The Princess of Wales embraces paganism??!

Some thoughts on Catherine's "Mother Nature" video

Earlier on today I watched Catherine Princess of Wales’ new video, “Mother Nature: Spring”. In the video she talks about the importance of connecting with nature. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it here — it’s only a couple of minutes:

I wanted to offer a brief thought about this video, in particular how I think it is deeply concerning. A few months ago, I wrote about whether Catherine’s carol service had any good news:

Does Princess Kate's carol service have any good news?

There I spoke about my fondness for William & Catherine, but also my concerns about the carol service. I think this new video has unfortunately demonstrated that my concerns were well-founded. The ‘Mother Nature’ video seems to me to be a turning away from Christianity and embracing paganism.

That said, things may not be as they appear. I do hope that it does at least show something positive, which I will come onto at the end.

Let me start by summarising the message of the video.

‘Mother Nature’ summary

There are some things about the video which, as a Christian, I find myself agreeing with. However, there are other things which absolutely make me wince. Make no mistake, the message here is virtually pagan — it is very far from the Christian message.

Let’s look at what Catherine actually says. Here’s a transcript of the video, as transcribed by YouTube, formatted by myself (apologies for any mistakes):

Over the past year nature has been my sanctuary.

The natural world's capacity to inspire us, to nurture us, and help us heal and grow is boundless and has been understood for generations. It is through nature that we can fully understand the true interconnectedness of all things, the importance of balance, and the importance of renewal and resilience. Connecting to nature helps us to experience a deeper sense of ourselves, the world around us, and each other.

Spring is the season of rebirth of hope and new beginnings. From the dark days of winter the outside world quietly awakens with new life, and there comes a sense of optimism, anticipation, and positive hopeful change. Just as nature revives and renews, so too can we.

Let us reconnect to nature and celebrate a new dawn within our hearts. It is often from the smallest of seeds that the greatest change can happen, and in this ever growing complex world we need to hold on to what connects us all. Spring is here, so let's make the most of it together.

Let me pull out a few things from this.

“Nature has been my sanctuary” — I am sure we can all understand how someone who has been diagnosed with cancer might seek to find sanctuary. I am also very sympathetic to someone finding sanctuary in nature: I am fortunate enough to live by the sea, and in the summer months I love cycling down by the sea of an evening. As you watch the waves rolling in and out on the beach, you could almost forget that you have troubles! However, although nature might help, it doesn’t take away the troubles. I also like to take my time riding to pray, which I find helps much more and can be done whether you are out and about in nature or not.

“The natural world’s capacity to inspire us, to nurture us, and help us heal and grow is boundless” — this is where alarm bells start to ring for me. Nature doesn’t have healing capacity in and of itself. Certainly many of our forebears didn’t have such a romantic view of nature, when being out in it could be a very dangerous thing.

“It is through nature that we can fully understand the true interconnectedness of all things” — somewhat off topic, but may I just say this is clearly a reference to Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently novels…

“Connecting to nature helps us to experience a deeper sense of ourselves” — once again, alarm bells. Or even something more serious. John Calvin famously began his institutes with saying that we need to know God in order to know ourselves — those two things are connected. This is a Biblical, Christian view. If Catherine is saying that we need to know nature in order to know ourselves, who is she saying god really is…? She is investing nature with godlike powers, and that is exactly the problem here.

“Spring is the season of rebirth of hope and new beginnings” — this is why Easter is celebrated in the spring. Christians celebrate the hope of the resurrection while spring is in full bloom. But that’s the key thing: it’s a resurrection hope. Nature simply points towards its Creator. There is no hope of rebirth without God.

“Let us reconnect to nature and celebrate a new dawn within our hearts” — once again, the language here is very redolent of Biblical language. It’s like Jesus’ words to Nicodemus, “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again”. But being born again comes from the Holy Spirit drawing us to repent of our sins and turn to Jesus Christ, not from ‘reconnecting to nature’. She goes on to talk about ‘seeds’, which is again redolent of Biblical language — Jesus told several parables about seeds. The problem here is that these words and concepts are being taken and used apart from Jesus Christ.

