First Parish Sermon

Introduction

As the initial shock subsided, people began consciously to evaluate their lives. More time was spent with family and less time at work or the mall. Some of the decline in holiday shopping can be attributed to economic and military uncertainty, but a change of mind and spirit can also be credited. Even such conservative lights as Forbes magazine began to question the wisdom of our national dependence on petroleum. 

I doubt that historians of the future will mark September 11, 2001 as the end of consumerism, but it does seem to have created some sort of a breather. More accurately, I would argue, it has brought greater attention to a simplicity movement that had already been gaining some momentum on September 10, and which had and continues to have a religious dimension. 

This morning I will begin by presenting some indications of this movement toward simplicity and keener awareness of the connections between human actions and environmental damage. I would like to devote the remainder of my remarks to the ways in which religion seems to have contributed to the environmental problems we now face and – more importantly – to the ways in which religious traditions are contributing to a solution to those problems.

Simplicity and Greening Trends

Well, guess what: for the past several years, the day after Thanksgiving has not been the top shopping day, nor has it been number two or three. Explanations have included changes in travel behavior, the impact of online shopping, and the like, but the clearest explanation has been the one least heard: people seeking a break from the consumerist treadmill have seen this day as the perfect opportunity not to buy. Buy Nothing Day has become the consumerist equivalent of the American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout, a day on which smokers are encouraged to put aside the butts for just one day. Not directly connected, but worth noting is the fact that the evangelical Christian video series Veggie Tales has an episode devoted to the perils of over-shopping. That is the one episode we watch most at our house!

The other indication of some movement in this area comes from a press release that got some attention last summer. A group of clergy members of several varieties – including, not surprisingly, Unitarian-Universalists – issued a call for people of faith to take better care of the earth by being more thoughtful in their habits of consumption. In the UU World, our denominational magazine, and in the Boston Globe, this led to a brief debate on whether it was appropriate or simply arrogant for ministers to invoke religion in the promotion of their own views of the environment.

Non-green Religion

A more telling incident had occurred a couple of years earlier. At a church picnic, I noticed one of the ladies saving wax paper for re-use later. I did not understand this; wax paper is disposable. When I asked my mother why in the world someone would reuse something like wax paper, she reminded me that the lady involved was from Bolivia – she was the only exotic person in the community – and that she had grown up with limited resources and so always conserved them. This is the first time I remember hearing about the conservation of resources, and it was connected more to poverty than to concern about the environment per se.

The best-known critique of religious failing in the area of ecology – and particularly of the failings of Christianity – comes from an article first published in 1967 in the journal Science. In the article, entitled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Lynn White draws a direct line from the Genesis story I read earlier in this service to the environmental calamities that were being discovered at the time. White was writing just a few years after two biologists had been published separate, landmark books about the unintended consequences of twentieth-century progress. In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich described how programs to alleviate hunger and disease in the former colonial regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America had led to the unprecedented and problematic growth of human populations. In the other book, Rachel Carson followed up on a story about dead songbirds in Duxbury, Massachusetts  and wrote Silent Spring, the first convincing account of the links between pesticides and environmental damage.

It was in this context that Lynn White wrote his piece for an audience of scientific readers, in which he asserted that the confluence of occidental – that is, Western – science and technology was responsible for the destruction of the environment that Ehrlich, Carson, and a growing chorus of other scientists was describing. Technology determines the ability of humans to modify their environments – for better or worse – and the marriage of technology and science has been particularly potent in the modern period. In fact, modernism itself is defined by the particularly Western combination of scientific outlook and technological application. 

While members of White’s reading audience of scientists were probably just coming to terms with the notion of the fallibility of technology – it must be remembered, after all, that only a decade before the inventor of DDT had won the Nobel prize in medicine – White was pushing the cultural critique a bit further. Not only was technology potentially ruinous, but Western Christianity had set the stage for this destruction.

White argues that modernism evolved over a period of about 1700 years within a distinctly Judeo-Christian worldview. Christianity, according to White, is differentiated from previous religions by its anthropocentrism. Unlike paganism and most Asian religions, the Christian God transcends nature. So, too, does or humanity. As an example, White compares antiquity’s guardian spirits to the cult of saints in Christianity. The former resided in every spring, stream, and hill; the latter resided in heaven. According to White, “Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.” He goes on to claim as a Christian axiom the notion that “nature has no reason for existence save to serve man [sic].”

White, a self-described churchman, did suggest a few caveats, which were of little avail against his critics. First, he argued that within the Christian church, Eastern and Western branches differed in the degree to which they fostered cultures that tended toward technological innovation. Second, he found in Saint Francis of Assisi a way out of the technological dead-end for Christians in the modern West. 

Political theory professor Patrick Dobel, writing in the Christian Century in 1977, argues that the secular world of nationalism, science, and liberalism is more responsible for the ecological crisis than is Christianity. He then goes on to admonish Christians to respond to White’s challenge by developing a “God-centered ecological ethic which accounts for the sacredness of the earth without losing sight of human worth and justice.” Dobel was quite concerned that “even some of the most secularized ecologists are calling for a rediscovery of the ‘sacredness’ of nature” and promoting a revival of “nature worship.” 

Green Religion?

