There’s no doubt we have shoved God out of the public square. In His stead, a new deity is arising: a pagan idolization of His creation.
Just like the Romans, we are trading “the truth about God for a lie.” The apostle Paul said in Romans 1:25, “So they worshipped and served the things God created instead of the Creator himself, who is worthy of eternal praise.”
On Tuesday, Union Theological Seminary in New York City — a bastion of progressive ideology — encouraged its seminarians, who were gathered in the school’s chapel, to “confess to the plants” their sins against them.
After facing quite a bit of backlash on social media, with one top Christian ethicist, Andrew Walker, calling the practice “a form of explicit paganism,” Union retweeted posts from others defending the ritualized service during which students “confessed to plants.”
One left-leaning pastor, Eric Atcheson, defended the school, writing, “Plants are already spoken to [and] even cursed in parts of Scripture and a lot of Christians rightly believe in confessing harm done to the planet, of which plant life is an integral part.”
Robert Ellsberg, who is seemingly a father to one of the seminarians who participated in the ritual, wrote, “Confessing to houseplants might seem silly — but what about glaciers, whales, the Amazon, monarch butterflies, the [earth] — which rarely figure in our confession of what we have done and failed to do.”
As Union slips into embracing animism, which is defined as the “attribution of conscious life to objects in and phenomena of nature or to inanimate objects,” NBC News — which should be an apolitical and areligious news-sharing outlet — is similarly calling for “climate confessions.”
“Even those who care deeply about the planet’s future can slip up now and then,” the website reads. “Tell us: Where do you fall short in preventing climate change? Do you blast the A/C? Throw out half your lunch? Grill a steak every week? Share your anonymous confession with NBC News.”
Mark Hemingway, a senior writer for Real Clear Investigations, summed up the new NBC News landing page perfectly. He wrote, “This from NBC News is amazing. Climate change is some kind of religion — all eschatology, minus the redemption.”
And that’s exactly what happens when we begin to place our faith in and share our confessions with the created rather than the Creator.
Writing about Union and the nascent environmentalist religion, reformed theologian James R. White wrote, “The world, of course, will applaud and celebrate the paganization of a formerly Christian institution, and will point to these folks as the very epitome of ‘tolerant’ Christianity.”
He continued, “If anyone asks you about this, just say, ‘Christians do not confess to plants, they worship the Creator who made the plants, but made mankind in His image, and hence holds us to His standard, His law, which exposes and convicts us of our sin, and our need of the Savior, Jesus, the Lord of all, who rose from the dead on the third day.’”
After kicking God to the curb, our secularized society has replaced him with a little-G god — or, in some cases, gods — who cannot sustain us or save us.