Introduction
John Betjeman once remarked that trying to love the whole city of London was like trying to embrace all the volumes of the national telephone directory at once. This has always conjured up for me a wonderful picture of some hapless human endeavouring to carry a mass of heavy, rather floppy volumes and helplessly watching them slip from his hands and end up on the floor. And sometimes, when I consider the threats to our global ecology, I can’t help feeling in a similar position.
Yet there is another picture that stays in my mind, as I am sure it does in yours, and that is the picture of our planet as viewed from space. How small it looks, how alone, how vulnerable. It was the sight of our earth looking like a floating bubble in the vast surrounding dark that caused what the historians call a paradigm shift in our thinking. Suddenly the world was not a solid mass beneath our feet that – barring the occasional earthquake – we could rely on to sustain us until the sun burnt out. We began to realise how precious it is, and how, if we do not treasure it, we could lose it. Ironically it was only when our space technology enabled us to leave our planet that we woke up to its value.
I generalise, of course. There have always been those who have valued and tended the world we live in. Good husbandry of land and animals has been essential for the survival of the human race since it emerged from its hunter-gatherer phase. Part of the ecological problem, however, is that since the industrial revolution many people in the northern and western areas of the world have become divorced from such husbandry. The city child who thinks milk is made in factories may raise a smile, but this is only an extreme example of our almost universal removal from the sources of the food we live on. Regarding water – without which, incidentally, we would die much more quickly than we would without food – the general public in the UK has little notion of how it gets to the tap, and perhaps that is understandable since water shortages here are comparatively rare, and usually follow exceptionally dry winters and hot summers, none of which we are particularly accustomed to. Yet before the end of this century there may well be wars fought over sources of water. As for fossil fuels, that heat our homes, run our transport systems, and power our factories, it is difficult to know where to begin on how we have designed our lives round them on the assumption that there would be an endless and cheap supply available as far as even the most pessimistic planner could see.
We are becoming educated rapidly on these matters, though. Scarcely a Sunday supplement goes by without some mention of the threat to the rain forests, or the loss of a species of animal, plant, or insect. Most of all, we have become aware of the damage to our climate that carbon emissions have caused. Closer to home, we have become aware of the damage to our landscape that our rubbish causes. And we have made a start on tackling those issues, hoping against hope that it is not too little, too late. For we have begun to realise that if our earth is a ball in space it is not one we can kick with impunity. We need to embrace it.
The Role of Religion
One might be excused for assuming, in this secularised society of ours, that the ecological problem is primarily a practical one, or one of secular ethics. It is certainly both of those things, and I do not wish to belittle their importance. Today, however, I want to talk about the religious dimension of ecology, and how it can make a contribution to the ideas that necessarily lie behind the practicalities and the ethics. For there is a new buzzword around now: EcoTheology.
Because the industrialised nations of Europe and the USA are deeply involved in the ecological problems that are becoming recognised, I shall look primarily (though not exclusively) at Christian theology. If Christianity is fading as an influence in Britain, it is still a force to be recognised here, while the USA, officially a secular nation, is a veritable powerhouse of Christianity. Indeed worldwide Christianity is present in more countries than any other religion, and one in every three people in the world is a Christian of some kind. Of all those who follow Jesus, sixty per cent are Catholic. If there is any such thing as a “typical” person, a typical Christian today is poor, female, young, and non-caucasian. The balance of power in Christianity is shifting away from Europe, and into the Southern hemisphere; Africa and Latin America are key to its future. So any teachings of Christianity on ecology have to take account of two things. First, they will have widespread influence. Second, but no less importantly, they will need to speak to the poor of the developing world, who will be most affected by ecological breakdown.
Traditional Christianity has been held responsible for some very negative attitudes towards the environment. The primary reason for this is the focus on the human, rather than the natural world in which said human lives. In the Old Testament we are told that God gave humanity dominion over the animals and plants. More, we are told that God made men and women in his image – obviously a spiritual, rather than a physical, image. This has encouraged the view that all living things, and indeed the earth itself, were created for the convenience and use of humankind; that men and women have always been superior to the rest of creation. When this worldview was added to the growth of capitalism that followed the Reformation, and was actively encouraged by those Protestant Churches who taught that prosperity was a sign of God’s favour, the seeds of modernity were sown.
