The Greening of Religion - Hope In the Eye of the Storm

By Jonathan Leader

Edited by Jonathan Leader, Ph.D. Some have said the America is the most religious industrialized country in the world.6 The power of politics driven at least in part by religious concerns was demonstrated dramatically in the November election. But are people at this grassroots level– the ones most likely to suffer the consequences of political deafness regarding climate change– do they really understand the truth of the approaching environmental storm? If not, perhaps they will best learn new ways of thinking (and living) from those whom they hold in highest regard, their religious leaders, thinkers, teachers, writers and communicators. With “The Greening of Religion” we hope to have added to a life-saving public conversation, perhaps even started some conversations. And we hope those conversations will lead to actions which can shelter us from the inevitable, and perhaps turn us from calamity, even here at the last minute.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387517503

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The Greening of Religion - Hope In the Eye of the Storm

The Greening of Religion

Jonathan Leader, Editor

Based on the 2016 symposium The Greening of Religion: Hope in the Eye of the Storm, held at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Cherry Hill Seminary.

ISBN #: 978-1-387-51750-3

Library of Congress: 2017964629 (print version)

© 2017 by Cherry Hill Seminary

Cover art © Cherry Hill Seminary | Roaring Mouse

Cover design © Cherry Hill Seminary | Roaring Mouse

Prepared for ebook by Cherry Hill Seminary

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the following donors, who made possible the presentation by Rabbi Arthur Waskow as well as the publication of this volume.

Central Carolina Community Foundation

Jerry Kline

John Baker, Baker & Baker Foundation

Samuel and Inez Tenenbaum

Jeff Selig

Morris and Penny Blachman

We deeply appreciate the individuals who assisted with proofing, including Dana Doerksen, Marcella Fox, Christine Grewcock and Marla Roberson.

Finally, we acknowledge the support of the College of Arts and Science of the University of South Carolina, especially the Department of Anthropology and the State Office of Archaeology, in hosting The Greening of Religion.

Preface

Holli Emore, Cherry Hill Seminary

Shortly after the 2014 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Cherry Hill Seminary Academic Dean Dr. Wendy Griffin contacted me with an air of urgent purpose. She’d just heard the keynote address (1) by Laurie Zoloth in which Dr. Zoloth made a powerful call to the audience, entitled Interrupting Your Life: An Ethics for the Coming Storm.

Calling climate change one of the central moral issues of our time, and in the wake of near-failure by corporate, government and private sectors of society to halt its grim forward motion, Zoloth sounded a clarion call to the educational community to take its own unique form of action, that of scholarship, thought, speech and action in our field.

Since her retirement from full-time academic life in 2010, Griffin has devoted herself to advocacy for the environment, especially the reduction of carbon emissions that directly contribute to the rapid climate change of our era. Moved by Zoloth’s speech, Griffin proposed a meeting and symposium which would push the current dialogue beyond the many fine NGOs and nonprofits which usually come to mind when one thinks of environmental issues. A joint Cherry Hill Seminary and University of South Carolina event would warn of Zoloth’s coming storm, and challenge our religious thinkers to discuss the particular ways that faith communities can call on our theologies to support change.

In fact, our poster image was a disturbing photograph of a thunderstorm gathering over wheat fields, superimposed with a hopeful green tendril. The allusion was intentional; responses from four nations and fifteen to twenty different religious traditions encouraged us that the topic could transcend the usual sectarian borders. By the time of the spring 2016 symposium, participants displayed an impressive array of ways to consider the problem. Presentations ranged from both traditional and progressive Christian theological reflections, to Pagan concerns for the Earth as immanent divine, to Waskow’s deeply poetic rendering of Genesis and the Song of Solomon, plus the more pragmatic writings of Tejeda, Davy and Quilley, and the intellectual serenity of Le Duc’s Buddhist studies.

Our students and guest attendees, including a number of faith leaders and a few environmentalists, went back home with fresh ideas. But only months later we could see in the election-season chatter that the tide of public opinion was moving in an ugly direction. Now, less than a year after The Greening of Religion, and not only in America, we face more opposition than ever to the societal and policy changes crucial to human and other species’ survival on Earth.

