As temperatures soar and wildfires burn abroad, summer dread is returning to my body
These days, when I come back into the house after being out on the land, it’s dust that I drop, not the mud I carried in on my boots and clothes during the past three years when the rain kept everything, and everyone, sodden most of the time. The rain that also kept at bay the feeling of impending disaster that now attaches itself to the arrival of an Australian summer.
Not that La Niña was safe, as all of those whose homes and habitats were washed away know. But in the early months of 2023, as if the weather gods had snapped a finger, soaked turned to parched, and I find myself here again. Borne by news of soaring temperatures and wildfires in the northern hemisphere, the shift from a medium to a high likelihood of the arrival of El Niño to the official declaration of its onset, and the feeling of hardening earth under my feet, summer dread is returning to my body.
As the winter months dissipate and the timer to summer is racing, the dread I wake up into is both a daily shock and also uncannily normalised.
The early mornings I used to spend strolling the donkeys over to their daytime pasture are now committed to lead training so that all of us become “comfortable” with emergency evacuation procedures. It’s galling for them and a chore for me, but also shadowed by some of my grimmest memories – frantically manhandling them on to a truck at 44-odd degrees on 28 December 2019, the fire baying on the other side of the Shoalhaven River. I now have casual conversations with neighbours about what level of threat should count as the criterion for putting a message on the emergency WhatsApp group. I read news of the Maui fires on my phone as I stand and watch the concrete bunker being dug into the old orchard and wonder whether this is the new form of privilege.
Four years on from the black summer fires, in this month when they already started in the north in 2019, anticipating what climate change will mean for the Australian summer feels very different. Whether you experienced those fires as months of muted light, breathing in the remains of the distant burnt, or directly, in the form of the conflagrations that destroyed lives, homes, habitats, communities and ecosystems, the looming future is no longer abstract.
I know I’m not the only one feeling this toxic mix of emotions: a tremor through my body when another climate-related news item flashes across the screen. The drop in my stomach when I look at the weather app and every single day is marked with a sun icon. My throat tightening when I see a graph displaying another sharply ascending line.
I also suspect I’m not the only one uneasy about how little we are speaking about it. As we watch images of the fires in Maui and Canada and Greece and Algeria, or hear that July 2023 recorded the highest temperatures on record across the planet, surely many of us are feeling anxious about what it’s going to be like here in December, January and February, if not earlier. The coming heat, I know, will kill the most vulnerable, and the future fires that will again devastate human and animal lives threaten to crowd out my efforts to focus on whatever I am doing. But for the most part, those fears remain unspoken – as if silence might cast a protective spell, or saying it out loud would make it so.
That so many of us still fall into this type of magical thinking is hardly surprising. And it is not just because we don’t know what to say, or because we’re terrified by our own emotions. It’s also a response to a sense of impotence and perhaps even hopelessness in the face of the abject failure on the part of our democratically empowered governments to act in a manner commensurate with the scale of the catastrophes – the one we already experienced and the ones to come. Most of us know, somewhere, what type of summer we are heading for. Worse still, we know that on the current trajectory those who look back in the decades to come will see these early 2020s summers as relatively mild.
Like the impacts of climate change itself, dread and terror and grief are neither evenly nor fairly distributed, as my colleague Dr Blanche Verlie has shown. They track other lines of inequality and injustice, falling most brutally on those who will be most severely impacted: the ones whose young lives will carry them well into a harrowing future; the ones whose poverty precludes escape; the ones whose social marginalisation and vulnerability exacerbates their exposure to heat or flood or fire; the ones whose millennia of relationship with, and care for, Country will see kin and culture decimated.
At the other end of the scale lie the ones whose privilege will shield them from the worst effects, whose investment in perpetuating fossil-fuelled economies precludes acknowledging their complicity, and whose unstinting faith in the promise of endless technological progress shuns any suggestion that the future will not keep on getting better. Theirs is not only a comforting delusion but a criminal impediment to the actions that need to be taken.
People in the Shoalhaven, south of Sydney, where I live, know well the reasonableness of fear.