Now modernity is not necessarily a bad thing. In any case, we are now stuck with it. Modernity, by which I mean the industrialised phase of western history, has achieved great things. It has, to name but a few of its achievements, produced mass education, good sanitation, medical treatment, transport systems, domestic labour-saving devices, and relatively uncrowded housing to put them in. Of course there have been horrific wars and industrial diseases and accidents; that is the obvious downside of modernity. A less obvious downside is that modernity encouraged materialism, and some elements of Christianity walk hand-in-hand with materialism by preaching the “Gospel of Prosperity”. Another downside is, of course, damage to the environment.
There have been Christians through the ages who have loved the world of nature above all. The most prominent who springs to mind is Francis of Assisi, though Hildegard of Bingen is also worth contemplating. It is also worth contemplating that Francis was regarded with deep suspicion by the Catholic establishment, not on the grounds that Francis talked to the birds – which would cause deep suspicion in our post-Freudian world – but on the grounds that he espoused poverty and his followers showed an alarming streak of independence. Francis was not afraid of nature. It seems odd to say this, although the natural world can be alarming, it is not all about Ratty and Mole in The Wind in the Willows. But the Christian Church in the Middle Ages was still wary of the nature religions it had superseded. So someone who viewed the entire natural world, not just humanity, as a physical expression of God’s love was unusual.
I speak here of the Western Church. In the Eastern Church there was a very highly developed theology of incarnation that extended beyond humankind. The reason for this was the use of the ikon in worship. Orthodox ikons are not just pictures – they are a means of connecting spiritually with the subject of the picture. The theoretical justification for this is the incarnation of Jesus. The whole physical world can be holy.
The New Thinking
Let us not be fooled into the assumption that nothing has changed in Christianity. A prime example of the change that is taking place is the Catholic Church’s appointment in 1979 of Francis of Assisi as the patron saint of ecology. This was an intentional endorsement of the views of Francis, who had regarded the earth as the creator mother, from which all life is born. In 1986 the Assisi declaration on religion and nature, under the auspices of the World Council of Churches, was endorsed by many world faiths, including Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and the Hindu Religions. It particularly enjoined all religious people to respect the integrity of creation, and was instrumental in setting up the World Wildlife Fund’s initiative on nature and religion.
The Assisi meeting was of historic importance: first, because it involved most of the leading world faiths, a recognition that unless religions work together on global issues they will not make progress. Thus the issue of ecology transcends religious differences. Second, the change in thinking within Christianity that lay behind it emphasised the role of humanity as having stewardship of creation rather than dominion over it. This was not a new idea. What was new was that it became the widely accepted view of many, if not most, Christians. The Orthodox Church also stresses the second story of the creation of humans in Genesis (chapter 2), and this has influenced some western theologians. In that account, humans were fashioned from the clay of the earth; humans are, by their very nature, of the earth, not beyond it.
In addition there was an acceptance of responsibility. God may have made a covenant with humanity that the world would not be destroyed again; but did humanity make a covenant with God to the same effect? While natural disasters do occur without any help from mankind – the earthquakes and tsunamis of this world – there are many “natural” disasters that result from human greed and thoughtlessness. And they hit hardest where the need is greatest; among those who live on flood plains because there is nowhere else; among those who live in famine areas because they cannot move long distances. The responsibility to help the poor has long been a Christian ideal. Crystalised in the Liberation Theology of Latin America, it has become recognised that the poorest of the poor suffer most when natural disasters occur. While Liberation Theology is suspect in certain quarters because of its Marxist echoes, it has been absorbed into many other areas of Christianity.
Ecotheology was a term that began to be used in the 1980s. Twenty years on it still has a way to go, but it has hit the ground running. The recognition that religion can motivate, inform, and affect attitudes, and the grasping of the environmental nettle by the religions, is surely a giant leap for mankind.
Conclusions
Where does this take us, as Unitarians? I would make four brief suggestions for how we can move forward.
The recognition that environmental issues transcend faith traditions places us in a good position for raising those issues at interfaith gatherings, in which we play an active part.
The fact that we live in a society where few people are churchgoers, but many desire a spiritual dimension to their lives, offers the opportunity to develop an “ecospirituality” that speaks to them.
We need to speak out regarding reinterpretation of the biblical account of creation, and the evangelical gospel of prosperity, to ensure that a message of humankind as ecologically and economically responsible is heard.
We should develop our own view of the universal, rather than the specific, incarnation, to encourage belief in the whole of creation being infused with the spirit.
We have a struggle ahead, and it will be difficult to embrace, rather like all the volumes of the national telephone directory. But let us instead hold in mind that vision of the earth floating in space, as an ikon for our times.
Kay Millard
(Chair of the Bath Unitarian Fellowship)
23 August 2009