The new director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is an individual who has frequently made court challenges to the EPA (most often unsuccessfully). The new president has declared that nobody really knows if climate change is real, and promised to cancel billions and billions of dollars in…climate change programs, as well as dismantle the EPA. (2) Only days after the January inauguration, visitors to the EPA website found that all references to climate change and research into global warming had been removed. (3) A freeze on grants, projects and external communication by agency employees has alarmed many who thought these battles had been won in the 1970s. (4) But the canaries in the coal mine have long since given their lives in warning. As Steven Cohen, Executive Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute has written:

The problems we were dealing with in the 1970s and 1980s were obvious and no one doubted they were real....There were no deniers at the Love Canal. No one doubted that Pittsburgh’s air was dirty and that our waterways were a mess….While scientific and engineering expertise is needed to frame solutions, the choice of public investments and acceptable risks are issues of public policy, not science. They are policy, political, ethical and economic issues, not issues of science. (5)

In light of Cohen’s observation that solutions in our time must be tied not to science but to public conversations about policy and ethics, The Greening of Religion and similar efforts become even more timely. Zoloth notes that This is a world so clean and easy for people with wealth, so hard and dirty for the poor . . . For those who refuse to turn their eyes to Chinese citizens wearing surgical masks outdoors, or West Virginia coal miners dying of black lung, or flood victims in the Pee Dee of South Carolina who have lost their crops for two years running, there is a chance they may hear wisdom from another source.

Some have said the America is the most religious industrialized country in the world. (6) The power of politics driven at least in part by religious concerns was demonstrated dramatically in the November election. But are people at this grassroots level– the ones most likely to suffer the consequences of political deafness regarding climate change– do they really understand the truth of the approaching environmental storm? If not, perhaps they will best learn new ways of thinking (and living) from those whom they hold in highest regard, their religious leaders, thinkers, teachers, writers and communicators.

With The Greening of Religion we hope to have added to a life-saving public conversation, perhaps even started some conversations. And we hope those conversations will lead to actions which can shelter us from the inevitable, and perhaps turn us from calamity, even here at the last minute. Quoting Zoloth again:

We are living in the last place, there is no other world for us, no second chance. This one world is so beautiful, with the sweet green willows shushing in the August breeze, and the halting diamond turns of water from small plastic sprinklers, the ordinary grace of a swerve of bright white birds, and the spun net of high-floating clouds….

We leave the reader with an image of hope, that of the green tendril which pushes its way out of the darkness of the soil, a kind of resurrection that happens over and over, year after year. It grabs what support it may encounter and spirals in order to hold on while it sends still more new growth out into the world. May the proceedings of The Greening of Religion find traction during tenuous times, then provoke growing awareness of the new ways of thinking and believing required in a shared future together.

Endnotes

1. Zoloth, Laurie, Interrupting Your Life: An Ethics for the Coming Storm (presentation, American Academy of Religion, San Diego, CA, November, 2014).

2. Kennedy, Caroline. Trump: ‘Nobody really knows’ if climate change is real. CNN. December 2, 2016. Accessed March 08, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/11/politics/donald-trump-climate-change-interview/index.html.

3. Kuffner, Alex, Future of the EPA in the Trump administration considered at R.I. conference, Providence Journal (Providence, R.I.) Feb. 6, 2017.

4. Former EPA Scientist Weighs In On Fate Of Climate Science Under Trump. NPR. (Bob Siegel interviews Tracey Woodruff) January 26, 2017. Accessed March 08, 2017. ttp://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/511851695/former-epa-scientist-weighs-in-on-fate-of-climate-science-under-trump.

5. Cohen, Steven. Environmental Science and Speaking Truth to Power." The Huffington Post. January 04, 2017. Accessed March 08, 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-ohen/environmental-science-and_b_13950218.html.

