Christians, Climate Change and System Contradictions
As I am preparing this manuscript for submission in December 2015, the Paris climate talks are making headlines across the globe. There is an enthusiasm in the voices reporting on climate change that is replacing the despair and resignation which followed âthe Copenhagen defeatâ of 2009, when the participating countries could not agree on a carbon descent plan. Thus, this book aims to tell the story of environmental Christians at an important and eventful time. As an ethnographic account of environmental Christian organisations, the present study sets out to chronicle, analyse and interpret the ways in which green Christian activists campaign, live and ritualise their identities. Christian environmentalism, I will show here, is quickly losing its once marginal status in the green movement and becoming a leading voice in the climate chorus. Even more surprising, the climate movement as a whole is also gaining momentum and beginning to impact the public sphere.
It is only during the past decade that climate change discourse, the tip of the environmental discourse, has finally become available and visible to the great general public. A polite conversation about the weather with a stranger can no longer mean what it would have meant ten years ago, even if (on a cold day) they may say: âSo much for that global warming, it isnât coming here, is it?â Although society seems (on most days) to get on with its business, the social implications of global warming will perhaps become discernible as society gets some distance on this historic process: the realisation that human activities have caused a new geological era for the earth, an era geoscientists now refer to as the Anthropocene (see Archean 2011).
Climate change specifically and the environmental crisis more generally are highly politicised issues. Climate change challenges the worldâs governments, and particularly First World governments where carbon emissions are highest, to think and act globally, in a common interest. This is a challenge that excites many, because it has the potential to become a platform for unity in a divided world. However, political analysts and commentators warn that policy-makers attempt to tackle the environmental crisis superficially, without addressing core âsystemic difficultiesâ or âstructural resistancesâ, and hence perpetuating problems or circumventing real solutions (Rustin 2007).
We are faced with such systemic difficulties or âsystem contradictionsâ whenever our values and norms are in a state of conflict (Lockwood 1964). In his editorial introduction to Environment and Society, the environmental geographer Philip Sarre points to the disparity between environmentalism and policy-making. On the one hand, environmentalist attitudes rarely produce clear policy proposals. On the other, the policies of governments and corporations react to environmental views symptomatically and without any significant change âto underlying attitudes and goalsâ (Sarre 1996: 2). These underlying attitudes and goals may in turn have been developed âwhen society was dependent upon the local environment but had small impact upon itâ (ibid.: 1). Thus, the biblical dictum âbe fruitful and multiplyâ (Genesis 1:28) carries with it, according to Sarre, an assumption that âdomination and exploitation would not destroy the environments people depended onâ(ibid.).
The question arising from this last is: are these ethical values that shape human and non-human interaction derived from religious traditions and more importantly are they to blame for the environmental crisis? In a lecture given in 1966 entitled âThe Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisisâ the historian Lynn White Jr argued that the ecological crisis was a result of our inculcated Judeo-Christian beliefs and values, mainly the belief in a transcendent God whose most valued creation (and the only one created in Godâs own image), âManâ, was given dominion over the rest, and was thus separated from it (White 1967). The Lynn White critique could be considered a sine qua non, albeit obsolete, of scholarly writing about Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and environmentalism. White was not the first to have made such a claim. Aldo Leopold had already suggested that âconservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of landâ (1989 [1949]: viii). Yet White made an extremely important claim that was going to be addressed by many eco-critics and eco-theologians who engaged with this issue:
Whiteâs accusation produced a massive response as the debate he ignited involved historians, environmentalists, philosophers, theologians and many others, preoccupied with either identifying the implications of this new original sin or attempting to show that Christianity in fact had an environmental ethos in the application of stewardship or social justice. Paradoxically, in their attempt to exonerate Christianity, some theologians who argued with White became eco-theologians, and therefore much as White had proposed, tried to make Christianity part of the solution rather than the problem (ibid.).Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destinyâthat is, by religion [and since] the roots of our troubles are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not (White 1967: 1207).
An Ethnographic Study of Christian Environmental Activism
This book is therefore preoccupied with the tangible results of these efforts. Although in this book I will speak of âgreen Christianityâ and âenvironmental Christiansâ as well as âthe Christian traditionâ, more generally, I am using this as a convenient shorthand and I am always referring to a plurality of manifestations rather than implying a monolithic formation. As a religious studies scholar I am well aware of the problems of defining âreligionâ and the current debates generated by this problem, some of which I will address in Chaps. 3 and 4, concerned with methods and models for investigating green Christianity.
