The influence of a sixteen-year-old has risen on the world stage, and Christians should take notice. Greta Thunberg, or just “Greta” is an environmental activist who is speaking at larger and larger events. Recently she spoke to a half million people in Montreal. Clearly, Greta has inspired people with her message.
The Search for Inspiration
Regardless of the degree of concern, you have about climate change, you can’t ignore the way a teenager has given inspiration to many of her peers and their parents.
Since Greta speaks with clarity and boldness about her views, she has galvanized the attention of young people in a hyper-distracted age. We know that keeping people’s attention is very difficult. Greta has spoken into the cultural moment with something that Millenials have been hungering for: inspiration.
It is easily forgotten that for all of our googling wisdom and instragrammed postures, there is a sterility and banality about life which millenials are feeling deeply. The result is that they know something isn’t right. And they don’t want to hear platitudes from the Boomers and GenXers that everything is going to be okay. As Greta said:
Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful; I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act, I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.
World Economic Forum
Greta has inspired the Millenial generation to think about more ultimate issues than cat videos and the Kardashians. But her message of inspiration, like so many other would-be prophets, fails to be ultimate enough. Her universal call for panic is not panicked enough, and in another way, it is panic that is misdirected.
The Panic of Hell
What Christians should recognize is that Greta has reintroduced the power of future damnation into our minds. The panic of global climate catastrophe (only about a decade away it is claimed), has created an urgency, immediacy and summoning power to a teenager’s message. It is a secularized version of the panic of being hell-bound.
At a time when evangelical Christians have utterly muted any talk of the panic of a literal damnation in hell, Greta has placed the panic of ‘the house on fire’ as her central point of inspiration.
An Urgent Message
Maybe Christians should learn to both inspire and warn in ways that Greta cannot. Who among evangelicals today does not get just a bit squeamish to say along with John the Baptist, “flee from the wrath to come” (Luke 3:7)? Or Jesus’s striking words, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” (John 9:39)?
Could the warning to metaphorical ‘weeds’ of the world be any more panic-inducing than to tell them where they are going? As Jesus said they go into “the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:42).
Maybe we should inspire and warn in the ways that Jesus did. Greta is doing it for her message. How much more should we do so for the message of Jesus?
