Nick Spencer unpacks the relationship between environmental problems and democratic problems. 06/08/2026
Greetings. I write to you on day 5,379 of the Great Drought. We at Theos are surviving on the occasional eggcup full of stagnant rainwater, while we watch footage of southern England ablaze, and stare longingly at photographs of something The Elders tell us was once called “grass”. We hope you’re coping too.
A joke, of course, but not an especially funny one. As I write, half of England (and all of Wales) is in drought, having received about 3% of long–term average rainfall in July; the fire service is responding to 19 active wildfire incidents in the UK; huge tracts of France, Spain and Greece are burning; and the temperature is again predicted to hit the high thirties across most of central Europe this week. And then there’s also the rest of the world.
We can expect more to come. The young Bart Simpson once complained to Homer, “This is the worst day of my life”, to which his father sagely replied, “The worst day of your life so far.” Wags have memeified the exchange for climate change.
“We all know what to do,” the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean–Claude Juncker, is supposed to have remarked. “We just don’t know how to get re–elected after we’ve done it.” He was talking about economic reform and democracy, but if any arena owns this aphorism, it is climate change. We know what causes climate change. We know what we need to do to slow it (we can’t stop it now). But it is a super–wicked problem – combining all the classic problems of collective action, short–term cost vs long–term benefit, and extreme pathway dependency (the problem is essentially embedded in our daily lives). The environmental problem is, perhaps more so, a democratic problem.
Alas, we’re not exactly suffering from a surfeit of democratic trust at the moment. Theos research, to be published later this year, has found some eyebrow–raising results among the British population when it comes to the question of whether we need a “strong man” political leader who is “prepared to break the rules.” The virtues of pluralism, political patience, and democratic deliberation have seen their stock fall over recent decades.
But if the environmental crisis unfolds into a democratic one, the democratic one unfolds into a human one. Whatever ails our politics, its unlikely to be fixed by tweaks to the electoral machine, or even by the election of Count Binface in Clacton, epochal as that may prove. Democracy rests on pre–political foundations and, as Jonathan Sumption recently argued, “even the most carefully designed democracy can be subverted once the underlying spirit has gone.”
Over a decade ago, in his encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote:
“We urgently need a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of knowledge, including economics, in the service of a more integral and integrating vision. Today, the analysis of environmental problems cannot be separated from the analysis of human, family, work–related and urban contexts, nor from how individuals relate to themselves, which leads in turn to how they relate to others and to the environment.” (#141)
He was spot on. The pressures of the hour call for (what he describes elsewhere in the encyclical as) “a genuine and profound humanism to serve as the basis of a noble and generous society”. (#181) Thankfully, there are signs of this emerging.
For a depressingly long time, many Christians were resistant to the green movement, because they saw it as pagan, and resistant to humanism, because they saw it as anti–religious (despite its deep Christian intellectual roots). As noted, Laudato Si’ ended the long drought of encyclical letters on environmental themes by rooting creation care in integral humanism. More recently, in 2020, Francis wrote in Fratelli tutti about “faith, and the humanism it inspires”, while just this year Pope Leo XIV’s much–lauded encyclical Magnifica humanitas pitted Christian humanism, against hubristic post– and transhumanism, insisting the while Christian humanism does “not reject science or technology, but embraces them with gratitude and realism”, it does so with the “higher vocation” of true human flourishing in its sights. (#129)
Earlier this year, a few members of the Theos team spoke at a conference, held at Washington National Cathedral and attended by over a thousand delegates, about Christian humanism and its potential to transform society. Later in the summer, Prof Luke Bretherton, who gave the keynote speech in Washington, assembled an academic conference in Oxford to discuss Reimagining Humanism. The historian of ideas Jens Zimmerman is about to publish a fascinating book on What is Christian humanism?
In other words, there is momentum here, as more and more people become aware of the way in which the current storms that are buffeting societies across the world are generated by deep weather patterns, originating miles away, in which the most fundamental questions that face human beings – who am I? who are we? to whom (and what) do we have a responsibility? and why? – are worked through.
As friends of Theos will know, this has been a theme in our work for many years now, linking theology (and, in particular, theological anthropology – the question of who I am, posed in the light of Christ) to everyday affairs. You can watch our most recent event on this topic, held at the National Gallery, in which Rowan Williams, Marcus du Sautoy, Ayla Lepine, Nathan Mladin, and Chine McDonald discuss “Art, creativity and what it means to be human in the age of AI” here. And you can also book to come to our next one, in September, on “Faith in Democracy”, in partnership with, and held at Westminster Abbey, here.
And as ever, there is a wealth of articles, longreads and reports on the Theos website, including our project uncovering the spiritual, social and political impact of motherhood (Motherhood, Inside Out), another of Emily Downe’s brilliant animations Making a Mother, and (sorry for the plug and even sorrier for the price; I didn’t make the decision) my forthcoming book that applies a Christian humanist lens to the question of future of welfare in the UK.
Happy August.
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