All in all, it strikes me as a virtually pagan view of nature, viewing it as something which has godlike powers in and of itself to heal us and even give us ‘rebirth’.

A Christian view of nature

To do a thorough exploration of the Christian view of nature would take a book, or several, but let me make a couple of quick points. The first thing to say is that God is the creator of everything. The universe was made for him and for his glory, and all creation is a showcase of his splendour, majesty and glory. This is what it says in Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.

Psalm 19:1-4

Everything in the world declares the glory of God. In a sense, Catherine is right to look at the natural world and see something divine there. But from a Christian perspective, she is entirely wrong to see the divine as a property of nature in itself. The divine quality in nature is from God. If the natural world does not lead us to God, we are not understanding it rightly.

This is the fundamental problem with paganism: paganism puts ‘nature’ where only God should be. It is an idolatrous distortion of the truth. Whereas we should worship God alone (see the first and second commandments), paganism is instead a worship of nature. Paganism is not a new thing, of course — it has been around since the dawn of time. The ancient world used to worship almost everything, especially the sun, moon and stars. (Even our own culture has echoes of this in the language we use: the words Sunday and Monday are both derived from gods to do with the sun and moon).

However, the Bible will allow us to have nothing to do with the worship of nature. Nature is seen as entirely subservient to God and his purposes. My favourite demonstration of this is in Genesis 1, which says:

God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. Genesis 1:16

Here, the author of Genesis doesn’t even use the names ‘sun’ and ‘moon’. They are simply ‘lights’ which God places in the sky. It’s hard for us modern readers to understand just how much a smackdown this would have been to ancient pagans — the sun and the moon were relegated to lamps which God put there! “Oh, the god you worship? Yeah, that’s just a big lightbulb our God put there…”

It’s also important to make the point that nature isn’t perfect, in the same way that we as human beings aren’t perfect. As I mentioned before, nature can be a pretty dangerous place. Paul says:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Romans 8:22

Nature is also under the curse of the fall, as much as we humans are. Nature is a mixed bag — full of much beauty, but also much darkness. That’s why there are earthquakes, tornados and hurricanes, wildfires, and so on. ‘Nature’ is as flawed as us human beings.

In short, the whole of creation has been created by God to serve his purposes. It must not be worshipped in itself, but rather should point us to the Creator. Creation as a whole has been subjected to frustration as a result of the curse of sin, and will find its true liberation in Jesus Christ and the new creation.

Has Catherine embraced paganism?

Let me return to the question of whether Catherine has, in fact, embraced paganism. If you take everything said in the video at face value it seems that the answer is yes. And yet, I feel there may be something else going on. The clue is in what she says near the end: “in this ever growing complex world we need to hold on to what connects us all”.

I suspect that she has focussed on nature rather than Jesus, because in her mind nature is a universal whereas Jesus is not. Why talk about Jesus (which is divisive and will alienate Muslims etc), when you could talk about nature instead? This is the modern way: let’s focus on things which unite us, rather than things which divide us. Let’s simply sweep everything divisive under the carpet so we can’t see it any more and pretend it’s not there.

However, this is not any kind of solution to the division in society. The divisions we are experiencing at the moment are serious and deep and need more than pithy “reconnect with nature” kind of comments to resolve. Nature does not have the power to heal us, only God does.

At the same time, I do think there is a glimmer of hope. A few weeks ago, Catherine did a video with the Scouts. There she spoke about how being in nature was “spiritual” for her. Now, this could simply be an expression of paganism as I’ve been describing it. However, I wonder if we can be more optimistic. I suspect that she has been through a kind of spiritual awakening over the last year, and she is struggling to come to terms with what she’s experienced. Perhaps she’s fastened onto nature over the last few months, in a way which looks pagan at the moment, but perhaps God will bring her to realise that nature itself is not the answer.

I think there is hope here, and I think we should continue to pray for the whole royal family and William & Catherine in particular.

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