Archive for the 'religion' Category

Why You Should Care - a Lot - About Christian Environmentalism

admin January 5th, 2011

Over at Science Blogs, one of my colleagues Dr. Jeffrey Toney, author of Dean’s Corner, has been meditating on the attacks on the environmental movement by Conservative Christian organizations.  

Protecting and sustaining our environment is a core value that seems to be common sense. It never occurred to me that this value might somehow conflict with religion - after all, isn’t being a good steward of the earth a goal of numerous faiths? Apparently not.

As reported in The New York Times, there is a strong push back by Christian evangelists against environmentalism. I find this mind boggling.

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

Sacred Nature?

Sharon November 9th, 2009

I had the enormous pleasure this weekend of chairing our synagogues Scholar-in-Residence weekend, and thus hearing three talks by Rabbi Jill Hammer, Midrashist and author of _Sisters at Sinai_ and _The Jewish Book of Days_.  Rabbi Hammer is an extremely fine and thoughtful teacher, and I learned a great deal about the nature and process of Midrash (that is, the stories both ancient and modern Jews tell to answer questions raised by Biblical texts).

Her last talk, building on _The Jewish Book of Days_, focused on reconnecting with the agrarian roots of the Jewish calendar - she argued that we tend to erase the agricultural content and focus on things that seem better connected to our lives.  Thus, she attempts to restore the material and agrarian history of the holiday cycle of the year - seeing Passover, for example, as simultaneously the story of the Exodus and the time of the barley harvest that sustained Jews until Shavuot and the wheat harvest. 

She is a very fine teacher, and it was a deep pleasure to learn from her.  But she did say something, spun off at the very last moment, that struck me as troubling, an idea I hear repeated fairly often.  I should be clear, however, I am describing my train of thought here, and riffing then on an idea that moved me, rather than picking particularly on Rabbi Hammer, who for all I know, may have meant something entirely different. 

Rabbi Hammer ended her talk with the wish that we as Jews recover a reverence for nature that she feels has been absent in our lives.  It is a language that I hear often in religious communities - from Christians and Pagans and in every faith community I have encountered in between, from the purely secular and the deeply religious, and suggests that if we could only come back to revering nature, to treating nature as fully sacred, we would also preserve and protect nature.

I must admit, in some ways, this language of reverence appeals to me too.  I take the idea of “revering” here to mean two things - that is, if we were to treat nature as fully sacred, an expression of G-d (or whatever divinity(s) you are concerned with), we might be careful to preserve it.  And if we viewed it as sacred, we might place ritual limitations and taboos upon our use of it that might be more effective than the limitations we currently have - that is, just as we have rituals that shape how we approach sacred objects, we might invoke or create rituals for how we respond to sacred nature.  Given the rapidity with which we deplete and destroy our ecology, anything that would constrain our use of resources is attractive to me on a purely pragmatic level.  

And yet, as enticing as the possibility of limiting the harm to our ecology through rendering (or rather, re-acknowledging) nature as sacred space worries me.  The reason is this - modern people of the Global North have a very strange idea of what nature actually is.   My concern with the idea of sacred nature is that I think in order for it to be meaningful, for it to be something more than a feel-good concept that allows religious people to praise themselves for their superior experience of the world, we must first change the idea of what and where nature is - and how we view sacred things in general.  Otherwise, we risk the danger of making “sacred nature museums”, much as we make our religious institutions, in many cases into “sacred religion museums.”

What do I mean by this?  Well, ours is a culture of clear lines and strong distinctions, in most cases.  While there are plenty of exceptions, I think many Americans, at least, thinks of religious or sacred acts as taking places in formal sacred spaces.  I can recall this from the days before my conversion - the vast majority of “Christian” acts took place at church, in the space of the church, at formalized times.  While my family made a genuine effort to generalize, the overwhelming impression I received was that church was the place one went to be religious, and reading through polls of American religious opinion, it seems that I’m not the only one who got that impression.

