in Utopian retreat to a pre-industrial past. Her followers’ calls for “climate justice” and reparations to poorer countries ring with self-flagellation.
In an astonishing speech to the United Nations last week, Thunberg excoriated the assembled world leaders for their “betrayal” of young people; they applauded masochistically as she rhetorically whipped them. Fans hailed her frosty run-in with Donald Trump as a symbolic meeting of good and evil; the venal and materialist versus the transcendent and quasi-spiritual embodied by “Greta”. Following an earlier address in Brussels, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker deferentially kissed her hand for the cameras, like a penitent medieval monarch at a shrine.
And, like an ascetic saint, Thunberg is praised for her self-denial. The press attention that accompanied her two-week voyage across the Atlantic highlighted her embrace of its physical rigours, drawing particular attention to the symbols of her suffering; the cramped conditions, the plastic bucket attesting to the lack of showers or toilets. Rarely do her followers ask “where are her parents?”, because they see her as a sacrificial lamb.
The veneration of St Greta is an extraordinary, yet unsurprising, phenomenon. Our comfortable lifestyles, and the decline of religion in the West, have created a spiritual void. But this new religiosity carries few redemptive qualities, such as hope or forgiveness. Questioning any aspect of its message is to be labelled a “denier” – the ultimate form of heresy.
Yet Thunberg’s affiliation with Extinction Rebellion’s extreme, anti-capitalist aims should prompt questions – especially because Left-wingers have routinely used the threat of global panic to herd populations towards socialism. During the Cold War, the anti-nuclear movement was infiltrated by hard-Leftists, keen for the West to drop its opposition to the Soviets.
Quasi-religious fervour is no substitute for hardheaded discussion of costs, benefits and policies. Nor, indeed, should it stop us from asking whether it is really appropriate to expose a child to this level of global scrutiny.
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