Category: Christian Anthropology

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When Academia Baptizes a Mountain: The Rise of the New Earth-Religion

Wesley J. Smith’s recent essay (behind the National Review paywall) exposes a remarkable—and troubling—shift inside the world’s most prestigious academic and policy institutions: the rapid ascent of the “nature-rights” movement. What began as environmental fringe activism has now won the imprimatur of Cambridge University, major law societies, scientific journals, and global U.N. networks.

The core claim? Nature itself—mountains, rivers, glaciers, ecosystems—is a living person endowed with legal rights.

Cambridge’s new policy journal, Public Humanities, is devoting an entire issue to this concept. Its call for papers is shockingly explicit:

“We urgently need to change the way we relate to nature. One of the ways to do so is to consider nature as a subject of rights, as a living entity that has the right to exist, to be respected, to fulfil its natural role without arbitrary interference and to be repaired when its rights are violated. The constitution of Ecuador… has recognized nature as a subject of rights and calls it Pacha Mama (Mother Earth)… Dozens more countries have followed… The views of nature as a being is expanding in a variety of realms from the arts, to philosophy and the natural sciences.”

This is not metaphor. It is metaphysics—and law.

The Premise: A Living, Sacred Earth

Smith notes the obvious: nature is not alive. Sand, granite, and air do not possess consciousness, agency, or moral standing. Yet Cambridge’s editors treat “Pacha Mama”—the Incan earth-goddess—as a model for modern law. The result is not environmental stewardship but a revival of Gaia-style mysticism 1Gaia mysticism is the belief that the Earth is a single living, divine organism—a conscious being that unifies all life. It treats natural systems as sacred and intelligent, often blending environmentalism with spiritual or neo-pagan reverence for “Mother Earth.” cloaked in academic respectability.

From a Christian vantage, this is Romans 1 in institutional form: worshiping creation rather than the Creator.

The Consequence: Human Beings Become the Problem

If nature has a “right” to exist without human “interference,” then several pillars of civilization become violations:

  • mining and resource extraction
  • large-scale agriculture
  • transportation networks
  • modern sanitation
  • energy development

Smith argues the implications are unavoidable: nature-rights law would make modern prosperity impossible.

This is not conservation; it is an attempt to curtail human exceptionalism—the biblical truth that humans, and not mountains, bear the image of God.

The Epistemology: Mysticism Over Science

The Cambridge initiative treats “indigenous lifeways” as privileged sources of knowledge about nature as a living being. Smith respects indigenous cultures, but he rightly notes:

  • these worldviews are pre-scientific
  • they cannot sustain modern economies
  • they are now selectively weaponized for ideological ends

In other words, the academy now elevates myth when it serves a preferred political religion.

The Politics: Anti-Capitalist and One-Sided

The call for papers warmly encourages scholarship on:

“the relationship between capitalism and the rights of nature.”

Conspicuously missing:

Any mention of the catastrophic environmental records of communist states—from the Aral Sea to Chernobyl to China’s ongoing ecological destruction.

When critiques run only in one direction, ideology—not science—is doing the talking.

Why This Matters: The Elites Are Converting

Smith’s final warning is stark. The nature-rights movement is advancing not because it is rational but because it is religious—an earth-religion that has seduced the institutional elite:

  • universities
  • scientific journals
  • international policy bodies
  • legal societies

People assume the movement is too absurd to gain traction. But fringe beliefs, once adopted by elite institutions, quickly become policy (e.g. transgenderism).

The Theological Stakes

The deeper issue is anthropological. When inanimate nature receives “rights,” humans lose theirs. The Creator/creature distinction collapses. Stewardship becomes theft. Human beings become intruders, not image-bearers (i.e. agents of the Creator.)

What Smith describes is not environmental ethics—it is neo-paganism with legal authority, the inversion of the Christian doctrine of creation and the dignity of the human person.

Unless scientists, policymakers, and Christians recognize what is happening inside the intellectual centers of the West, this new earth-religion will not remain symbolic. It will reshape law, limit human flourishing, and weaken the moral foundation on which human dignity rests.

