On Faith and the Environment:
Can Religion Save God's Green Earth?

When Brad Cullen asked if I would make this talk, I was a little bit dubious since talks to geographers, or about geography, are supposed to have slides, if only in an effort not to be boring. But the lecture is about faith, and spirituality, and religion, and God. How can you have slides of God? But after I thought about it for a while I realized that you can indeed have slides of God.

In fact, most of us have such slides, squirreled away in those little yellow boxes recording our vacations to the landscapes Montana, or the Outer Banks of North Carolina, or the New England coast. The slides are not always of amazing scenery, and not always of the highest technical or artistic quality, and yet taking them can be a spiritual, even religious, experience. We do not have to go completely pagan to find God in, say, a lovely dogwood tree in blossom, or to find the tree in God, as a friend, Wally Ford, has put it. The idea of seeking the divine in nature, and thereby strengthening one's faith in the future, is a central tenet of all religion, including, but not restricted to, traditional Judeo-Christian theology.

As Mark I. Wallace, head of the Religion Department at Swarthmore College, has written, “God is a living and dynamic presence within the natural order who is greater than the theological models of God within any one particular religion.” Long ago, Martin Luther wrote, “God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.” And as Jewish theologian Daniel C. Matt has written, “How then can we find God? A clue is provided by one of the many names of Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of God, the divine presence. She is called ‘ocean,’ ‘well,’ ‘garden,’ ‘apple orchard.’”

Our slides of beautiful places also affirm that nature spirituality is very much part of the American ethos, starting from the very beginning with, for example, the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards who, like Luther, read God in nature. In one account of a transformative experience while out walking, Edwards wrote that “God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; . . . in the grass; . . . in the water, and all nature.” Later, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and others established Transcendentalism—the presence of God in nature and in man—as a spiritual idea that was, in its essence, religious. And following Thoreau, John Muir extolled the spiritual values of the wilderness, as did Aldo Leopold who translated a spiritual sense of the ecological values of nature into what he called a land ethic. That these foundation-stones of American earth spirituality were, as we say, “unchurched” is a part of the story, not an anomaly.

Another important strain in the American nature ethos is that provided by the beliefs and practices of our native peoples, who preceded the Puritans by thousands of years, wherein the concept of a Great Spirit is integral with the forms and processes of nature. I have participated—even been the object of—some of the ceremonies of our indigenous religions, and I will tell you that they have much to teach us.

It is important that people, not excluding geographers, pay attention to the immanence of God in nature.

But lest we all get too comfortable, we should also take some pictures, and look at them from time to time, of what poet and essayist Wendell Berry calls a “horrid blasphemy”—the ugliness of urban sprawl consuming natural landscapes, factories belching poisonous gases into the atmosphere, the banks of smog over our cities that at the end of the day create garish “pollution sunsets.”

Here is what Wendell has written, in what I consider the best essay, from a Christian point of view, ever published on the topic at hand. “The destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship,” he writes, “or stupid economics, or betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into his face as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.”

Many people of faith have been, and are now, trying hard to bring ideas like Berry’s into the mainstream of what we call organized religion. But it has not been easy. Here is the background.

In its present form (which is not its earliest as we have seen), what might be called the “greening-of-religion” movement began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During the 1970s, there were teach-ins and preach-ins to support environmental legislation, but the religious component faded quickly.

Then, in the ’80s, concern about the integrity of the natural environment suddenly moved to a new level. Before that air and water pollution, ecosystem stability, and renewable resource sustainability were seen to be regional in scope, for the most part, and therefore subject to remediation through local and national legislation. But even as laws were enacted to control ambient air and water pollution and protect natural processes and resources, North American and European scientists began to raise the alarm about environmental problems of an altogether different kind—problems that were deadly on a mass scale, global, and incapable of solution by ordinary political means.

