The Chatelaine's Keys

This movement refers to itself as “Resisting the Green Dragon” {is such a moniker supposed to conjure images of fire breathing dragons in a prehistoric era?} and refers to enviornmentalism as a “false religion.” Is it not a science? Shouldn’t scientific data drive the conversation?

I’m not sure that environmentalism is a science.  It is based on scientific evidence, but while scientific reasoning might well lead one to the sense one should protect the environment, it is also possible that other things would lead you there - love for a specific place or experience endangered by our way of life, for example, or a religious sense of obligation to care and protect things.  As I’ve written before, my own environmentalism is certainly a product of the scientific evidence for climate change, resource depletion and habitat destruction, but I don’t think it is solely the sum of that reasoning.  The Jewish notion of Tikkun Olam, that humans are here for the purpose of repairing a damaged world is central to my thinking, as are other philosophical and theological and historical reasons. 

I’m glad that Dr. Toney is writing about this issue, because I think it is profoundly important, and it doesn’t take a lot of hard thinking to figure out why.  At this point, the leading environmental issue of this century, climate change, has powerful ideological associations, associations that will essentially determine whether we do anything to protect ourselves from the worst outcomes of global warming.  Our last election put nails in the coffin of climate change legislation in the US, nails that were already halfway banged in by the tepid support of even the left.  Toney’s argument that environmentalism should be about science is right, but it isn’t - and it hasn’t been for a very long time.

The Green Dragon movement which appalls Dr. Toney is a response to the emergence of a conservative Christian environmentalism that is profoundly concerned with climate change and resource consumption.  I had the pleasure of speaking at Mercer University a while back, along with Dr. David Gushee, drafter of the 2006 Evangelical Climate Initiative, and other evangelical Christians attempting to create a Christian cultural narrative with an awareness of how fragile our ecological situation is at its center. 

This is a fraught position among conservative Christians - at the same conference, young climate activist and writer Jonathan Merritt talked about the anger and threats that had accompanied his first tentative steps to bring his environmental and religious convictions together.  Gushee has argued that there is an emergent Christian “Center” that could be moved politically and socially on a host of issues.  But such movement, and popularizing the theological and philosophical cultural grounding that will allow people who have been raised to view environmental awareness as ideologically leftist and associated with a lack of faith or paganism is a big and difficult project.

The statistics are very clear - there aren’t enough leftists in the US to do much of anything (to the extent the US even has a left, which is another issue).  In order to make political change that will moderate the worst extremes of climate change or begin preparing us for resource depletion, traditional environmentalists must collaborate with people they haven’t always gotten along with.  As I have argued for some years, particularly in this article “Moloch’s Children” , we are going to have to choose who we concentrate our efforts on, and in some ways, attempting to move Conservative Christians may actually be more effective than moving the vast secular middle. 

Why do I think this?  Because as I say in the essay mentioned above, I distinguish between two categories of climate skeptic - the paid shills, who deserve to be properly reviled, and the rest, the ordinary people who are simply uncertain about what to believe, or reject climate change because they have been told they should.  Among this group are a large number of people who I think could be moved by our ecological crisis, if the framing was correct (I’m not sure at this point climate change is the best mover - it may be that peak energy works better):

I don’t believe that people can be easily and accurately divided into enlightment categories – I think they are mostly a distraction.  Nor do I think that the climate change debate exists in the terms that most climate activists frame it, between skeptics and activists/scientists.  There are certainly some people on both sides who come to this with a single, all-encompassing worldview that could be described that way, but mostly, I don’t think that’s accurate.  Instead, I would frame the distinction differently – that the populace is roughly divided into two groups – but not the ones you think they are. The first, I’m going to call “Moloch’s Children” – which isn’t a very nice name, but it is, I think,  accurate.   By this I mean that like Moloch, they devour their own young.  I do not claim that the Children of Moloch do so intentionally – at worst, their seeming god is Mammon.  But the reality is that the worship of consumption leads to the cannibalizing of our future and our children.  