Source: Academia Embraces the Unscientific Earth Religion of ‘Nature Rights’ by Wesley J. Smith, National Review Online.

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Celebrate God’s Good Creation

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When National Security Turns Against the Created Order

One of the most striking features of our cultural moment is how thoroughly gender ideology has seeped into institutions charged with safeguarding the public good. Universities, medical associations, school districts, and corporations have all been reshaped by DEI frameworks that treat gender identity as a sacred category beyond scrutiny. But the recent whistleblower report from inside the National Security Agency (NSA), published by City Journal, reveals something even more troubling: this same ideology has taken root within our intelligence community—an arena where ideological capture is not merely misguided, but dangerous.

According to the whistleblower, a “very small number” of transgender-identified employees and activists inside the NSA wield outsized power, effectively steering workplace culture, intimidating dissenters, and introducing radical ideological commitments into the agency’s operational environment. This is not simply about workplace inclusion. It is about an activist minority leveraging institutional mechanisms to impose a worldview on the nation’s top intelligence analysts.

As the whistleblower puts it:

“There is a very small number of them, but they wield an enormous amount of power. And outside of the sick stuff, you also see a prevalent Marxist philosophy going on with these people in their chat rooms. They hate capitalism. They hate Christians. They’re always espousing socialist and Marxist beliefs.”

This hatred of Christians is not a vague dislike of religion in general. It is a targeted hostility toward those who still hold to Christianity’s historic teaching that human beings are created male and female, and that Jesus Himself affirmed the creational design of marriage as one man and one woman (Gen. 1:27; Matt. 19:4). In other words, their contempt is aimed precisely at those who uphold the biblical anthropology that gender ideology seeks to overthrow.

The whistleblower recounts that when ordinary analysts raised concerns—reminding coworkers that the agency’s mission is to protect the United States and identify adversaries—they were met with instant denunciation:

“They just got hammered. They would just start coming out with ‘transphobe’ and ‘homophobe’ right away or calling you a ‘racist.’ And that’s why a lot of folks are still hesitant to say anything, because you still have people at these agencies in those key spots. It infected everything.”

This is precisely how ideological capture works: not by persuading the majority, but by ensuring that dissent is costly. When the enforcement mechanism is social punishment, accusations of bigotry, or professional marginalization, most people keep their heads down. And in a place like the NSA—where people can lose clearances or career prospects for being viewed as “hostile” to DEI priorities—silence becomes the only safe strategy.

The theological undertone here cannot be ignored. When an ideology that denies the givenness of the body also breeds contempt for those who affirm the God-given meaning of the body, the conflict is not merely cultural—it is spiritual. What the whistleblower describes is a workplace atmosphere where those who hold to Christian teaching on creation, marriage, and sexual morality are treated not as colleagues, but as enemies.

The implications are sobering. Intelligence agencies depend on clarity, objectivity, and moral seriousness. An environment where analysts fear speaking honestly, or where ideological activists dominate key positions, is an environment where national security itself becomes compromised.

What this whistleblower describes is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a larger pattern: elite institutions across the country now treat gender ideology as a non-negotiable orthodoxy, and they enforce it with missionary zeal. When even intelligence agencies are reshaped by activists who “hate capitalism” and openly disdain Christians, we are no longer dealing with neutral bureaucracies. We are witnessing the politicization of institutions that were never meant to be political.

Defend God’s Good Creation

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Europe’s New Anti-Sex, Anti-Family Revolutionaries: From Foucault to O’Flaherty

When  almost 70 left-wing French MPs recently proposed removing biological sex from national identity cards, they claimed to be advancing equality. In reality, they were advancing an anti-human ideology—the same ideology that has spread across the EU and now infects its highest institutions.

As Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobnina explain in The Critic (Europe Must Not Erase Sex), this latest move is not an isolated gesture but part of a coordinated push rooted in the European Commission’s newly published LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy. Ostensibly, this effort aims to protect LGBTIQ+ individuals from discrimination and social exclusion, but in practice it extends far beyond that limited goal. That strategy, as they observe, promotes self-identification of sex without age restrictions across member states—an intermediate step toward the total abolition of sex envisioned in the Yogyakarta manifesto drafted by Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.