Judaism is not a religion whose primary acts are to take place in the synagogue - the temple is recreated ideally, in the home.  But American liberal Jews at least (and this constitutes a majority of sorts) tend to also to think of religion as something primarily enacted at synagogue. In fact, this is true of almost all American liberal and moderate religious communities, and some Orthodox ones, according to the Pew surveys I’ve been reading - the primary act of religiousness is going to church, synagogue, temple or mosque.  Home-based, daily life integrated acts are a substantial part of religious observation for only a tiny percentage of American religious people.  Moreover, most Americans seem to tend to think of private religious experience, or private acts of religiosity as belonging to the more nebulous category of being “spiritual.” That is, we tend to identify personal experiences of the sacred as somehow separate from religious acts.  This strikes me as a significant fact.  

For me, I think of this division between “ordinary life” and “experience of immanence or sacredness” categorized as ‘spiritual’” and “religious institutional life” as having a powerful, if mostly unacknowledge impact on nearly everything in religious life.  Our sense of faith, and/or experience of something greater than ourselves exists, thus, in carefully broken down categories of divison that look like Linnean categories of animal division, or some other territory of modern science.  In this model,  ordinary day to day activities for most people have nothing to do with either religion or spirituality.  One chooses one’s work, does the carpool, fixes the deck, makes dinner, goes to a movie without reference to either religion or spirituality, outside of extremely orthodox minorities in any given community. In fact, reference to one’s faith in, say, choosing one’s profession, dress or deciding where one lives is usually considered archaic in the extreme - those who visibly orient their lives around their faith are generally something of a curiosity.

At the same time, for the vast majority of Americans who do not go to religious instiutions, and probably a majority of those who do, one als has “spiritual” experiences that are private, and largely unshared with others.  Some of these take place in nature, others during personal meditations, or in the course of day to day life, and occasionally, someone even has one at church or shul or mosque or temple ;-).  

When asked about spiritual life, occasionally this is part of practices that they integrate into day to day life, but most people  talk of unusual, rather than day-to-day occurrances - often in unusual conditions, often in what we think of as “nature”.  That is, they say they had profound spiritual experiences not while meditativel doing the laundry, or reading in the yard or praying at church, but while sitting on a mountain top, or at a special retreat, or while in the woods.   In some cases these experiences are religious in nature, but many people who are spiritual don’t claim any particular religious allegience, nor do they necessarily include G-d or Gods among the defining characteristics of those experience, although, of course, many do.

Then one has religious experiences, and for the comparatively small percentage of Americans who frequently visit a religious institutions, these are formalized - you go to church or synagogue or other institution to do your religious thing - and then you go home, and mostly, on average, don’t “do” religion again until the next time you go. 

There are exceptions - there are certainly many people whose lives integrate some or all of these three categories.  There are, of course, people who feel no attraction or need to have either spiritual or religious experiences, and people who have/seek out only one of those.  My standing joke, precisely because it is the exact opposite of the normal American experience is “I’m not spiritual, I’m religious.”  In fact, I don’t think the two are in conflict, but because Americans so strongly identify themselves as spiritual, often without being religious, or while specifically rejecting religion, I find myself tempted to head in the other direction.

I should be clear, I’m not suggesting that those who are spiritual but not religious should become more religious, or that those who aren’t either should become either.  I am merely observing that in the modern world, we tend to draw fairly strong dividing lines between kinds of experience.  And this is what worries me about the language of sacred nature or the language or reverence for nature.   That is, it strikes me as largely not solving the problem of our misuse of nature, because as long as we live in a world where categories of sacred experience are so starkly drawn, and where we do “spiritual” and “religious” at times and in ways very different from the way we live our daily lives, I’m not at all convinced that recovering a reverence for nature will actually do anything to protect it.