The Currowan fire that burned for 74 days could neither be controlled nor its movements forecast, let alone stopped. 30 December 2019 and 3 January 2020 were just two of the dates when the fire prediction maps did not reach the towns and stretches of country incinerated 24 hours later. All of us – people and animals – learned that not only our protective but also our predictive capacities were now redundant. The strategies people had deployed in the past to protect themselves and the animals they lived with proved feeble. Birds who might have flown out to sea to escape fires past lay dead on beaches, exhausted. The native animals that were not killed found themselves in unrecognisable worlds without shelter or food or water.
‘The only way through climate dread’
During the past year I worked with a team speaking with people who had rescued, cared for and tried to assist domesticated, farmed and wild animals during and after the black summer fires. With the Covid-19 pandemic starting less than two months after the fires ended, few had ever spoken about what they had done or seen or felt, and they are carrying the trauma into the coming summer. But that is not all they are carrying; they, like others who have lived through climate changedriven disasters, are also bringing to this summer the hard-won knowledge that solidarity and collective action are the best antidotes to terror, dread and the mental health tolls of ongoing climate disasters.
When we gathered groups of people who had lived through the fires, witnessed human and animal suffering and death and saved who they could, two critical shifts started to happen.
First, as horse owners, wildlife carers and farmers shared their memories and fears for the future, they started to recognise how normal and rational their emotions were, and to build together a sense of being part of a community of experience and feeling.
Second, they started to go to work on creating plans for how to better cooperate and build collective strategies to support each other and their human, animal and ecological communities in the face of future disasters.
These two shifts – the emotional ones and the action-oriented ones – are connected. Grief is, after all, the other side of love, and anger the other side of the courage and determination to right injustice.
As we confront projections that threaten the lives we had imagined would unfurl into the future, it’s tempting to reach for what Jenny Offill called the obligatory note of hope. But false illusions are a flimsy barrier against reality and no foundation for the actions that would justify authentic hope. They are also, at this point, criminally irresponsible.
The truth is that this summer and the summers to come will bring extreme heat and fires, the extent of which we cannot yet know.
But the truth is also that there is so much we can, collectively, be doing to ease the burden for all Earth beings as we move into that future. As counterintuitive as it may sound, looking our predicament square in the eye and then, in the face of what we see, organising and acting – collectively, politically and practically – with a view to caring for the planet that is our earthly home is the only way through climate dread.
Danielle Celermajer is a professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences and deputy director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. Her book Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future (Penguin 2021) was written in the wake of the black summer fires
For the most part, those fears remain unspoken – as if silence might cast a protective spell
physical impossibility. “I don’t think I’m able to have children,” I remember saying, upon which Karina replied: “I don’t think anyone does until the ultrasound.”
I asked myself then, do I really not think I’m able to have children, as in physically? And I realised I had missed the mark. It wasn’t the physicality of it, it was something else. It was the role. Me as mother. What I strongly felt was, motherhood is not on the cards for me. Able? Probably. But not willing. (Did I mention I was a precocious child?)
I was not shy though and had no qualms voicing this newfound epiphany. I would never have children – another sparkling curio added to my rapidly growing identity. And I’ve never stopped voicing it. I am lucky with family. Growing up I was met with never-ending interest and attention. There are no nay-sayers in my family and I have not once been told to “be sensible” or any such nonsense. So far so good. My childfreeness has not sparked any guilt-tripping or worry about what the neighbours will think.
Other people have perhaps not always been as easygoing. “It’s just a phase,” or “Who will take care of you when you’re 80?” And of course, the well-worn favourite: “You will change your mind when you get older.” This from relatives, friends, acquaintances and yes, strangers too. A chorus so recurrent I know the lyrics by heart. I can sing its harmonies. Probably even pick it out on the piano if asked. I don’t mind much, it’s not malicious. It’s a routine reaction, one I can sympathise with and understand. It doesn’t hurt my feelings one bit. But scratch the surface of this statement a little and underneath, I wonder is there a tad of the old “women are so emotional and hysterical and irrational they can’t be trusted to know their own mind” consensus? Yes, I think there might be.