6. Noack, Rick. Map: _ese are the world’s least religious countries. The Washington Post. April 4, 2015. Accessed March 08, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/14/map-these-are-the-worlds-leastreligious-countries/?utm_term=.eb84f5e5abf9.

Contemporary Paganism, Environmental Politics, and the Third Way:  A Complex Systems Perspective on Cross-Scale Ideational and Behavioral Change

Barbara Jane Davy, Ph.D. and Stephen Quilley, Ph.D., University of Waterloo

Introduction: disembedding, re-enchantment, and environmental politics

The evidence of the biophysical limits to growth and potentially catastrophic climate change is becoming hard to ignore (Rockström et al. 2009; Hansen et al. 2016). But even as mainstream sustainability discourse begins to question the mantra of economic growth, efficiency, and scientific progress, change remains slow and incremental. There remains a desperate desire for people to believe the neoliberal myth that the rising economic tide will float all boats, when really we are in danger of drowning in the flood.

Any realistic acknowledgement of biophysical limits to growth (Turner 2012; Daly and Farley 2010; Morgan 2016) intimates a paradigm change to a post-capitalist society. A sustainable civilization defined by more place-bound, ecologically sensitive and self-limiting production and consumption systems would entail (1) the simultaneous emergence of a very different form of political economy (2), a new relationship with technological and technical change and an equally radical departure at the level of mythos or ontology. (3) Taking our cue from Karl Polanyi (1944; 1968) our grounding assumption is that the disembedding of economic life has been the defining feature of modernity, tightly connected to: processes of individualization and rationalization (Weber 2013; Beck 1992); the integration of economic and social activity over ever more abstract economic spaces; and the consolidation of co-dependent market and state institutions always at the expense of embedded community relationships of livelihood, of the commons and of the domain of reciprocity (Polanyi 1968; Scott 1998). Building on the tradition of critical social commentary of Anarchists, Social Catholic Distributists and Greens–traditions that share a preoccupation with the idea of some kind of alternative modernity often conceived as a Third Way, a re-enchanted modernity could allow communities to recover a more human scale of livelihood and to develop more self- sufficient production and consumption systems rooted in reciprocal relationships (including with the more than human world) and defined to a greater extent by individual and social restraint and by the principle of subsidiarity. But at the same time, this trajectory would not entail the complete abandonment of the progressive trajectory of science and technical innovation nor the important forms of social emancipation derived from the Enlightenment, dependent on high levels of social complexity and nurtured by the institutions of the state (Quilley 2013).

The need for a different form of political economy has of course been central to all radical critiques of capitalism–with traditions differing on the role given to the institutions of the state, the family, private property, fiscal-welfare systems and a wide range of non-state institutions such as cooperatives or guilds. More recently the Internet, combined with radical innovations in fabricating technology (e.g. 3D printers), open up all sorts of possibilities for local and community production of relatively sophisticated technology (Carson 2010). But here we focus on the problems of meaning and the potential role of mythos, radical ontology and the technics of ritual in changing consciousness and behavior Earth-based ontology, we argue, has a vital role in the environmental politics of societal change, but also in the cohesion and functioning of any future sustainable society. One reason for the relative neglect of meaning systems in mainstream environmentalism is that religion, spirituality and psychoanalysis all challenge the idea of the sovereign, rational individual as the agent of change Paganism, with its central insight as to the power of group ritual to change consciousness and behavior, embodies a very different and discomforting but powerful theory of social innovation.