Right now, those who report powerful spiritual experiences often report having them “in nature.”  But generally speaking, when they talk about being in nature, they are usually not talking about being in the nature that actually surrounds them every single day - they are speaking of the kind of nature that most Americans have to get in a car and drive to visit.  They speak of retreats and special events in natural settings, of climbing mountains or standing under waterfalls.  And this is, I think, a forceful articulation of how powerful comparatively untouched ecologies are, and how powerfully we are drawn to the woods and the water, the mountains and the sea, where human beings haven’t over-written the world with their hands.  Most faiths include transformative religious moments for their leaders in the wilderness, or in extraordinary places.  This is not a bad thing by any means.

But our focus on the tranformative power of bits of wildness also speaks to the idea that nature exists, not where we are, but in “nature museums” which are “outside over there somewhere” - that is, nature exists in national and state parks, and extraordinarily beautiful natural settings that are unusual to us.  But we don’t speak of nature, generally speaking, as growing out of the cracks of our sidewalk.  We don’t tend to be powerfully moved by nature as it appears in our suburban yard in the form of squirrels at our bird feeders. 

I see this when people email me, speaking of a calling to grow food, a sense that they have an sacred and religious feeling that draws them to the farm.  In many cases, there are barriers to their leaving their present urban or suburban lives, but they speak passionately about how much they need and desire to be in the dirt, and in nature.  When I point out that there is dirt in city lots, and dirt under the pavement, and dirt in suburban yards, they often dismiss this as insufficient - there profound sense that the nature we have overlaid with human landscape is not *real* nature, that one can’t do “real” agriculture where humans are populous, that one does nature out somewhere other than where human beings are, in places with beautiful agrarian landscapes, or with wild scenery.

Now beauty does have a powerful role in bringing us to sacred experience, but this deep division between what we see as an absence of nature here, and a presence of nature “over there” is profoundly problematic if we believe that reverence, or the sense of a sacred will help us preserve our ecology.  Because just as we see “doing religion” as something we do only in certain places, and not as fully integrated into our day to day life, we see “doing nature” as something done only in certain places, and not part of the whole that is our lives. 

I’m the first to admit that it can be hard to find nature when it is covered by what Barbara Kingsolver calls “the flat, killing mulch of a sidewalk”, where the only animals you see are starlings, rats and humans.  And yet, I would argue, that if we were to treat nature as sacred, it would be here that we most urgently need to reclaim that sense of sacredness.  But this is the hardest part - because we have two deep divisions to overcome - the sense that sacred nature is something far away in a state park or a farm somewhere, and the sense the work of reverence, of preserving and protecting and ritualizing our relationship to the sacred is done, not constantly, as part of our lives, but in either closed buildings or unusual, preserved spaces for spiritual experience.

If we reclaim a reverence for nature now, as we are, we won’t preserve a damned thing.  I mean that quite seriously - we cannot revere nature in church, as we celebrate an agricultural holiday that means nothing to us, since agriculture is wholly alien from our society, and go out and eat daily cheap industrial food grown without reverence for anything.  We cannot go out into nature once a year and camp in the mountains and then come back and chemlawn our own green space.  We cannot get together once a year for a nature ritual and flatter ourselves that our acts matter, if 364 days a year, we live life as though nature did not matter.  We cannot experience G-d by the sea, praying for rain, and come back and flush our wastes down into that sea.  Reverence might be enough in a world where we lived integrally and integratedly with nature, where we saw ourselves as part of nature.  Without that, it is a kind of idolatry - nature as a substitute for G-d - because, after all, if G-d exists and is anywhere, G-d is in the squirrels, and the lawn, and the water that courses through you sewer system - because that is nature too.