Actually, the word “problem” scarcely describes it: the mass extinction of species; the dying forests of Europe, North America, and Siberia and the eradication of tropical rainforests in South America and Asia; the loss of ecological function in the world’s oceans; the hemispheric bombardment of deadly UV-B rays; the increased incidence and range of dengue fever, malaria, and mutated filoviruses (HIV, Ebola, Marburg, Hanta); extreme weather events; the possibility that the Gulf Stream may shift course; the inundation of low-lying coastal areas, indeed whole nations, by rising sea levels courtesy of global warming; mass starvation and conflict in the less developed countries of the world.

Thus began a “post-crisis” environmental era of intractable global change. Many, including me, came to the realization that the ordinary tactics of environmental activism—letters to members of Congress, carrying placards, press releases, getting people “involved”—were clearly inadequate to meet the challenge of global issues of this magnitude.

Aware of this, and distressed by the scientific findings, religious leaders such as James Parks Morton, then Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, met with influential scientists, such as Henry Kendall of MIT who founded the Union of Concerned Scientists and the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan of Cornell, and joined with politicians, such as then-Senator Al Gore, to develop a concerted effort to deal with the environment in ethical and spiritual terms as well as scientific ones since the revelations of science alone were clearly not enough to move people to action.

The result was a 1991 “Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment,” in which religious leaders affirmed that concern about the natural environment was indeed a matter of religious importance. “We believe,” their “summit statement” asserted, “that the cause of environmental integrity and justice must occupy a position of utmost priority for people of faith.” The meeting was held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and the statement signed by 25 distinguished leaders of the principal denominations, religious organizations, and seminaries in the U.S.

The summit statement was followed a year later by a “Declaration of the ‘Mission to Washington’” in which 150 clergy leaders proclaimed, “We believe that science and religion, working together, have an essential contribution to make to any significant mitigation and resolution of the world environmental crisis.”

Shortly after, a new umbrella organization was set up with abundant funding from foundations—the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, as it would later be named, with the Union of Concerned Scientists playing an active role. During this period, many other national and regional organizations—by my count about 50 of them—came into being or took on new life. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish denominations and groups signed on as well, producing important theological statements, including one by Pope John Paul II. Scores of important environmental books were written by theologians. Hundreds of conferences were held, thousands and thousands of pages of instructional materials were sent to churches—perhaps as many as 5,000 congregations. Expectations were high that the faithful millions would tip the political balance in favor of environmental sanity at last.

This was to a “great turning,” said Joanna Macy, philosopher and deep ecologist. An “ecological reformation” comparable to the big-R Reformation 400 years ago, said Deiter Hessel, a Protestant theologian. It promises “the renewal of religious life,” said Paul Gorman, head of the newly organized National Religious Partnership for the Environment.

And yet, ten or a dozen years later, after all the hoo-ha, people concerned with the relationship of churches to environmental reform are asking themselves, “What happened?” Instead of effective advocacy and action engendered by the religious suasion of churches working in behalf of God’s Creation, we are confronted not only by increasing scientific evidence of damage to the ecosphere, but a flood of contrarian anti-environmental propaganda coming from the very places that were to be the salvation of nature. A resurgence of creationism, including a museum in rural Kentucky featuring Flintstone-style humans and dinosaurs living in the same neighborhood; school boards forcing biology teachers to teach “intelligent design” which is not only non-scientific, but bad theology in the view of serious theologians; and the dismantling of a half-century of environmental protection laws by a extremely religious president who apparently did not get the message.

On the other hand, much good is happening with regard to religion and the environment—and I will talk about some of it in moment—but the point I want to make now is that, generally speaking, it’s not happening because people in the pews are rising up en masse and insisting on reform, despite pronouncements on the part of their denominational headquarters. Says Stan Euston, formerly of the New Mexico Conference of Churches and a national leader in the effort to involve churches in matters of global warming, “We simply don’t have the power in the denominational structure to be effective on our own terms. The best we can do is support the efforts of environmental groups.” And the environmental groups are not doing all that well either, as many have been at pains to point in recent studies.

Stan’s view is not an eccentric one. In fact I heard it first from none other than James Parks Morton of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the mother church of the greening of religion. In an interview with Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest and our best-known ecotheologian, I simply could not get him to talk about the institutional potential of organized religion to affect change. And local pastors have told me they cannot, realistically, get out front in the way I might want.

