Philip Jenkins: How global warming will increase religious strife
[Philip Jenkins is the author of God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis.]
... The connection between climate change and religious violence is not that tenuous--in fact, there's a historical indicator of how it could unfold, the Little Ice Age. Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the Northern Hemisphere actually went through a modest warming phase: With a longer growing season, harvests were bountiful, Europe's population boomed, and the relative prosperity inspired a burst of creativity in the arts and in the new university system. But, in the late thirteenth century, what's known as the Little Ice Age began: Pack ice grew in the oceans, making trade routes more dangerous, and summers became cooler and wetter, harming crops. Populations swollen by the earlier boom came up against steep food shortages. The Great Famine, beginning in 1315, led to rumors of widespread cannibalism within a few years. At least one-third of Eurasia's weakened population died in the Black Death of the 1340s.
In a climate of death and horror, people cast about for scapegoats, even before the Black Death struck. The Church formally declared witchcraft a heresy in 1320, and people were soon being executed for devil-worship and black magic. And governments, desperate to find a safe outlet for their subjects' rage, condoned mob attacks on religious minorities.
Bigots of whatever faith rarely referred explicitly to the climatic catastrophe in progress around them, but the very close correlation between the cooling and a regionwide heightening of violent intolerance makes such a linkage likely. Jews were among the favorite targets of the Little Ice Age's hate criminals: England expelled its Jews in the 1290s, and pogroms were common in the 1320s and '30s and accelerated during the Black Death, forcing an eastward migration that ended up concentrating most of Europe's Jews in modern-day Poland, Lithuania, and Russia by the end of the fourteenth century.
But Christians suffered as well, at the hands of Muslims in Asia and the Middle East strained by some of the same circumstances that were affecting Europe. In 1250, Christians were still substantial minorities in many African and Asian countries. But, during the Little Ice Age, old-established Christian communities began to get the same treatment their coreligionists were dishing out to Jews in Europe. Egyptian Muslims accused Christians of arson and plotting terrorist attacks against mosques, using the newly popular weapon of gunpowder. Elsewhere, in Mesopotamia and modern-day Turkey, churches were destroyed and Christians were massacred. When modern jihadis look for intellectual role models, they turn back to precisely this era, to hard-line scholars like Ibn Taymiyya, who loathed infidels and condemned moderate Muslim regimes for not being tough enough on them.
It is not outlandish to say that we are heading toward a future very much like our fourteenth-century past, particularly in the areas of the global South where Christian populations are rising drastically. ...
Read entire article at New Republic
... The connection between climate change and religious violence is not that tenuous--in fact, there's a historical indicator of how it could unfold, the Little Ice Age. Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the Northern Hemisphere actually went through a modest warming phase: With a longer growing season, harvests were bountiful, Europe's population boomed, and the relative prosperity inspired a burst of creativity in the arts and in the new university system. But, in the late thirteenth century, what's known as the Little Ice Age began: Pack ice grew in the oceans, making trade routes more dangerous, and summers became cooler and wetter, harming crops. Populations swollen by the earlier boom came up against steep food shortages. The Great Famine, beginning in 1315, led to rumors of widespread cannibalism within a few years. At least one-third of Eurasia's weakened population died in the Black Death of the 1340s.
In a climate of death and horror, people cast about for scapegoats, even before the Black Death struck. The Church formally declared witchcraft a heresy in 1320, and people were soon being executed for devil-worship and black magic. And governments, desperate to find a safe outlet for their subjects' rage, condoned mob attacks on religious minorities.
Bigots of whatever faith rarely referred explicitly to the climatic catastrophe in progress around them, but the very close correlation between the cooling and a regionwide heightening of violent intolerance makes such a linkage likely. Jews were among the favorite targets of the Little Ice Age's hate criminals: England expelled its Jews in the 1290s, and pogroms were common in the 1320s and '30s and accelerated during the Black Death, forcing an eastward migration that ended up concentrating most of Europe's Jews in modern-day Poland, Lithuania, and Russia by the end of the fourteenth century.
But Christians suffered as well, at the hands of Muslims in Asia and the Middle East strained by some of the same circumstances that were affecting Europe. In 1250, Christians were still substantial minorities in many African and Asian countries. But, during the Little Ice Age, old-established Christian communities began to get the same treatment their coreligionists were dishing out to Jews in Europe. Egyptian Muslims accused Christians of arson and plotting terrorist attacks against mosques, using the newly popular weapon of gunpowder. Elsewhere, in Mesopotamia and modern-day Turkey, churches were destroyed and Christians were massacred. When modern jihadis look for intellectual role models, they turn back to precisely this era, to hard-line scholars like Ibn Taymiyya, who loathed infidels and condemned moderate Muslim regimes for not being tough enough on them.
It is not outlandish to say that we are heading toward a future very much like our fourteenth-century past, particularly in the areas of the global South where Christian populations are rising drastically. ...