As I will discuss in great depth throughout this book, I should state from the very start that I recognise that religious identity is complex, overlapping and multi-layered (see Tweed 1997; Wuthnow 2005: 276â278; Nita 2014). My original academic training is that of a linguist and philologist and as such I am in fact interested in the coming together of two distinct discourses or bodies of language: âgreenâ on the one hand and âChristianâ on the other, and the ways in which my informants negotiated these mergers and cross-fertilisations in the context of their campaigning activities and in response to their different audiences. Moreover, I am interested in the role language plays in both expressing and changing values and behaviours, since talking about climate change is clearly not enough and campaigners are politically involved through symbolic and direct action 1 as I will show in future chapters.
To look at these developments I will be using my own ethnographical data gathered in the UK between 2007 and 2013 and I will also draw on secondary sources to show how my own research is contrasted by similar research around the globe. For example, in a recent study entitled Between God and Green: How Evangelicals are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change, Katherine Wilkinson (2012) shows that evangelicals in the USA who are also climate change activists need to frame their âcreation careâ campaign in a particular way that responds to (and overcomes) local politics and the American public sphere more generally, concerning association between âgreenâ and âsecularâ, âhumanistâ, âliberalâ and so on. Both green campaigns and religious organisations are often specifically situated within a local and national political arena, and generalising about green Christians, globally, is not always possible. With this disclaimer in mind, environmental Christianity no longer represents a fringe movement within the Christian tradition, as in the last three or four decades green Christian initiatives have continued to grow and manifest through a wide-ranging diversity of denominations, networks and organisations, from Christian anarchists in the UK or Australia who are heavily involved in protest against their governments to evangelical Republican Christian groups in the USA.
My research suggests that green or environmental Christianity is growing particularly in the Anglophone world, in the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia. Although some new Christian developments inside this movement may be somewhat removed from the wider tradition, like for example the new Forest Church movement also known as the Communities of Mystic Christ in the UK, it is likely that many green Christians will share a sense of ecumenical belonging and this may be illustrated by the wide endorsement from many non-Catholic Christian organisations of the recent and much anticipated papal encyclical Laudato Si: On the Care for Our Common Home (June 2015), in which Pope Francis called on global action against climate change. The recent encyclical marks yet another important shift from periphery to the centre: green Christianity is no longer a fringe movement inside the green movement, and my research will clearly document this shift, showing a progression from a more marginal status back in 2005 when the climate movement started to today, in 2015, when Pope Francis is considered to be one of the most outspoken public voices globally on climate change.
As a social scientist I was not particularly interested in Christian eco-theology or official ecclesiastical statements on the environment, although I did look at some of these developments and I will be discussing the relationship between text, church and people in this book, since connections are many and fruitful and relevant to our discussion. Eco-theologians are not just writing in their ivory towers and eco-theology, I was pleased to find, is on the street and at green festivals, where writers, vicars and activists meet and discuss practical issues as well as loftier ideas and ideals. However, my research attempted to understand âthe bottom-upâ greening of the Christian tradition, focusing on the voices of the people who make up these green networks rather than the public and official voices in green Christianity. First I wanted to know if this bottom-up greening was happening and, secondâif it was indeed happeningâI wanted to look at how it actually worked and what were its inner mechanisms? Therefore, when I started my research in 2007 I wished to find grassroots Christian organisations and look at what they were doing and saying, at what exactly they were attempting to change.
The book provides a wealth of evidence that challenges the view that Christianity, like the other two Abrahamic traditions, Judaism and Islam, is maladaptive and cannot produce an adequate environmental response, given the urgency of the ecological crisis, a view endorsed by the environmental anthropologist Roy Rappaport (1999), and further explored by Bron Taylor in his article âEarth Religion and Radical Religious Reformationâ (Taylor 2010b). Examining the view that the major religious traditions may only be capable of changing in incremental and thus insufficient ways, Taylor contends that
My data indicates that Christian activists adapted their religious beliefs and practices to various, sometimes extreme, degrees in their encounter with the nature spirituality of the green movement, or the climate and transition towns movements which represent current crystallisations of the green movement as I will show in future chapters. Furthermore, my data attests to the high degree of plasticity and adaptability the Christian tradition has at its disposal. Despite the profound changes they underwent, most activists retained their primary Christian identities in the climate movement and thus reported that they were motivated to act on climate change by their faith rather than any other political or secular concern. The hybrid results of these intersections need to be carefully examined if we are to understand the very mechanisms of this adaptation, and this is one of the main aims of the present study.[L]ongstanding religions have more historical and conceptual obstacles to overcome than do post-Darwinian forms of nature spirituality, and this is why very little of the energy expended by participants in the worldâs religions is currently going toward the protection and restoration of the worldâs ecosystems. Conversely, participants in nature spiritualities steeped in an evolutionary-ecological worldview appear to be more likely to work ardently in environmental causes than those in religious traditions with longer pedigrees. (Taylor 2010b: 6)
Two major movements have been at the forefront of t...