Thousands of years ago, when the texts and rituals that many of us rely on were evolving, we were a different people - the lines our faiths attempted to draw between nature and human made some measure of sense.  We lived, after all, outside, all the time.  For the most part, the strong human lives of cities marked only a tiny landscape, and that surrounded by agriculture.  The largest cities of the Biblical era were tiny, and agrarian.  We small and natural creatures lived by and large by the cycles of nature, we lived daily in nature, and our texts helped us determine how to do so.  We revered nature, to the extent that reverence is the correct word (and whether it is depends on the time and place and experience) because like G-d (because it is like G-d in some faiths) it was bigger than we were, more powerful, encompassing, whole.  One might go to the temple to perform an important religious activity, or to join in community for a holiday, one might go into the wildnerness or to the top of a mountain to commune *particularly* with G-d (or Goddess or both)  - such stories are part of every religious narrative.  But these were the spectacular events in a world where religion and experience of the divine were also part of daily life - needed because we were so vulnerable to the vagaries of nature, because we lived wholly in and through the natural world.  We have shifted from a time in which nature was sacred because it was our world, to a way of seeing nature as sacred because it is scarce - and thus rendering it more scarce.

Yes, I’d like to see us reclaim a sense of the sacredness of nature, if only for purely practical reasons - because we are less likely to kill and destroy what we view as sacred.  But I think that beginning from that project risks the cration of more “nature museums”  and sacred groves surrounded by dead zones.  At this point, I think much of our much-vaunted reverence for nature in most people allows us to feel self-satisfaction that we preserved a small space in which to love nature, while we ignore the continued rape of the natural world, transformed by our presence, but not absent from it. The idea that we chase out nature by living somewhere is partly right - we destroy wild things and we kill other species and we reduce cultures to monocultures.  But we can never excise nature, any more than those of us who are people of faith believe we can excise G-d simply by choosing not to acknowledge or even to believe in G-d. 

The first step to restoring our ecology for people of faith, then, is not developing a sense of the sacredness of nature, but  developing a sense of sacredness *period* that involves the daily integration of our beliefs about the world into our lives.  That is, if we don’t live our faiths at every meal, in every choice, every time we spend money - if we don’t use our conviction to inform our daily lives, why would it matter whether we hold nature sacred or not?  Because our daily lives are just that - they are daily, they are the 95% of our acts that don’t we don’t consider “religious” or “spiritual” and their impact will always overwhelm any special religious or spiritual space we make for nature.

Only when we live our lives with care and restraint as though our daily lives are sacred, can we add in the concept of a sacred nature, one that is part of us, integrated into our bodies, the land on which we walk and sleep, into the small and often unseen lives that surround us.  We start there with sacred nature - with our water table and our dinners, with our yards and the trees that overhang our street.  From there, we can reach out to those special and transformative natural spaces in which have in the past had spiritual experiences, and to our churches and mosques, temples and shuls, where we have the chance in community to teach about and learn about and experience the collective agrarian history of our faiths.  But at the beginning, nature starts where we are - it is literally and materially in us, and if we are to show reverence to it, we must begin at the beginnning.

So, a Catholic, a Jew and Druid Walk Into a Bar…

Sharon July 27th, 2009

Well, not quite (so far we haven’t all managed to get to the same part of the country, or I’m sure we would find a nice bar ;-) ), but after much hemming and putting things off, Bob Waldrop, Catholic Worker, OKC Coop founder, Running on Empty Moderator and initiator of many, many cool things; John Michael Greer, Archdruid, author of many, many books and public intellectual; and yours truly,  Jew, goat farmer and wordy peak geek (also the one without a beard ;-) ) - have put together an interfaith discussion group on the intersection of faith and depletion - covering everything from how this changes our worldview to how we can bring our knowledge of what’s coming to our communities.

This is a conversation we all agree needs to happen - in practical terms, many religious communities are already doing the work that will need doing, and we also need to engage religious communities with the larger picture of imagining a future.  We welcome people of all faiths (and no faith, as long as you are prepared to be respectful of the basic premise of the group - ie, we’re not going to engage in endless “is religion bad” discussions) who are interested in exploring this topic productively and who have the maturity to behave like grownups on these potentially contentious subjects. 

To subscribe, send an email to [email protected]. 

 Cheers,

 Sharon