This is not the brand of Christianity promoted by Dobel, who argues that traditional Christianity and sensitivity to the needs of the planet are not mutually exclusive. Twenty years after his article was written, many like-minded Christians and Jews have come together under the umbrella of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE). This group was founded by the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and the Evangelical Environmental Network. Though it represents a variety of denominations, the language used by the NRPE suggests common, traditional beliefs in a natural world created by God and in a separate humanity. Humanity’s distinctness from the rest of creation is not seen as an excuse for misusing it. Quite the contrary: because the earth has been created by God and entrusted to humans, religious people have a special obligation to care for it. Nature itself need not be seen as infused with divinity in order to merit the special care by God’s people. Indeed, many in this growing movement, read the Judeo-Christian bible as encouraging stewardship of the earth – and even celebration of the earth – rather than dominion over the earth.

For example, Rabbi Daniel Swartz, of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) describes a long succession of biblical, talmudic, and later writings that point to the integral role of Creation in Jewish religious thought. He writes of the “wonderful reciprocity of Creation: Creation’s sheer magnificence turns the heart towards its Creator, and the heart that has turned to God opens, inevitably, towards Creation, towards the awesome integrity of the natural universe that is God’s gift.” 

Rabbi Swartz also points out that the Hebrew Bible is full of natural metaphors because, as he writes, “the Bible is the story of people who cared about and knew intimately the land around them.” He even writes that modern Zionism – with its kibbutzim and its focus on a particular geographic space – is to some degree a reaction against the urbanization that Jews had experienced in Europe. The Jews of the biblical period were very close to the land, without complex layers of intervening technology.

This closeness to the land brings us to the question of indigenous people and what they might have to teach us about caring for the earth. If you are a certain age, you might know the hard rock musician Ted Nugent, who in the 1970s had a popular song entitled “Great White Buffalo.” He taught millions of mostly white young people that because indigenous people would only hunt for exactly what they needed, “the Indians and the buffalo existed hand in hand” until the white man came along with a “sick and empty head” and slaughtered all of the buffalo. I play this song for my students every semester, and I value it because I was one of those kids who had probably never given much thought to how indigenous people value resources before I heard it.

Unfortunately, the song also exemplifies a certain kind of simplification that occurs all too often in these discussions. By placing the pre-European buffalo hunters on a moral pedestal, Nugent creates a sort of noble savage. It is the case that the decline of the buffalo greatly accelerated with the arrival of white Europeans, because of differences in both technology and motivation for hunting. And it is certainly true that this is just one of many examples of Europeans taking a resource that they did not really need and causing a great deal of pain for indigenous people who had relied on it. In the case of the buffalo, however, it is simply not the case that the indigenous hunters only killed exactly what they needed. At dozens of sites throughout North America, Plains Indians organized  drives in which large herds of buffalo would be stampeded over a cliff. The most famous such site is Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, where a pile of buffalo skeletons up to 30 feet deep accumulated over a period from about 5,700 years ago until the middle of the nineteenth century. By the way, “head-smashed-in” refers to the fate of one young brave who was crushed under the falling buffalo. 

I mention the grisly buffalo hunting methods only to dispel the notion that all indigenous people are somehow configured in such a way that they can do no environmental harm. Of course this is inaccurate, and it diminishes their humanity. One of the most persistent air quality problems in Arizona is visibility in the Grand Canyon, which is tied both to smog from Los Angeles and to the lack of adequate controls on a coal-burning plant on the Navajo reservation.

This morning I was careful to say that the opening words I used are ascribed to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish. They are words we have come to wish he had spoken at a speech he made in 1854, in which he predicted the demise of his people at the hands of the expanding American state. He did make the speech, but the “web of life” version was written in the 1970s by Ted Perry of the University of Texas for the movie Home, produced, ironically, by the Southern Baptist Convention. Perry did not intend for his fictionalized version to supplant the actual text in so many places, including our UU hymnal! The words continue to be used – as they were here this morning – because they represent so eloquently at least part of what indigenous people understand about the environment.

 In his article “Indigenous Traditions and Ecology” John Grim of Bucknell University makes what should be an obvious point: the 200 million indigenous people found throughout the world today are not monolithic. They speak myriad languages and have varied understandings of how the world operates. Within this diversity, he mentions several common threads, though:

• a concern for spontaneities of religious experience, 
• remarkable intimacies with local bioregions, often believed to be the source of sacred revelation, and 
• developed ritual practices which instill the collective memories of the people and their homeland in individual bodies and minds

Professor Grim of Bucknell makes another important point with respect to indigenous people in the late twentieth century, which will be increasingly true in the  twenty-first. All of the indigenous people in the world share a common geopolitical position. They are at what geographers call resource frontiers – boundaries between those places that are integrated into the world economy and those places that are not – which also happen to be places where some natural resources remain to be exploited. In such circumstances, concern for the future survival of each culture is keen, and cultural survival is in turn tightly linked to the long-term viability of the resources on which they rely. It is for this reason that such groups as the Indigenous Environmental Network are striving to bring traditional understandings to bear on natural-resource questions that impinge on the very survival of some indigenous groups.

No religious tradition is above reproach, then, in the ways in which its adherents behave in the world. I suppose we already knew that. The ecumenical movements described above suggest that all human religions include some positive teachings about the environment. The Forum on Religion and Ecology Research at Harvard substantiates this claim, providing ample material from all of the traditions I have discussed this morning, plus many others.

I will conclude by mentioning one more example of how people are trying to blend their religious journeys and their environmental concern. That is the Green Sanctuary program, which was launched in the fall of 2000 by the UU Seventh Principle Project, an affiliate of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Building on the Welcoming Congregation model, the program invites churches to seek accreditation as Green Sanctuaries by taking a number of steps related to environmental aspects of the church’s physical operations, religious education, worship, and social justice work. I am not offering to lead such a project in our church, but I will make the information available to any members or friends of this church who are interested in pursuing it.