The Prime Minister has asked us to pray for rain. Amid a powerful drought, Scott Morrison gave a speech last week where he said:

It's great to see it raining here in Albury today. I pray for that rain everywhere else around the country. And I do pray for that rain. And I'd encourage others who believe in the power of prayer to pray for that rain and to pray for our farmers. Please do that.

For many Christians, this was a small but encouraging gesture: the nation's most prominent public official acknowledging that rain is a blessing we receive as gift, an expression of our dependence upon a whole network of creaturely relationships overseen by a Creator.

Yet, for many atheists, it was a small but offensive gesture: the national leader talking to a sky fairy, embracing and promoting irrational superstition. Some responded on social media with angry mockery, warning of theocracy or taking the opportunity to criticise Morrison's particular brand of Christianity.

As a Christian, I found Morrison's comment to be offensive. But not because a Prime Minister speaks publicly of prayer or is open about his Christian beliefs.

Rather, what I find truly offensive is the profound disconnect between his professed prayers and the pro-coal - and thus anti-farmer - agenda of his government. To pray when facing a crisis like widespread drought is not the problem. But when the government Morrison leads has spent many years doing little or nothing about the root causes of the warming that is worsening such extreme weather, then inviting the nation to pray in response is somewhat galling.

The Coalition does not have a climate policy. While paying lip service to Australia's thoroughly inadequate national pledge towards the Paris Agreement, the Coalition has no mechanism to reduce emissions, and is committed to many policies that actively make the situation worse:

huge subsidies and very generous tax arrangements for coal, oil and gas;

threatening states that seek to limit gas extraction;

consistently seeking to water down international agreements (most recently at the Pacific Islands Forum);

opening up more native forests to clearing;

giving the green light to almost every proposed fossil fuel project;

watering down the Renewable Energy Target and criticising clean energy constantly;

thwarting investment stability;

ruling out any price on carbon;

attacking state governments that seek to reduce emissions;

cutting funding for climate research;

largely ignoring the public health effects from coal extraction and combustion;

abolishing the Climate Council;

ignoring the Climate Authority and then stacking it with pro-business figures;

misrepresenting climate science in public discourse;

offering the equivalent of the drug dealer's defence ("if we stopped exporting coal, another country would meet the demand");

attacking the funding of environmental NGOs;

operating a revolving door between government and the fossil fuel industry; and

failing to protect the Great Barrier Reef from bleaching while directing significant funds to an organisation that barely mentions climate change.

The list could go on.

So when then Treasurer Morrison brought a lump of coal into the Parliamentary chamber to use as a prop during the height of a record-breaking heatwave in February 2017, the symbolism was deliberate and obvious. When he became Prime Minister and appointed an anti-wind campaigner as energy minister, a former mining industry lawyer as environment minister and the former deputy CEO of the Minerals Council as his new chief of staff, he left no doubt that the Coalition's legacy of climate inaction would continue under his watch.

Returning to his request for prayer: by all means, let those of us who pray, pray. It can't do any harm, right? Unless it becomes a substitute for action, which I suspect is the real - and justified - fear in this context. Christians read in our holy text, "let us love not in word or speech, but in truth and action" (1 John 3:18). If we want to care for those hit hard by the drought, let us add to our prayers practical support for rural communities, including supporting a suite of climate policies that stop making such crises worse.

If you are a person of faith, I would suggest that the Prime Ministry brings faith into disrepute not by speaking of prayer, but by showing in his priorities that such prayers are empty. Too often Christians are silent in the face of a fossil-fuel-owned government whose actions are a form of uncreation, disrupting the patterns of rain and temperature on which our society is built. To cheer a Prime Minister for invoking prayer while giving him a pass on letting our future go up in coal smoke is to confirm the worst suspicions of our fellow citizens about the function of faith in masking destructive and self-serving political agendas.

Conversely, if you are an atheist - perhaps even one who thinks that there ought to be no public expressions of faith by elected officials in a secular society - can I humbly suggest you also have a choice: is it more urgent and important to fight religious superstition or climate disruption? Because if you want to see the Coalition's dirty energy agenda defeated electorally, then, statistically, you're going to need many people of faith voting against them. Waiting for current demographic trends to deliver religious "nones" a majority is time our climate crisis doesn't have.

By all means, criticise religious hypocrisy (I do a fair bit of that myself). But when you choose to mock Morrison's prayer per se, rather than drawing attention to the hypocritical gap between prayer and (in)action, this continues to send a message to Christians and people of faith that caring about climate is something that only godless atheists do.

Now you may genuinely believe that society would be a better place in the long term if Christians were jeered into silence, but the immediate cost of such a strategy is to make climate action harder. I respect and will defend your right to criticise all religion; I just think it's a strategic mistake to major on it in this context.

I am not advocating a bland notion of mere civility or moderation. We are hurtling towards a world rendered hostile to life as we know it. Thus, immoderation is the name of the game when the stakes are the habitability of the planet itself - or, to put the same point in different language: when the sakes are whether we will trust a bounteous Creator or torch the very possibility of stable shared existence. It's not simply a matter of choosing to ignore differences or begrudgingly deciding to get along with one another because politeness is nice; it's a matter of whether our necessary disagreements and debates distract us or draw us closer to faithful care for our common home.

Byron Smith recently completed a PhD in theological ethics through the University of Edinburgh on emotional responses to climate change. He is currently Assistant Pastor at St. George's Anglican Church, Paddington.