Complex systems: the Third Way as an adjacent possible basin of attraction

Our secondary starting point relates to the complex systems heuristic. Using the metaphor of a gravitational landscape or state space, our grounding proposition is that global capitalist society should be understood as a deep basin of attraction i.e. a tightly integrated configuration of economic, cultural, psychological and political institutions and processes keeping the system within certain parameters. The central dynamic in this system is the commitment to sustaining the economic growth upon which all public services and infrastructure (health, childcare, education, welfare, policing, transport etc.) depend. Such a deep basin of attraction will always be resilient and have a strong propensity to return to its established equilibrium and, as such, it is highly resistant to shocks (as we have seen repeatedly, most recently with the financial crisis of 2008). But the implication of the complex systems model is that system change is likely to be non-incremental, non-linear, and involve threshold changes and tipping points. When change does occur it is likely to be rapid, but the direction of change may not  be predictable. With regard to the gravitational landscape metaphor, a shallowing basin is by definition becoming less resilient and more vulnerable to potentially transformative shocks. From this perspective, progressive environmental politics would involve undermining the resilience of the existing basin of attraction whilst acting to deepen a potential alternative. The suggestion is that apparently small and insignificant counter-hegemonic (Pratt 2004), counter-cultural movements– shallow basins of attraction–can, in the right circumstances, provide the seed for rapid cross-scale change contemporary Paganism has the potential to contribute to a prefigurative environmental politics, scoping an alternative attractor whilst providing a vehicle to drive the process of change.

Counter-cultural Paganism as a prefigurative third basin

Ronald Wright, in A Short History of Progress, uses the metaphor of a ship to describe modern industrial civilization. He presents it as a ship plotting a course through a narrow gap blocked by icebergs. We are all on this one ship, he says, having left a series of shipwrecks behind us (Wright: 2004,3). But if modern industrial civilization is the Titanic, we should be building more life boats and looking for other boats beyond his horizon, such as indigenous cultures whose crafts may be damaged, but still afloat, or Pagan crafts newly cobbled together. There are all too many pirates ready to cannibalize the ship and commandeer any other boats they might happen upon. We only think we are on the only vessel, and on the only possible course, because it is so big and hard to steer. Scary as it may be, we can jump ship.

We need de-growth and to re-localize our economies, but getting there is not easy and not likely to be painless. In the language of complex systems theory, global consumer society is an enormously powerful attractor. It is a basin of attraction (a state) into which, in the wake of any disturbance, the social economic system continually falls back. Wright’s image of history littered with the wrecks of previous civilizations intimates one ever-present alternative basin of attraction: faced with a sufficiently large shock, the resilience of a system may fail, resulting in collapse. However, this is not the only possibility. There may be alternative basins of attractions–configurations of culture, economy and ecology–that are viable, but perhaps not visible from within the existing system. These are attractors in the adjacent possible.

Counter-cultural politics can be understood as prefigurative basins of attraction: the hollowing out of small experimental models of economy, culture, and ecology that will remain permanently marginal within the present system but which might become a viable pole for re-organization during any process of collapse and reconfiguration. Some forms of contemporary Paganism can be thought of as attempts to hollow out such a prefigurative basin of attraction.

There will be trade-offs, but preparing such prefigurative alternatives may be a viable strategy to weather the transition to necessarily smaller scale societies. In what follows, we describe contemporary Paganism in ideal typical terms, as it might function as a prefigurative attractor for a different kind of modernity. Specifically, we are interested in the ways in which the growing culture of Paganism can apply leverage to the system at the level of changing goals and adapting worldviews, whilst also offering a variety of strategies for political action. The most significant modality for this counter-cultural politics is re-enchantment (Berman 1981), particularly as it is facilitated by ritual in community. Paganism could be a component of a potential third basin; whether or not it can serve in this capacity more broadly remains to be seen.

The language of basins of attraction comes from the application of systems theory to ecology, using a gravitational metaphor of basins of attraction to describe the behavior of complex systems. In Resilience Practice (2012) Brian Walker and David Salt explain basins of attraction, and thresholds between systems, using the analogy of a ball spinning in a basin. In equilibrium the ball spins around, wobbling with disturbances in the system, but staying in the same basin. Larger or repeated disturbances can push the ball over a threshold into a new basin of attraction. Some basins are deeper than others, and once past a threshold it can be difficult to get back into the previous one, maybe impossible. Also, crossing a threshold can happen quite quickly, causing a system to flip from one basin to another.

In our understanding, the system we are in now is the first basin of attraction–modern industrial capitalist civilization (see