Harvard Divinity School and the New Climate Inquisition

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, antiblackness, Islamophobia, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia… exemplifies the characteristics of ecofascism.”

.

That’s a greatest-hits compilation of approved anxieties.

Climate action. Resource preservation. Every currently fashionable -ism. All fused together in one long exhale, as if someone was afraid the sentence might escape before all the ideological vitamins were added.

You can almost picture the drafting process.
“Did we get xenophobia in there?”
“Good. What about transphobia?”
“Add it. We don’t want to leave any sins off the list.”

The structure is elegant in its own bureaucratic way. Start with environmental concern. Immediately attach it to a litany of moral crimes. Let the association do the work. There’s no need to define thresholds or draw bright lines. Just keep everything in the same conceptual zip code and let reputational gravity handle the rest.

If an unstable criminal mentions trees in a manifesto, congratulations — forestry just got morally complicated.

The description then performs the ritual balancing act. The far-right does one form of eco-badness. The far-left does another. See? Symmetry. The institution hovers above both, robes flowing, keeper of correct environmental doctrine.

It’s adorable when elite universities pretend to be neutral referees while reciting a vocabulary list straight from the activist handbook.

And then comes the obligatory manifesto reference. We’re told that in certain mass shootings, “religion (and race) were central” to the perpetrators’ ecofascist thinking.

Of course they were. These were unhinged murderers. They stuffed their documents with whatever fragments of ideology felt dramatic. The question serious institutions should ask is how representative those fragments are in broader political discourse.

Instead, Harvard uses them as a framing device for mapping American environmental thought.

That’s like teaching a course on transportation policy organized around the manifesto of a car thief.

The term “ecofascism” has been stretched so aggressively over the years that it now fits anything from Nazi agrarian romanticism to modern arguments about border enforcement and resource allocation. It’s an academic bungee cord. Hook it to whatever argument needs moral weight and give it a pull.

And that elasticity is useful. Very useful.

Because once you can float the word “fascism” anywhere near a policy disagreement, you’ve moved the debate from engineering and economics into the realm of moral emergency. You don’t have to argue about grid stability. You don’t have to argue about energy density. You don’t have to argue about agricultural inputs or industrial scaling.

You just have to look grave.

Which brings us back to the Divinity School — the most honest part of this whole production.

This framework is theological down to its bones. There are orthodox positions on climate. There are deviations. There are hidden heresies that “masquerade” as legitimate environmental concern. There are moral contaminants lurking in phrases like “resource preservation.”

Swap out the word “ecofascism” for “heresy” and nothing structural changes. The architecture holds.

What’s missing? Any comparable concern about how climate emergency rhetoric can slide toward centralized economic control. No solemn warnings about bureaucratic overreach. No anxious paragraphs about how permanent crisis framing can justify speech policing or regulatory sprawl.

Apparently the only direction illiberalism flows is from politically unfashionable actors.

Funny how that works.

And here’s the part that deserves open mockery: the total absence of measurable standards.

If ecofascism is a serious analytical category, define it with precision. Provide criteria. Offer empirical frequency. Show how often it appears in mainstream discourse versus isolated criminal manifestos. Establish thresholds separating ordinary policy disagreement from ideological extremism.

Instead, we get a paragraph that reads like it passed through twelve committees determined to ensure nobody’s favorite grievance was left out.

This is moral pageantry.

The stacking of antisemitism, racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia, and environmental rhetoric into one conceptual bundle creates an atmosphere thick enough to chew. Students don’t need to be told what to avoid. The associations hum quietly in the background.

Talk about immigration and resource strain? That’s going to feel dicey.

Discuss national energy independence? Might want to triple-check your phrasing.

Argue that industrial civilization runs on dense, scalable energy sources? Make sure you preface it with sufficient ritual disclaimers.

No explicit prohibition required. The fog handles it.

And Harvard isn’t alone. Across elite campuses, environmental politics increasingly passes through the same identity prism before anyone touches a spreadsheet. Carbon curves wait politely offstage while the moral taxonomy gets sorted.

You can practically hear the future graduates explaining supply chains by citing oppression hierarchies.

Meanwhile, the unglamorous questions — grid reliability, fertilizer inputs, mineral extraction, cost curves — receive less attention than semiotics. It’s much easier to map conceptual contamination than to calculate megawatts.

Harvard markets itself as the pinnacle of intellectual seriousness. One expects analytical sharpness. Instead, we get a paragraph that sounds like it was assembled by someone terrified of omitting a buzzword.

The irony writes itself. A Divinity School warning students about ideological masquerades while performing one in broad daylight.

And the broader pattern is hard to miss. Environmental discourse is being reframed as a moral sorting exercise. Before you debate policy, you scan for hidden sins. Before you examine tradeoffs, you establish virtue alignment.

The ritual comes first. The math can wait.

Harvard has every right to teach this material. Freedom cuts both ways. But when the intellectual product resembles a compressed anthology of campus orthodoxy, people are going to react. Not with shock. With laughter.

Because when elite institutions start treating environmental policy like a battlefield for exorcising ideological demons, the incense almost becomes mandatory.

And somewhere in Cambridge, a student will dutifully underline the phrase “blending of climate action and resource preservation with…” and absorb the lesson: certain arguments carry spiritual risk.

The current state of education: liturgy with a tuition invoice.