Church’s “Religion for Climate” Campaign Draws Ridicule

The program, called “Reli fürs Klima” (Religion for the Climate), represents a joint initiative between the aid organization Bread for the World and the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia. Starting in third grade, students are being trained not merely as believers but as climate activists through what organizers describe as creative approaches to sustainable nutrition and global connections.

The latest offering in the series is titled “Enough for Everyone” and focuses on permaculture practices and conditions in Zambia. Materials include what the church calls a “First Aid Kit for Nutrition” designed to raise awareness about sustainable eating and global food systems among children who are typically eight and nine years old.

Manufacturing Fear to Offer Solutions

Alexander Kissler, writing in Nius, points out a fundamental contradiction in the program’s approach. The evangelical church’s Office for Ecclesiastical Services states that the climate crisis frightens many young people, but that faith can strengthen them, awaken hope, and encourage them to take action.

The critical flaw, as Nius observes, is that eight and nine-year-olds only experience climate anxiety when adults deliberately cultivate those fears. The church is creating the very panic it claims to want to alleviate. By treating climate catastrophe as an established fact requiring immediate action, religious education becomes a vehicle for environmental alarmism rather than spiritual instruction.

The program treats advocacy for so-called climate justice as a religiously mandated duty for minors. Activities include making wind chimes with tree messages and studying church forests in Ethiopia. Whether such exercises actually help children overcome manufactured anxieties remains an open question.

Cringeworthy Campaign Materials

The promotional materials for the initiative have drawn particular criticism. The campaign’s theme song features a blonde woman singing shrilly before an altar about an Earth crying out in pain, a sick planet that must be rescued. The lyrics ask who can save the sick Earth that appears on the class schedule.

Even Bishop Christian Stäblein of the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia participates in promotional videos, appearing in clerical robes to recite an eleven-word poem about climate protection.

The spectacle reveals a church that claims to be sensitive, mindful, woke, and progressive yet handles its own theological traditions with remarkable carelessness. The final judgment has been relocated from the next world to this one and reinterpreted as a meteorological phenomenon. Where once stood the righteous God, climate justice is now supposed to reign.

A Church That Has Lost Its Way

The initiative demonstrates the extensive overlap between Germany’s tax-funded church establishment and activist civil society organizations. A church that transforms itself into a climate protection lobby ceases to function as a church in any meaningful theological sense.

The program represents what critics see as riding the last wave of a fading zeitgeist. By making environmental activism rather than spiritual formation the core mission of religious education, the institutional church abandons its foundational purpose. The biblical apocalypse proves too difficult for modern church leaders to address, but they embrace an earthly climate catastrophe with enthusiasm.

For parents concerned about the religious education their children receive, “Reli fürs Klima” illustrates how traditional religious instruction has been displaced by political activism in some German Protestant churches. The question remains whether congregations will continue supporting institutions that prioritize climate campaigning over spiritual guidance.

With information from Nius