There are exceptions of course, some right here in this area, including in many important ways the Presbyterian church in Placitas to which I belong. But we should not be surprised that ecotheology is not, suddenly, the topic on Sunday mornings in, say, Davenport, Iowa, or Sparks, Nevada. Indeed, research has shown that “the environment” is far down the list of concerns of church-goers. At the top are potential schisms over gay clergy, Catholic pedophile priests, the pronouncements of far-out Protestant evangelicals like James Dobson on stem-cell research, gay marriage, and abortion. The preoccupation of Christianity in America today is not the natural environment, the glory of the Creation, but a near-prurient fascination with sex.

As a result, rather than growing in influence, some important national religion-and-environment associations that tried to work with congregations have now ceased to exist or, like the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, have vastly reduced the scope of their programs. The material distributed by denominations has tailed off. Two major magazines on the topic have gone under. It would seem that the enthusiasm and sense of purpose in the conjoining of science and religion so that the people in the pews could forthrightly address the new global environmental challenges is slipping away.

The underlying reasons for the failure of the science-and-religion message to find fertile soil in congregations, as congregations, are several. And they are all 800-pound gorillas. To begin with, as prominent Georgetown University theologian John F. Haught puts it, “Concern for either local or global environmental welfare is not a very explicit part of the Christian tradition.” The Hebrew Bible is clearly more “earthy” and more environmentally instructive than the New Testament. But in any case, however much an outdoor preacher Jesus of Nazareth actually was, his message was about social reform, not natural processes, except indirectly.

Moreover, in most Christian denominations the primary emphasis is on personal salvation, not the salvation of the earth. Heaven, not earth, is what religion is all about in this anthropocentric, supernatural view—another 800 pound gorilla. And when such Christian anthropocentrism is taken to extremes, as it is in some conservative Catholic churches and most evangelical-fundamentalist Protestant churches, “the earth” is not only irrelevant, it is cursed, pestilential, detestable, and due for extinction anyway at the “end times.” Such beliefs are growing in influence in the U.S. and they leave very little room for the idea of the sanctity of nature or for evolution—“the mysterious future which faith knows by the name God,” in John F. Haught’s phrase—as the foundational principle of the biological and earth sciences and the core not only of modern environmentalism but also ecological theology.

The final gorilla is the reluctance of clergy, as mentioned earlier. In the Abolitionist movement a century and a half ago, Henry Ward Beecher got his Congregational Church members in Brooklyn to buy Sharp’s rifles—“Beecher’s Bibles” they were called—to arm anti-slavery forces in the territories. A century or so later we heard great and powerful preaching at churches in Harlem, Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere on civil rights, and we marched. But today the front-line clergy is largely silent on the preservation of the Creation, which, may I remind you, is a world-wide issue that pertains to the very sustainability of life on earth.

What to do? Larry Rasmussen, the Christian ethicist who spoke at UNM a few weeks ago, has, in fact, provided a useful, non-institutional approach. “The great struggle for humane survival in a sustainable earth community has already begun,” he says. “So choose a portion to reform, and find a few colleagues. Resist all appeals to select a single vector of analysis and overlook none for the wisdom hidden there. Be humble, ecumenical, and daring. As in other ages of great discontinuity, the images of mustard seeds, of salt, are the right ones. To say nothing of dying and rising.”

The emphasis here is on ecumenism, on cooperative approaches that do not require an institution to be expressed, on thoughtful, creative strategies, and, notably, on daring. When this good advice is followed, good things happen.

A few months ago an extraordinary religious organization called Christians Caring for Creation joined with the Center for Biological Diversity in a lawsuit to force the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect crucial habitat for the endangered arroyo toad along the upper Santa Clara River and San Francisquito Creek in the San Fernando Valley. Said Connie Hanson, director of Christians Caring for Creation, “In the Bible, God’s words are very clear concerning the creatures on this earth. He loves them. They are good. They belong to him. And we, the people of this earth, are told to keep his creatures alive and thriving.” Along with lawsuits, Hanson’s group puts out a frequent list of prayer requests to thousands of true believers. Recently these have included prayers to protect the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, to defeat a crippling amendment (passed by the House, alas) to the Endangered Species Act, to stop destructive logging on public lands, and much else.