Will I change my mind? Not impossible, but unlikely. And that brings us back to poor David. He has been dripfed this piece of information about me since the very beginning. It was not a shocking conversation we had to put our relationship through. Before sitting down to write this I asked him: when
I first told you, aged 21, wide-eyed and radical and hair cut like a boy, did you think it was a phase? Did you think I’d change my mind when I got older? He says he doesn’t remember, it being quite undramatic and all. But that yes, he probably did think it. We were so young after all, we barely knew who we were.
I do remember one of those early conversations. We had moved from Stockholm to a prototypical Swedish small town: one car factory, two wine and spirits shops, 17 or so hairdressers. Population 40,000. A slight, good-humoured accent. David was working in a large, clean supermarket, supporting me while at uni. One day he cycled home, his nose and cheeks rosy like always from stocking the freezer section all day, but still I could see he was flustered. While changing out of his fleece uniform he told me: “Jimmy’s girlfriend is pregnant.” Jimmy being his closest co-worker, the other freezerstocker. “They’re buying a house. Jenny, he’s 21.”
There it was, David’s free spirit. His need for stability, security, comfort never successfully subduing his want for the big adventure! David the escapader, experiencer of romps, a bit of the nomad in him. Seeing how the news about Jimmy made him doggedly protective of our geographical freedom was a relief and a joy. I got chills. I kissed him hard. There were no smalltown chain-house savings accounts in David’s budget. And soon thereafter we emigrated to London.
But back then in the small town, he still took for granted he would be a father one day. It was the normal thing to do. And I remember a certain look he used to get, seeing a sevenyear-old in a flamboyant dress on her way to a birthday party. And I figured, if it wasn’t for me, he would delightedly buy flamboyant clothing for a future daughter, hold her tiny, sticky hand with his warm, smooth, kind one, patiently endure the tinnitusy screams from a squadron of berserk children, huddled with the other parents, before safely bringing her home, her new dress sullied and grass-stained.
Does picturing this scenario cause me guilt? Yes.
I am being dramatic. David would make an excellent father, yes, but it doesn’t mean he wants to. And now it has been years since I last saw that specific look in his eyes. David has gone from a content childfree person to an extremely happy one, as he is wont to tell me after every dinner party with children present. “Thank God.” And: “Can you imagine if?” That sort of thing.
Since I am the one inciting this lifestyle I do check in, every six months or so. “Are you sure? There is still time.” And his conviction, much like a fontanelle (if you’ll allow the topic-specific analogy), at first wobbly and pliant, has calcified to seemingly bone-hard. Bonehard or not, whenever he suggests tying his tubes I do ask him to hold off. I might not have many childbearing years left, but his sperm could stay in mint condition for decades yet. What if I die? It could happen. He should have the option. Anyhow, there are other ways to contracept.
For the record, I do not dislike children. And the fact that I have to clarify this is a little strange to me. I mean I wouldn’t clarify being fine with Japan as a country if not feeling like a trip to Tokyo this year, but here we are, I’m clarifying (a lesson well learned). I’m not overly interested in children as a group, I admit that. Specific ones I often find utterly fascinating. Even adorable. But in general? I do prefer adult company. Don’t ask me why.
I’ve gathered that the stereotype of a childfree woman is a cutthroat careerist, frigid and selfish, and narcissistic even more than most. OK, I might be somewhat of a narcissist, as my novelist and influencer job titles will imply, but I am the opposite of a frigid cutthroat. I’m a sweetheart. Not tough at all! A surplus empathy vegan who can’t watch cancer films or read Toni Morrison without it shattering her little eggshell heart. Show me a cat, any cat, and I’ll melt completely. There are brands of caring other than maternal.
So please don’t worry: I am not here to convert anyone. I have no stakes here. I am not representing other childfree women, we are not a group. And even though motherhood and childfreeness are both highly politicised topics, especially in countries where women’s reproductive rights have either never existed or been recently revoked, for me personally there is no morality involved. I am not proud to be childfree. But more importantly (and if you’re skimming this article, this is where I would invite your eyes to pause), though not proud, neither am I ashamed. My only reason for not having kids is that I simply do not want to. Flippant perhaps. But not shameful. It might be a tad abnormal, probably unrelatable to most, but that does not embarrass me. There is no sense of lack, I do not wonder what if. I do not feel unnatural, or less of a woman.
