Grappling with Christianity in the age of climate change
Unrest in the Garden: The disconnect between church and environment
My home church, University Lutheran, is situated in the thick of Harvard Square. The otherwise unassuming brick building boasts an enormous rainbow banner waving proudly above its front door and a Black Lives Matter sign in the window. Our brand of Christianity is built on identity politics, unabashed liberalism, and a heavy dose of progressive white guilt.
Environmentalism is a central focus of University Lutheran’s theology. At each "UniLu" service, the congregation prays for leaders to act on climate change and for the less privileged communities affected by climate injustice. Especially as a kid and young teenager, I loved our environmental bent. For my eighth-grade confirmation project, I wrote an essay emphasizing the environmental stewardship- and creation-focused passages in the Old Testament. Reading my essay to the congregation, I burst with pride, thrilled to have linked the centuries-old, Christian sense of duty and morality that had been instilled in me as a child with a relevant, pressing issue, one that consumed much of my thought on a daily basis: climate change.
My unbridled enthusiasm for climate action melted into something more cynical over the course of high school. Perhaps it was the deluge of depressing news that dominated my newsfeed each morning – record temperatures each year, flooding in Indonesia. Maybe it was the sense of overwhelming human congestion in the Greater Boston Area, or the way I’d anxiously check the weather every morning in the winter, praying for at least a little snow to assuage my deep-seated suspicion that nothing would ever be normal again. I’m sure my teenage angst and my flagging self-worth played a role, too. Whatever the reason, I started to understand that there were too many people on the planet, that my commitment to recycling and the selfies I took at the People’s Climate March in New York City weren’t enough. It seemed to me that humans acting in their self-interest, prioritizing even the basic health and happiness of the species, was just inherently incompatible with environmentalism.
My cynicism extended to church, too. The simultaneous prayers for climate action and other, more human-centric interests felt contradictory. Could we pray for human needs, like economic development in poverty-stricken regions, and also truly care about the success of the natural environment? I began to grapple with the basic idea of valuing human life – I wondered how to balance my own care for humanity, especially in the context of my Christian morality, with my desire for radical climate action. I know this concern about climate change played a major role in the way I drifted away from church (and started to question my belief in God) throughout high school and college.
Though the angsty, semi-obsessive rumination of my adolescence has (thankfully) passed, I still feel a certain discomfort with progressive places of worship like UniLu. This anxiety has gotten more acute with my impending college graduation. I've realized how much I valued having church as a space to explore spirituality, to think about how my existence could be useful and impactful. I'm not closed to rekindling my relationship with organized religion as I enter the "adult" world. Yet something feels unresolved. People like me, with liberal religious backgrounds, claim to care deeply for both people and the environment, but I wonder if there’s some unspoken, or unrealized, cognitive dissonance.
This has all led me to ask a troubling question.
Is the Christian framework inherently compatible with environmentalism? And if not, where do we go from here?