Closer to home, we have our own Albuquerque Petroglyphs, a sacred place to Native Americans and the rest of us, with values that pertain to the integrity of this escarpment that must not be severed by a multi-laned speedway, as planned, any more than the ceiling of Sistine Chapel should be severed into parts by, say, water pipes and electric cables. Go around. The New Mexico Conference of Churches, working with the what is now called the Sage Council, staged a Petroglyph Pray-in 1998, and some religious organizations have supported the wonderful young people of the Sage Council in their effort to preserve the area ever since. It is a hard battle, and may not be won. But those who have led the charge are blessed and have been an inspiration nationally to others concerned with saving sacred lands.

A final illustration is from the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, now being destroyed horribly by a practice known as “mountain-top removal” to get the coal underneath. In removing the mountaintops, the valleys are filled, wildlife destroyed, streams diverted and silted up, “home places,” as they call them, devastated, and community life permanently disrupted. To defend their land and community, local residents Bob Marshall and Allen Johnson organized a coalition called “Christians for the Mountains.” Believers disagree on many things, but, as Johnson told Newsweek magazine, “God has called all of us seriously, and we should agree on one thing: to take care of his earth.” The group will be holding its first large conference this fall.

Projects of this kind validate the Rasmussen approach—in every case they are humble, ecumenical, and daring. But there are other activities that should be noted as well.

Perhaps the greatest amount of institutional energy has been placed on global warming. The Interfaith Climate Change Network provides brochures, videos, instructional material, and bumper stickers about saving energy, especially energy used in church buildings. The network has eleven statewide coordinators, of which Stan Euston, for New Mexico, is one. In Philadelphia, the Interfaith Coalition on Energy encourages energy conservation in churches and synagogues in the region. Interfaith Power and Light which started locally in San Francisco has become a national program to encourage church members to save energy, write letters to public officials, and sign up for renewable energy such as the windpower program of the PNM here in New Mexico.

Then there is the indefatigable Fred Krueger’s Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation, which among many projects nationally, has organized vigils at Otero Mesa and Valle Vidal in New Mexico. Other efforts include Genesis Farm, Sisters of Earth, and on the academic side, the Forum on Religion and Ecology. For those wishing to cruise around on the internet to find out about all this activity, a good place to start is at a listing provided by the National Council of Churches.

Clearly, something is going on. But it may be different from what many of us assumed to be the direction of the greening-of-religion movement of the early and mid-1990s, which was supposed to happen in church on Sunday morning, not out in the dusty places where the bulldozers and dynamiters are busy.

To be sure, when you consult the NCC website, you will find the U.S. Catholic Conference and all mainstream Protestant denominations with environmental information and education programs. But if my own experience as a board member of Presbyterians for Restoring Creation, a denominationally-sanctioned national group, is any guide, the basic idea here is to direct an environmental point-of-view denominationally inward, to the folks who show up at church and light the candles.

This is fine, of course, and the denominations should not stop doing what they do. But as recent experience has shown, faith-oriented environmental advocacy tends to resist corporatization, hierarchies, and doctrinal conformity. Indeed, from a purely political standpoint, denominationally-based initiatives have failed to signify, at least to the extent hoped for ten years ago.

Accordingly, instead of trying to recruit every-Sunday church-goers as eco-activists, which is discouraged by those three 800-pound gorillas—the absence of explicit New Testament authority, the emphasis on personal salvation rather than salvation of the earth, and the reluctance of clergy to take to the ramparts—maybe the greening-of-religion people ought to up-end the earlier church-based strategy and develop instead an on-the-ground faith-oriented environmentalism that would give people—whether they are frequent church-goers or not—a spiritual, if not deeply religious, motive for engagement.