Then what about David? I know my own views, but can a person ever truly know what someone else is feeling? Is there a sense of lack in him, deeply hidden under layers of contentment? I don’t think there is, but I will never know for certain. What I will do though, is take his word for it. Trust that he can make his own decision, guard his own happiness. Respect him enough to not treat him like a hysterical, irrational woman who doesn’t know her own mind, by telling him “You know, you might change your mind when you get older.”
Jenny Mustard is the author of Okay Days (£16.99 Sceptre hardback). Buy it for £14.95 at guardianbookshop.com
former songwriter for the popular Christian rock band Caedmon’s Call, speaking of LGBTQ+ acceptance in Christian music. “But no one wants to be the first to take that step. What would be suicide for one person could be a revolution for those who follow.”
Webb was part of a wave of 90s Christian rock stars – including Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan and DC Talk’s Kevin Max – who became disillusioned with the rightwing culture of CCM and began writing songs questioning that institution, going through a process commonly referred to in the exvangelical world as “deconstruction”, wherein a Christian unpacks the political, cultural and theological rhetoric they’ve been fed throughout their lives and discards what doesn’t ring true any more (which, for some, is all of it).
Webb appreciates the term for fueling this movement but fears that it’s been weaponized by the right to the point of being meaningless. When Feucht attacked Flamy Grant’s collaboration with Derek Webb – with Webb dressing in drag in his music video – he tweeted:
None of this was new to Matthew Blake.
A maternal figure like Grant – a kind of Cher or Dolly Parton to young queer Christians like Blake throughout the 80s and 90s – became essential when Blake, like so many questioning Christians of their time, enrolled in Exodus International, an ex-gay, “conversion therapy” program that has since shut down and been disavowed by its founders. Blake was working as a worship band leader at a megachurch in Reno at the time, and was trying to shed the queer impulses that had been with them since grade school.
“I definitely considered ending my life,” Blake recalls. (Data shows that conversion therapy leads to higher rates of depression and suicide). “Thank God for music, because if I didn’t have those creative outlets I don’t know where I’d be.”
After five years with Exodus failed to turn Blake straight, they eventually embraced their sexuality, began attending a progressive church in San Diego, and launched a podcast that laid bare their deconstruction experience. During the pandemic, Blake played music on an exvangelical livestream called Heathen Happy Hour, and one night decided to show up in drag under the moniker Flamy Grant.
Drag turned out to be the perfect medium to portray the deconstruction experience, where Flamy could organically blend dark humor, social outrage and wild theatrics fit for a megachurch. On their album Bible Belt Baby, they sing with the delicate yet powerful range of a worship band leader, while telling the story of a boy who wants to cross-dress as the Virgin Mary, followed by a feminist anthem set in the Old Testament, and a cover of Amy Grant’s Takes A Little Time.
Exvangelical audiences flocked to Flamy Grant almost instantly, leading to collaborations with the former 90s Christian rocker Jennifer Knapp, the queer exvangelical songwriter Semler (who also topped the iTunes Christian music charts the year before with Preacher’s Kid), and Derek Webb, with Grant appearing in his music video for Boys Will Be Girls.
Chrissy Stroop, trans author and one of the pioneers of the exvangelical movement, says all these artists “display an authentic expression that is lacking in what we typically think of as CCM, allowing themselves to ask real questions and not come away with the pat answers evangelical subculture demands. They also directly reject certain evangelical doctrines and explicitly include and affirm queer people.” Still, she notes, “while they may top the iTunes charts, they’re not going to be played on Christian radio stations, because evangelicals control those”.
Ever since the CCM industry was born in the early 70s – when a small group of ex-hippies began proselytizing through rock music – there have been queer Christian musicians hiding in plain sight.
Credited with writing the first CCM song, Marsha Stevens-Pino saw her career destroyed when she came out in 1979, inspiring her to form Born Again Lesbian Music (Balm) Ministries, one of the first of a growing network of queer Christians in need of a home.
Ray Boltz was an evangelical household name with his megachurch anthem Thank You, but he lost much of his conservative audience when he revealed he was gay. Yet Boltz continued writing Christian songs, albeit with new, provocative themes, like 2010’s Who Would Jesus Love?