Who are these people?  The children of Moloch consist of the great mass of Americans and other rich world denizens whose central ideology is technological progress and consumption – Moloch is their god, the overarching center of their world is the urge for more and more comfort, more and more possessions, more and more wealth, more and more technology in complete disregard of the fact that these things are not possible.   They do not realize that they devour their own future as they consume.  I realize that most of the people I am describing would fervently deny that this is true of them – but they would mostly be wrong.  At the center of their value system is something empty and deeply wrong, and that emptiness stretches out and empties their world.  They do not know what is missing from their lives, so they seek out more to fill the empty space.

The Children of Moloch cross political, religious, cultural and ethnic lines.  That is, there are plenty of climate skeptics who believe that the climate probably isn’t changing and even if it is, we can just fix it with more free enterprise.  But there are equally many people in the same camp who believe that yes, climate change is a big problem, and someone really should do something about it, but not me, and nothing that impacts my mutual fund statement.   It is possible to be a devout Christian and still hold prosperity, comfort and your game cube at the center of your world in practice, while going to Church on Sundays.  It is possible to be a radical leftist athiest and still hold those same values at the center of your world.  Every shade of middle ground runs through the center.  Moloch knows no political bounds.

The truth is that if you could meaningfully divide the world up into climate skeptics and climate believers and use that information politically, then we’d already be acting on climate change.  The fact is that you can’t – the vast majority of people who believe we should do something about climate change believe that we shouldn’t do anything very difficult, expensive or inconvenient – pretty much what the skeptics believe.  They are different in that if it doesn’t cost them anything substantive, they’d be happy if the problem went away.

The second group I’ve called several things over the years – anti-modernists, sustainability folk (before that term came to mean “people who buy green prada”)…  For this purpose, though, I call them “People of the Center” – that is, anyone who has something other than Moloch at the center of their world: a hope for the future, an investment in the past, the love of a G-d, the love of humanity in general, an ethical paradigm that actually trumps the desire for more –  and thus perceives, sometimes instinctively, sometimes after long study, that we cannot go on this way, and must find something else. 

And this category too crosses all political, cultural and religious lines.   There are devout Christian homesteaders in this group, and indigenous native farmers, radical leftists and radical rightists.  There are aging hippies and crunchy cons.  There are Quakers and Amish, Hasidic and Liberal Jews, Moslems, Buddhist Nuns and Catholic Nuns, Neo-Pagans and Athiests.  There are people who believe that climate change is no problem at all, or not their problem, but who deeply and profoundly believe they are called by their faith or taste or commitment to another principle to live ethically.  There are people who believe that climate change is everything and come to the same conclusions.  And in the end, what matters here are the ends- the conclusions and the life that follows them.

Here, then, I see the people who are already beginning to live the life necessary.  They may think I’m a complete raving loon on the subject of climate change – but they recognize the need to grow their own food.  They may not care at all about peak oil, but they know they need to cut their energy use and energy budget.  They could be, on the right political grounds, supportive of far more radical political changes than most of the moderate people who accept climate change, because their basic premise is that the future is worth preserving.

The truth is that even without acceptance of climate change, tens of thousands of people recognize the essential emptiness of our center and are looking for a better way.  The truth is that even if we disagree on peak oil, or on the face of the financial collapse, we have things to speak about.   Even if we fight over important (I do not claim they are not important, just perhaps not as important as preventing the worst outcomes of our future) issues that are simply secondary – the traditional battleground issues of left and right, for example, we can recognize their secondariness. 

Even if we have nothing in common except our commitment to creating a future for human beings in the world, we can work together at least in some measure – and I would argue that the People of the Center have more in common with one another than they do with the Children of Moloch, regardless of  their opinions on gay marriage and health care funding.

Christians whose primary ideology is Moloch or Mammon and those who recognize that the way of life they live cannot go on are now associated with each other, but there’s nothing ideologically necessary in that association, and the emergence of the Christian Center and a language of Christian environmentalism is part and parcel I think of creating a culture in which it might be possible for those anti-modernist people of the center to ally.  It won’t be easy or simple, but it may well be the best bet we have.

This is why even if you don’t think Christian environmentalism has anything to do with you, even if you have thought up to now that all evangelicals are alike, you should rethink.  It is important that we begin to explore the common ground held by middle peoples - and provide aid and support to those beleaguered by blowback -  our lives depend on it.

Sharon