This is the approach, for example, of the Partnership for Earth Spirituality, led by Franciscan Sister Joan Brown here in New Mexico. The Partnership’s resolutely ecumenical work in sanctifying the earth through new forms of ritual and service, along with projects elsewhere to protect toads, sacred sites, and mountaintops, are the thin edge of the wedge in my view, and may well be the models for the greening of religion movement in the future.

Can religion save God’s Green Earth? I honestly do not know. I do know that this is an important matter, for the United States of America, among all the developed nations, is the most religious. Research has shown that some 53 percent of Americans describe themselves as “very” religious, in contrast to European countries where the corresponding figure ranges from 11 to 14 percent. Is it just a coincidence that the most religious of nations is the worst polluter and least respectful of its landscape?

Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, those spiritual patriarchs of earth ethics, answered this question by rejecting the religious orthodoxy that separated man from nature and gave him a special and privileged relationship to God.

But should we reach the same negative conclusion today, with all the theological effort that has gone into making organized religion part of the earth solution rather than part of the problem? That is still a legitimate question it seems to me, and one that takes more effort to address than denominational bodies publishing pious declarations about the importance of “the environment.” This is not enough. Installing those low-wattage lightbulbs and using crockery rather than styrofoam for the after-church coffee hour is not enough.

It is not enough for any green religious movement worthy of the name to stand idly by while corporations and their government minions banish posterity with bland assurances, in the face of scientific fact, that there is no problem.

I sincerely hope that one way or another an honest green church movement will come into its own. And when it does, it will not stand idly by. Its new message and its new messengers will, at last, raise holy unshirted hell about the destruction of God’s creation—and not be silent as the whole planet is nailed to a cross.

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Selected References and Further Reading

Albanese, Catherine L. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Arroyo toad (Christians Caring for Creation). See www.sw-center.org/swcbd/press/toad524-05.html.

Bernstein, Ellen, ed., Ecology and the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature and the Sacred Meet. Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1998.

Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower, 1999. By the most influential of our ecotheologians. The title phrase, “The Great Work,” has become a rallying cry for earth spirituality and the greening of religion.

Berry, Wendell. “Christianity and the Survival of Creation.” Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Available at www.crosscurrents.org/berry.htm.

Haught, John F. The Promise of Nature: Ecology and the Cosmic Purpose. New York: Paulist Press, 1993. Haught is among the most influential Catholic theologians. A recent synthesis paper, which deals with intelligent design, is “Darwin, Design, and the Promise of Nature,” the 1994 Boyle Lecture given at St. Mary-le-Bow in London. The paper is available online at www.stmarylebow.co.uk/news/boyle2004.htm.

Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment. The two statements, in New York (1991) and Washington (1992), among others by various denominations and organizations, may be found online at www.environment.harvard.edu/religion/publications/statements/index.html#early.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949. The bible of the modern conservation movement. Available in several paperback editions.

Mountaintop Removal. See www.christiansforthemountains.org.

Moyers, Bill. “9/11 and the Sport of God.” September 7, 2005, address at the Union Theological Seminary (New York) on the alliance of the radical right and Christian conservatives in the United States. Available at www.uts.columbia.edu/index.php?id=605.

National Conference of Churches listings. See www.toad.net/~cassandra/links.htm.

Partnership for Earth Spirituality (Joan Brown). See www.earthspirituality.org. The website, still under development, should be available by mid-November, 2005.

Petroglyphs. See www.sagecouncil.org.

Rasmussen, Larry. Earth Community, Earth Ethics. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996. For a recent summary paper on the theological basis for an earth ethic, see “Drilling in the Cathedral,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 42:203-225 (Fall 2003). Available from the UNM Religion Department website: www.unm.edu/~religion/ (click on “upcoming events”).

Wallace, Mark I. Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Selections available at www.swarthmore.edu/humanities/mwallac1/mark.earthgod.html.

White, Lynn Jr. “The Historical Roots of the Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155:1203-1207 (10 March 1967). The seminal paper that identified Christian anthropocentrism as a cause of the environmental crisis. Available at http://people.cedarville.edu/employee/gollmers/gsci1020/project/03g1020h3.pdf, among other sites.