Unlike outright mockery of faith by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens’ “new atheism” movements, exvangelical songs (as well as memoirs, podcasts and stand up comedy) often bleed with raw vulnerability, sitting with the unanswered questions about the Bible and the evangelical experience, wrestling with doubt and longing, loneliness and persecution, not necessarily rejecting God but often inviting him to the table for a difficult conversation.
“I don’t think uncertainty is the enemy of faith,” says Webb, adding that a lot of the ministry of Jesus was a kind of deconstruction of Jewish laws of the time, not unlike what exvangelicals are up to today.
Questioning gender roles, sexuality, capitalism, sin and salvation doesn’t sit well with the Christian right, where biblical literalism and Christian nationalism answer most questions.
Embodying conservative principles (or at least not violating them) has been a prerequisite for any musician working in the CCM genre. But exvangelical songwriters can now simply click “Christian music” when categorizing their music on iTunes, and suddenly they’re in the game.
This has led to a fundamental revolution in the genre, dragging it into a new cultural and political sphere, and discovering a large audience has been waiting for it all along.
“The term ‘Christian,’ when applied to anything but a person, is a marketing term,” says Webb. “Anyone can claim the category. My record, Flamy Grant’s, Semlers, they’re for Christians, and that’s why we categorize it that way. It’s like new life from the Phoenix ashes.”
• This article was amended on 13 August. An earlier version included an image of international poker player Derek Webb, not the musician of the same name.
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
“nones”. Only 40% of Americans call themselves Protestant. The Wasp ascendancy has yielded to Sunday brunch and walks in the woods. “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost, they took the last train for the coast,” as Don McLean sang. For some, Trump rallies present a variation of community and communion. A younger generation of evangelicals heads for the door. The numbers tell of a crisis of faith.
“We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the “church itself” does not believe what the church teaches,” Moore laments.
Predation, lust and greed are poor calling cards for religion. Unchecked abuse within the Catholic church left deep and lasting scars among those who needed God’s love most. Moore notes the Catholic church’s fall from grace in Ireland and posits that “bornagain America” may be experiencing a similar backlash, as a powerful cultural institution lacking “credibility” seeks to “enforce its orthodoxies”.
Against this backdrop, Catholicism’s boomlet among younger continental Europeans is noteworthy. Recently, hundreds of thousands converged on Lisbon to hear the Pope. The same demographic helps fuel the resurgence of the Spanish far right. Tethering the cross to the flag retains its appeal.
That said, Jerry Falwell Jr’s posturing as Trump-booster and voyeur didn’t exactly jibe with Scripture. The ousted head of Liberty University, son of the founder of the Moral Majority, allegedly paid a pool boy to have sex with his wife as he watched.
“What we are seeing now … is in many cases the shucking off of any pretense of hypocrisy for the outright embrace of immorality,” Moore writes.
America barrels toward a Biden v Trump rematch. The former president is a professional defendant. The country and its religion sag and shudder. Moore prays for revival, even as he fears nostalgia.
Losing Our Religion is published in the USby Penguin Random House
based on more than 13,000 people suggests that if you are obese according to BMI, you are most likely obese according to body fat percentage as well.” This means that if your BMI goes over (or under) the NHS-approved “healthy” range, it’s probably worth investigating further.
The real concern is body fat: having too much, particularly around the waist and internal organs, is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and several cancers. “A lot of the other ways of measuring body fat are more involved – for instance, a Dexa scan [a test of bone density] or skin calipers,” says Hodzovic. “In terms of simplicity and speed, and to prompt further action, whether that’s an immediate lifestyle change or further testing, it could be argued that BMI has a place. The problem is that it’s been overvalued or used in isolation and misinterpreted historically by health professionals, and that does need to change.”
The prescription? Use your BMI as an easy reference point – but if you’re telling yourself that you’re OK despite being over the acceptable range, perhaps check your waist circumference with a tape measure (the British Heart Foundation has a handy guide) or do a body fat test using smart scales or hydrostatic, or underwater, weighing. If you are concerned, your doctor should be able to check other markers of health, including blood pressure and blood work, to give you a more complete picture about what might be going on. If you are over the recommended BMI upper limit, it won’t hurt to take stock of what you are eating in a typical day.
