Charles Rotter Harvard Divinity School is offering a course titled “American Religious Ecofascism.” Yes, that’s real. No, it’s not from The Babylon Bee. This is Harvard. Divinity School. The place that once trained clergy to wrestle with Augustine and Aquinas now training students to hunt for carbon heretics. The course description opens like a progressive word-association game played under deadline pressure:
“The blending of climate action and resource preservation with antisemitism, antiblack...
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Is this a required class? If an elective, will any one sign up?
I’m a big fan of having choices.
I take it that the CO2 wafting from the vent over the front door is exhaled by the inhabitants.
I wonder how they are going to include the measuremant of it in their classes?
I understand that it amounts to about 2 pounds per student per day. Perhaps more at Harvard because of the student’s extraordinarily active minds.
Surely you mean extraordinarily active mouths?
Grok
American religious ecofascism refers to an emerging and niche ideological intersection where far-right environmentalism (ecofascism) blends with religious elements, particularly white Christian nationalism, to frame environmental crises like climate change and resource scarcity as threats that justify authoritarian, exclusionary, or violent measures to preserve a supposedly “pure” (often white, Christian) society and its connection to the land.
What is Ecofascism Generally?Ecofascism combines radical environmental concerns with fascist or far-right politics. It typically blames environmental degradation on overpopulation, immigration (especially from the Global South), and “over-industrialization” by non-white or non-Western groups. Solutions often involve extreme measures like halting immigration, enforcing ethnic separation, or—in the most violent interpretations—genocide or mass culling to “save” the planet for a select group. This ideology has roots in historical far-right “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden) thinking from Nazi-era Germany, but it has re-emerged online in modern forms.
While ecofascism is not mainstream, it has appeared in manifestos of mass shooters (e.g., Christchurch 2019, El Paso 2019, Buffalo 2022), who cited it as motivation to target minorities seen as threats to environmental and racial purity.
The Religious Dimension in the American ContextIn the United States, some discussions highlight a specifically religious variant tied to white Christian nationalism. This views climate disaster or resource collapse as a crisis requiring the defense of a white, Christian homeland. Perpetrators of certain attacks explicitly linked their ecofascist motives to preserving “white Christian nationalism” amid impending ecological breakdown.
A Harvard Divinity School course titled “American Religious Ecofascism” (HDS 3221) explores this directly. It examines how ecofascist rhetoric masquerades as environmental concern but intertwines with antisemitism, antiblackness, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and other far-right prejudices. The course asks whether there’s a longer historical thread in American religious writings that prefigures this blend, noting religion and race were central in several high-profile ecofascist-linked manifestos.
Related concepts include:
This remains fringe and largely online/subcultural, not representative of mainstream American Christianity or environmentalism. Mainstream religious groups (Catholic, Protestant, evangelical associations) often advocate for climate action as stewardship of creation, while far-right denialism or deregulation has been more common in some conservative Christian circles.
The term highlights how climate fears can be weaponized by supremacist ideologies, framing ecological survival as a zero-sum racial/religious struggle. It’s a dangerous hybrid that scholars track to prevent radicalization, especially as climate impacts intensify migration and resource pressures.
That Grok analysis reads exactly like the professor’s course description. (I expect.)
I wonder if that is cut and paste, or if the bulk training of Grok is almost identical to the output of most Ivy League radical Marxists?
What a a tiny little pigeon hole Grok has created in far too many words. Mostly bunk.
Please explain.
I read Denis comment as describing a lot of words that all reduce to “climate realism is racist and Cristian”. Then it adds nonsense phrases like “deep ecological spiritualities” and “far-right denialism or deregulation” and “weaponized by supremacist ideologies” to obscure the real meaning enough to hide.
(the “real meaning” here is that whoever wrote what the AI used as a source is afraid to admit the extent to which they are driven by hatred for a bygone culture)
Jargon is a substitute for thought. More than a handful of jargon words is a sign to walk away.
No wonder Al Gore took up divinity studies.
Al’s totally on board with all those punishments for humanity, who Al believes is frying the earth, and making the oceans boil.
Grok’s analysis of the movement is not an endorsement. It may well be correct.
Do you mean the earth frying and the seas boiling, David?
(just pulling your leg 🙂 )
It has always amazed me how the left always accuses others of doing what the left has been doing.
I think- “training the adults of tomorrow to fight the battles of yesteryear.”
Universities will tend to lag behind due to the tendency of all people, eg professors, to fall a bit behind as they age. It’s all fields, not just humanities. I had an EE professor teaching how to program then-obsolete (could not be reordered if they broke) microcontrollers using binary data entry when software engineering was already a field.
or as professors veer off into ideological dead ends, leaving behind tittering students
I would argue that any flavor of fascism is not “far right,” in spite of how it is commonly portrayed. It is still socialism.
Agreed. The original meaning of FASCISM is now almost completely lost. It was originally an economic system positioned as a compromise between socialism (Marxism) and capitalism. So while right of socialism, it is hardly far right. It seems the term is popularly confused with fanaticism. If there is a specific term for dictators from the right, what is the term for Pol Pot, Castro, Uncle Joe, Moa, Lenin, Tito, Ho Chi Mihm, Kim Jung Il, and 1000 more? Dickheadism?
“Charles Rotter Harvard Divinity School is offering…”
Wow! I had no idea you were the namesake of a whole Harvard school! Good work!
Holy Typo! I noticed that too. 😎
I have three degrees from Harvard (BA, JD, MBA), all with high honors. This kind of crap is why I severed all relations to my alma mater about a decade ago. Getting rid of Harvard’s very undistinguished DEI President last year because of campus antisemitism did NOT stop the ideological rot that has infested the University for many years.