This direct institutional alignment shows how activist philosophy has been absorbed into the machinery of governance. O’Flaherty, as the author of the Yogyakarta Principles, embodies this bureaucratic radicalism: he is the face of a movement that trades truth for theory and biology for ideology, converting the abstract ideals of postmodern “liberation” into binding European policy.

 O’Flaherty’s position stems from his long-standing advocacy to eliminate sex from law and practice, which culminated in his drafting of the Yogyakarta Principles in 2007, later updated in 2017 with a clear demand: that states must cease registering sex on all legal documents, including birth certificates.

It is this demand, alongside other Council of Europe and EU references, that the French politicians cited in their proposal, concluding that “the inscription of sex on national identity cards is a form of discrimination.” A similar conclusion was reached by Finland’s Social Democratic government, which in its 2020–2023 Gender Equality Plan proposed removing the sex-based digits from national identity numbers. While this may sound absurd to most Europeans, few are aware of either its repercussions or its history.

Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobnina
Europe Must Not Erase Sex

This kind of thinking is not uniquely Irish or European—it is quintessentially French. The same intellectual impulse that gave us Michel Foucault’s “liberation of desire” has now metastasized into EU policy. What began as abstract deconstruction of “power and knowledge” has become a practical project to dismantle every category by which human beings understand themselves—male and female, husband and wife, father and mother. In the name of equality and freedom, it seeks to dissolve the very foundation of society.

The Assault on the Family

The logic of sexual “liberation,” as articulated by its most candid theorists, leaves no room for the family as a stable or normative institution. Its advocates have been forthright about this. The philosophical roots lie not in grassroots activism but in a deeper intellectual rebellion—one that sees moral order and family structure as mechanisms of control. French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose ideas remain foundational for today’s gender theorists, framed the matter bluntly:

“Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized. They are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who have used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them. Controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.”

—M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 151, quoted sympathetically in R. Goss, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto, p. 62.

Foucault’s project, spelled out further in The History of Sexuality, was nothing less than the subversion of the moral universe that Western civilization inherited:

“If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required.” (The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 5)

In other words, liberation requires not reform but revolt—an overthrow of what Foucault called “the rules.” And what institution embodies those rules more clearly than the natural family, with its inherent moral and generative order? To challenge the family, then, is to challenge the very structure of reality as given.

Foucault’s disciples have carried that revolt from the lecture hall to the culture at large. As one of the more extreme voices put it, the family must be eradicated altogether. Michael Swift declared without apology that “the family unit—spawning ground of lies, betrayals, mediocrity, hypocrisy, and violence—will be abolished. The family unit, which only dampens imagination and curbs free will, must be eliminated.” (After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s, p. 361.)

These are not isolated voices on the fringe. They articulate the philosophical engine behind the broader sexual revolution—an assault on the givenness of the human person and the stability of human relations. What was once academic radicalism now guides public policy, from the French Parliament to Brussels. The rhetoric may have softened into the bureaucratic language of “rights” and “equality,” but the underlying goal remains: to dismantle the traditional family, erase natural distinctions, and replace them with a new social order shaped by the will to power rather than the wisdom of creation.

The Biological Foundation of the Family

At the heart of this struggle lies a deeper truth that El-Nagashi and Zobnina rightly defend: the family cannot be understood apart from the biological reality of man and woman. Our complementary male and female existence is not a social construct to be reprogrammed—it is the very architecture of life, the biological building block upon which human society stands. From this complementarity comes new life, and with it, the moral and social bonds that form the family. To erase sex, as the French proposal and O’Flaherty’s activism would have it, is to erase the foundation of both human identity and civilization itself.

The authors of The Critic article warn that this ideological erasure masquerades as compassion but is in fact a profound act of cultural suicide. Europe’s lawmakers, seduced by Foucault’s logic of perpetual rebellion, now seek to “liberate” humanity from the very structure that makes it possible to exist. To defend the truth about sex, therefore, is not reactionary—it is an act of preservation, an affirmation of reality against the fantasies of power. The future of Europe depends on recovering that truth.

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Defend God’s World