“Eat less processed food, drink less alcohol, focus on getting protein and vegetables at every meal, build a movement habit and get enough sleep,” says Hodzovic. “The key is consistency over intensity, so focus on building longterm habits rather than trying to turn your life upside down overnight.” Do all this, and you won’t need to worry too much about which measures of health are right or wrong – you’ll be doing the best you can for your body either way.
Nick Chater, professor of behavioural science at Warwick Business School, approaches those stubborn social networks from a different perspective. In the aftermath of the referendum, he led a discussion on Radio 4’s The Human Zoo into the psychological fallout of Brexit, the hardening of decision into identity. He laughs a little when I ask him if there is any kind of time limit on cognitive dissonance.
“Behavioural psychology very rarely looks at the long term,” he says. “So I think actually, psychologists have fairly little idea how long these things tend to last.”
What he finds striking about the current situation is the almost total absence of debate about the effect of the decision itself. “It’s become so divisive, that even raising the issue seems almost a provocative act. There’s a sense that we just can’t talk about this at all any more.”
Does he see a strategy that would allow that to change?
“One of the things might change is if one could get to a point where we can reframe the debate. Say if the EU clearly broke into a two-speed Europe where there was a central core engaging in really deep integration and an outer rim more loosely connected…”
And what about the kind of language that might prompt a rethink?
“The most useful language would recognise that politics is inherently uncertain,” he says. “So: ‘We thought it would be a bad idea; you thought it would be better; but nobody really knew for sure. Now we know a bit more, and perhaps it’s time to rethink…’”
Does he hear much evidence of that?
“Not a great deal…”
***
Perhaps the most extensive examination of the referendum in these terms came in a book called The Psychology of Brexit, written by Brian Hughes, a specialist in stress psychophysiology and a professor of psychology at the University of Galway, Ireland. “Brexit,” Hughes argued, “emerged from psychological impulses, was determined by psychological choices, is construed in terms of psychological perceptions, and will leave a lasting psychological imprint.”
At the heart of the choice, Hughes suggested, were two persistent fallacies. First, the notion that people ever approach political questions with clear-headed reason. Second, the idea that your opponents have cornered the market in irrationality. “Remain did not have a monopoly on reason. This is because remainers are human beings.”
Hughes’s book came out in 2019 at the height of “no deal is better than a bad deal” insanity. If he were to add to it now, he suggests, it would be as a textbook case of “polarisation theory” and the ways in which the three-word sloganeering of “Brexit means Brexit” and “get Brexit done” has been repurposed to provide the illusion of simplicity to other very complex issues – “stop the boats” etc. The primary division of Brexit has extended into “clusters of interwoven views” on the climate crisis, vaccination and immigration, feeding everything into the same blunt binary.
One result of that, he suggests, is that Brexit has become a classic example of toxicity. “If there is something especially scandalous in our own lives or traumatic, we will try not to mention it. It just brings too much up. People talk about the ‘Ming vase strategy’ for Labour and Brexit [the idea that they must not smash their precious majority]. The political logic is that this event was still so painful for people that you could lose half the electorate as a result of one soundbite.”
If there is a way through this, he suggests, it is to break down the myths of us and them. “Brexit was obviously never the single will of the people, but also the will of leavers and the will of remainers are very far from homogenous. Politicians need to find ways of foregrounding the diversity of views that people had and have, even if some of them might be very ugly. They need to show the illusion of simple polarisation.”
Preventing this, he says, is the fact that Brexit has brought into the political mainstream “all the reasoning errors that people make”. Polarity acts against nuance, and undermines the middle ground. “Both sides start to look at the other as somehow irretrievably deranged. And when you pathologise the other side, there’s no point in reaching out to them.” As a result, he suggests, “People who have the opportunity to address political challenges are no longer seeking to control the divisions in society, they are trying to maximise them for their own ends.” Does he see an end to that polarity? “It would require politicians and commentators to take some of the heat out of the arguments,” he says. “That might take a generation, or it might be one of these cyclical trends.” For the time being, our Brexity brains are it seems here to stay.
It’s that old idea of being open-minded, but not so open that your brains fall out