frogblog

It’s fair to say that when one thinks about the role Christians play in politics, one usually thinks of “the religious right” in the United States, a morally and socially conservative force with which the environmental movement has very little in common. But one shouldn’t forget that a “religious left” exists too, which emphasises such things as alleviating poverty locally and globally.

There are also progressive voices within Christianity (and all other religions) which sing very similar tunes to the environmental movement - who see humans as living sustainably, in balance with their environment, as a religious duty. They might come to the same conclusions in different ways to your conventional Green, but they still come to the same conclusions.

Here’s an (admittedly simplistic) Christian argument for trying to live sustainably: God loves all of His/Her creations, including the Earth, all the creatures who live on it, and the future generations of humans yet to be born. It would therefore be blasphemous to trash the planet because:

1) You’re directly trashing one of God’s boldest creations (the planet);
2) You’re directly or indirectly causing the death of lots of God’s other creations (species who’re dying out because we’re living unsustainably, like us frogs);
3) You’re ensuring that future generations of God’s creations (i.e. humans who will live in the future) won’t be able to live the prosperous lives we do.

This isn’t just a hypothetical argument. Religious leaders are making it, albeit with their own theological quirks. Rowan Williams, the global leader of the Anglican Church, has been trying to use his mana to get British electors to contemplate environmental issues before casting their votes early next month.

In an op-ed in the Independent on Sunday recently, he wrote:

To seek to have economy without ecology is to try to manage an environment with no knowledge or concern about how it works in itself - to try to formulate human laws in abstraction from or ignorance of the laws of nature.

It is time to look seriously at the full implications of this. We need to start by recognising that social collapse is a real possibility. When we speak about environmental crisis, we are not to think only of spiralling poverty and mortality, but about brutal and uncontainable conflict. An economics that ignores environmental degradation invites social degradation - in plain terms, violence.

It is no news that access to water is likely to be a major cause of serious conflict in the century just beginning. But this is only one aspect of a steadily darkening situation. Needless to say, it will be the poorest countries that suffer first and most dramatically, but the “developed” world will not be able to escape: the failure to manage the resources we have, has the same consequences wherever we are…

We could imagine, for instance, a “charter” of rights in relation to the environment - that we should be able to live in a world that still had wilderness spaces, that still nurtured a balanced variety of species, that allowed us access to unpoisoned natural foodstuffs. It may be that the time is ripe for an attempt at a comprehensive statement of this, a new UN commitment - a “Charter of Rights to Natural Capital” to which governments could sign up and by which their own practice and that of the nations in whose economies they invested could be measured.

Explaining the theological background to this position, Williams wrote:

All the great religious traditions, in their several ways, insist that personal wealth is not to be seen in terms of reducing the world to what the individual can control and manipulate for whatever exclusively human purposes may be most pressing. Religious belief claims, in the first place, that I am most fully myself only in relation with my creator; what I am in virtue of this relationship cannot be diminished or modified by any earthly power. In the environment there is a dimension that resists and escapes us: to reduce the world to a storehouse of materials for limited human purposes is thus to put in question any serious belief in an indestructible human value.

Similar debates are taking place among American Christians. Writes self-styled eco-evangelist Matthew Sleeth (hat tip, whoar.co.nz):

Evangelicals believe that God not only made everything, but that he loves his creation, enjoys it, and claims ownership of it. Yet for the past two centuries Christians and non-Christians alike have taken God’s creation for granted or, worse, seen it simply as a resource to be exploited. Evangelicals cannot claim to love God and not love what he loves.

All of which should remind us that it’s very hard to pin down the “type of person” who votes Green. Indeed people of all walks of life care about the environment. This planet is, after all, everyone’s home, and lazy stereotypes about Green voters (which I’m prone to as much as anybody) conceals a much more complex reality.

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