I only have one degree, Associate of Theology. But I didn’t get it from Harvard Divinity School.
(Maybe that’s why I still love God?)
The inmates run the institution now, Rud?
Charles Rotter,
Thanks a million for the “heads up” notification, but this (incomplete) sentence:
“The blending of climate action and resource preservation with antisemitism, antiblack…”
is all I need to summarily dismiss Harvard’s Divinity School course titled “American Religious Ecofascism” as being the mental equivalent of basket weaving . . . well, maybe even less than that.
Harvard University: once a deservedly-proud institution of higher education, now headed to the dustbin of history.
The is plenty of religiously based eco-fascism out there.
They usually go by the label of global warming alarmists.
This is what Google’s AI gives. I must say that in reading over this material the courses seem a lot more interesting and a lot less single minded than I had expected. The links between religion, environmental disaster (such as Sodom and Gomorrah) and political ideology really are worth serious study. From the course description there does not seem to be any simple minded focus on AGW, rather they seem to be attempting to trace the roots of authoritarian approaches to the environment and society much further back, and left as well as right.
Harvard Divinity School (HDS) offers a specific course titled “American Religious Ecofascism” (HDS 3221 / RELIGION 1902), which examines the intersection of environmentalism, white supremacy, and religious identity.
Course Overview & Core Themes
Broader Context at HDS
The study of American Religious Ecofascism is part of a larger institutional focus on Religion and Ecology at Harvard. This broader initiative includes:
For more details on the current schedule or to register via the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium, visit the HDS 3221 Course Page or the BTI Course Portal.
Totalitarian leaders usually have both left and right arms which Grok doesn’t seem to understand.
Reminds me of the saying, ” don’t take medical advice from people who think the planet is overpopulated”.
Vaccine advocate Bill Gates is a eugenicist, the Epstein files now show conspiracy between Epstein, Gates and other Globalists to bring on the Pandemic so as to introduce the genetic vaccine that reduces fertility and speeds up so much disease.
Wal:
The “Epstein Files” are voluminous: could you narrow that down so we can verify the
Covid pandemic conspiracy claim? Or links for further reading?
Thanks!
It seens those at Harvard Divinity School have either not read the Bible or not believed its claims. There are over a hundred references to rain. We have Jesus’ own words that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Ancient passages like those in Job 38 are a clear claim that it is the sovereign God who alone controls the weather and climate. The very first chapter of Genesis has the Creator establishing the seasons.
If there is no sovereign God, who created the universe and our world, then we have to believe everything just came into existence by itself and can as easily disappear. This leaves us in a meaningless quandry. We came from nowhere and are going nowhere. Therefore there is no point to anything in life and our world as all will simply be extinguished like a candle flame. It is a futile exercise, if one holds such views, to study divinity. Why would one want to spend your life studying God if he does not exist? Similarly why waste your life obsessing about some hypothetical climate catastrophe?
The claims of the Bible is that God not only exists, that he not only is the sovereign Creator but the God who is essential for the continuance of life. Paul reminded his hearers in Athens of the words of one of their own philosophers, “In him we live and move and have our being.” In addition to these, it claims that God has revealed – through certain people and finally through Jesus Christ – who he is and guided some to make a written record of this revelation. The study of Divinity needs to begin with these Bible books and their claims, none of which support climate alarmism.
If it comes out of 99.99% of colleges you know it is wrong.
Course overview from the syllabus
The blending of climate action and resource preservation with antisemitism, antiblackness, Islamophobia, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia—tactics typically linked to the far-right—or advocating for the destruction of the earth to “level the playing field” for all creatures, a strategy often associated with the far left, exemplifies the characteristics of ecofascism. These dangerous ideologies often masquerade as environmental consciousness.While contemporary discussions frame such rhetoric as a reaction to the growing awareness of climate change, it has deeper historical roots, particularly visible in American religious writings. Lest we forget that religion (and race) were central to the ecofascist manifestos espoused by the perpetrators of several tragic events: the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, where a gunman targeted Muslims during Friday prayers at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Center; the 2015 mass shooting of Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; the 2019 Walmart shooting in El Paso, Texas that targeted the Latinx community; and the 2022 attack at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. In the manifestos, the shooters identified as ecofascists whose mission was to protect and preserve white Christian nationalism in the wake of climate disaster.
The manifestos accompanying these attacks have brought greater visibility to ecofascism today, compelling us to examine its historical roots and current operations. Is there a longer history of American religious ecofascism? How can we characterize this history, and what insights does it provide into the functioning of ecofascism in contemporary society? How have communities resisted ecofascism?
That is unbelievable!
Someone is paying a lot of tuition to write papers that agree with that world view so they can get an ‘A’.
We have had Ecofascism for several decades. Pretty well always mainstream and left.
All western governments have promoted it.
It is one big progressive word-association game. That is the best way to describe this mess. Where would you even start?
I think probably the term “ecofascism” comes from this site, actually. We have used it for years, going on decades, in the comment section. It is a popular term which describes the green environmentalist regulations which always seek to tell you what you produce, how you produce it, and inevitably, raising the cost to produce it.
This is an ecofascist movement, and here is why: the national socialist/fascist movement does not necessarily seize private property outright, the way that most collectivists do. Instead, it seizes private property by strict regulations and government mandates regarding what you can do with it, thus removing any ability to truly own and enjoy the use of “private property”. That is ecofascism.
The professor seems to have appropriated it, then attached it to some “manifestos” and other garbage from the left, and hey presto, no modern student could possibly be the wiser when they read the Mad Lib course description.
Very well written. I’m impressed.