A great evil is sweeping across the land.
I know this sounds apocalyptic, even excessive, but how else can we describe a system that places profit over people, consumerism over creation, and individualism over community?
This unholy trinity—economic exploitation, globalised consumerism, and radical self-interest—is jeopardising the lives of millions as temperatures rise and extreme weather becomes the new norm.
We are locked into a global system of endless growth, a system that recognises the existential threat of climate breakdown yet presses harder on the accelerator.
We are racing past 1.5°C of warming towards a future where 3°C is not just possible, but likely—a world of mass starvation, mass migration, and societal collapse.
This is evil—systemic, deliberate, and entirely predictable.
It is an evil that hasn’t taken science by surprise but unfolds exactly as foreseen, devastating the world’s most vulnerable and generations yet to come.
And yet, this evil is not high-handed; no one is openly setting out with genocidal intent. It is, as Hannah Arendt described, the banality of evil—a cultural blindness, a functional denialism that refuses to act decisively even as the evidence of catastrophe grows clearer by the day.
This is an evil perpetuated not through malice but through inertia, through systems and habits that seduce us into complicity and numb us to the consequences of our inaction.
And here, even the Church cannot claim innocence. Yes, even those who have declared a climate emergency are often drawn into this functional denialism. Too often, we offer words without action or cling to shallow spiritual comforts that allow us to escape the harsh realities of the future.
But this is not our calling.
We are not called to denial or despair but to truth and transformation.
It is time to wake up, as the apostle Paul exhorts: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” The Church must rise to its prophetic calling, becoming a community of truth-tellers in a culture of denial.
In a world paralysed by despair, we are called to enact hope. In the face of entrenched power, we must speak truth for the sake of the powerless.
Our task is not only to avoid the worst of what may come but also to prepare, in love, for what will come. This will require a cruciform posture—sacrificial, courageous, and rooted in radical love.
To be the Church in this moment is to take up the mantle of justice and mercy, to confront the systems of death that dominate our world, and to embody a hope that is both fierce and tangible.
The time is now. We must refuse the numbing allure of denialism and rise to the sacred task before us: to be a people of truth, love, and transformative action for the sake of God’s creation and all who dwell within it.
In the power of Christ, let us renounce the banality of evil and become the prophetic, cruciform community the world so desperately needs.
- Rev’d Jon Swales, Nov 2024
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