The greening of religion

At “The Immanent Frame,” Roger Gottlieb gives an overview of “religious environmentalism.” Not religious in the sense that conservatives sometimes say that environmentalism is a religion, but environmental concerns and movements emanating from traditional religions.

One provocative claim Gottlieb makes is that, as religions “green,” they move to the left more generally:

There is also a near universal tendency of religious environmentalism to move religions to the left. Inevitably, confrontation with the causes of the environmental crisis leads to a confrontation with global capitalism, militarism, and political repression. To capitalism environmental problems are externalities, and must remain so. To militarists every environmental problem takes a back seat to every military one. And repressive governments are too concerned with maintaining their own power to worry about ecosystem health.

This move to the left extends even to culturally and politically conservative communities. America’s Evangelical community has given rise to the vital Evangelical Environmental Network, and the religious right as a whole has been split over environmental issues, with activists taking well publicized moves to make clear that environmental concern is not solely the province of granola eating old hippies like the author of this essay. A split on this issue, however, portends at least the possibility of a split on others, and in any case necessarily leads to the questioning of unfettered corporate power.

I think one worry this might raise is that this “move to the left” would also mean abandoning the central claims of Christianity or watering them down with some bland, syncretistic “eco-spirituality.” As it happens, I’m currently reading a book called Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, by Lutheran theologian H. Paul Santmire (Santmire’s more well-known earlier work–which I haven’t read–was called The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology).

Santmire argues that theology can and should thread a middle way between extreme reconstructionists who want to junk the entire edifice of traditional theology and start anew (e.g. the “creation spirituality” of Matthew Fox) and apologists for the traditional anthropocentric status quo. He thinks that Christian theology already contains the resources, if often ignored, to provide the necessary response to the ecological crisis. The term he prefers for his own project is “revisionist,” aiming to be “orthodox but innovative” in mining the resources (er, bit of an ironic metaphor there, I guess) of the tradition. Santmire wants to press for a re-appropriation of the tradition that is less anthropocentric and more theocentric. Or, in other words, to formulate a more thoroughly cosmic vision of the Christian faith. I think this opens a door to a “greening” of faith without abandoning the commitments to classic creeds, doctrines, and beliefs. Christianity doesn’t need to abandon its core beliefs to address environmental issues, but it may need to dig deeper, to the roots of its own confession.