Anthropocene Antihumanists
January 25, 2023 § 4 Comments
An article in the January/February 2023 issue of The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch titled “The People Cheering for Humanity’s End” has me returning to my apocalyptic theme. At one point Kirsch writes: “The revolt against humanity . . . is a spiritual development of the first order, a new way of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence.”
I myself have met people who react to the various apocalypses that are bringing in this new Anthropocene age* with this kind of glib nihilism—well, we’ll be destroyed, but the earth won’t be; she’ll go on. I hear this especially among despairing environmentalists. This annoys me greatly.
It’s a postmodern mashup of, on the one hand, some dark emotions, mostly fear and guilt and a perverse kind of spiritual pride in the knowledge, a grandiosely condescending attitude that fallen humanity will finally get its come-uppance and we told you so. In this, they are in league with Christian apocalypticists, who also see both humanity and the world as fallen and deserving of its disastrous fate.
The other half of this mashup is a lack of compassion that verges on schadenfreude for the suffering of all the other beings we’re bringing down with us, not to mention the suffering of countless human beings. Among Christian apocalypticists, this schadenfreude, the sense of pleasure felt at the pain of another, is on full gloating display. Even the suffering of those left behind after the rapture will have glorious meaning; what’s a thousand years of suffering in the eyes of a just and jealous God?
Meanwhile, the apocalypses are piling up and ramping up. It’s natural to seek solace and meaning somewhere. Where will Friends look as things get worse, as they inevitably will? When climate migrants storm the southern border and lots of people, and not just fascists, demand its militarization? When melting ice caps flood our major coastal cities, including Washington, D.C., and virtually all of Florida? When water shortages reduce our food supply? When the federal government is no longer able to rebuild communities built in the face of annual hundred-year storms and wildfires? When we can’t make any more computers because China has decided it needs the world’s only supply of rare earths for itself?
We desperately need a testimony that speaks to these crises. That is, we need to sink down in the Seed in prayer and worship, as individuals and especially as meetings and yearly meetings, to see what God wants from us, to see what love can do.
* “Anthropocene” is the title that some are giving the new geological age that humans are bringing us into with climate change and species extinction. We’re currently in the Holocene, from the Greek holos, whole (as in holocaust, wholly burnt), and kainos, new—holocene means wholly new. The anthropocene is the age in which, as Thomas Berry puts it, humans take evolution off of auto-pilate and take over manual control. Never mind that we have only small parts of the operating manual, our instruments are unreliable, and we are flying blind.
Climate Change, Apocalypticism, and Christian Failure—Part 3: Liberal Inaction
September 17, 2022 § 2 Comments
So conservative Christian doctrine holds that the wilderness is a place of temptation, nature is virtually synonymous with sin, and the Creator, not the creature, is to be worshipped, per Paul; and anyway, it will all be destroyed in an immanent apocalypse, just as is it deserves. “Oh sinner man, where ya gonna run to . . .” goes the African American spiritual—“well, I ran to the forest but the forest was a-burnin’, ran to the forest was a-burnin’ . . ., on that judgment day.”
Meanwhile, the liberal Christian answer—earth stewardship theology—holds that creation is utterly good, per Genesis, and destroying it is a sin. However, the Christian communities who might actually act on their stewardship mandate, who care about climate change and might do something about it, don’t actually care enough to do more than wring their hands, it seems. I think I see several reasons for this.
First, the gospel of Jesus is all about justice for the (human) oppressed, but it has basically nothing to say about justice for animals, plants, ecosystems, the climate, or the planet, at least not in any clear way. And if Jesus doesn’t talk about it, then why should we care so much? Meanwhile, Jesus was himself an apocalyptic, a truth that many liberal Christians choose to ignore. His “Little Apocalypse” in Mark 13 and its parallels in Matthew and Luke are not as cosmic as Revelation, but they have their share of human suffering and a remnant surviving. Not long before delivering that sermon, he had actually cursed an innocent fig tree.
Second, I think that many liberal Christians may be shy of apocalyptic thinking, even now when the real thing is happening right in front of us, because of a kind of cognitive/theological dissonance—it’s scriptural, yes, so theoretically we should take it seriously, but the fundamentalists take it so far down an unhinged path that it’s nerve-wracking and difficult to talk about it even in a reasonable way, for fear of association, and we don’t like what it says.
Third, this thing is so big. What are you going to do that makes a difference about climate change? Only truly radical transformation will make a difference. And the changes required will have to take place at every level, from the individual household up to meta-national corporations and nation states, which, frankly, isn’t going to happen. Closer to home, that means congregations will have to reimagine themselves as households with their role to play in completely restructuring how we live on this earth.
All this will require down-sizing sacrifice—our sacrifice, not Christ’s. One of my definitions of “liberal” is a politics that takes its analysis and action up to, but not past, the point at which it threatens its own status quo. Will liberal Christian (or Quaker) communities commit to the sacrifices that will be required of us? I suspect not, not until the apocalypse is upon us and we have no choice, when drought, famine, heat, storms, and war threaten our own status quo.
The modern liberal Christian answer to ecological devastation is earth stewardship theology, the belief that we don’t own creation, God does (“the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”) and we are just his caretakers, that it is a sin to be bad caretakers, and that the proper structure for practicing stewardship is covenant, binding and reciprocal promises and responsibilities between ourselves, our God, and the land we live on. But what are the terms of this covenant, in what ways is it binding, and where do we see it actually happening?
It’s been sixty years since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and Christian theologians began responding to the crisis she described with their earth stewardship theology. Sixty years and it still hasn’t reached seminary curricula and spiritual formation programs in any meaningful way, or, by consequence, the parish pulpit and congregational practice, let alone our spirituality and forms of worship.
A final reason for this failure of liberal Christians to deal with climate change in a meaningful way so far, I suspect, is that even liberal Christianity sees itself as a system of belief, rather than as a vehicle for direct experience of God. Christian belief systems are, by definition, built on scripture as foundation, and especially on Christian scripture, and most especially, on Paul. Where is climate change in the Bible and in the Christian message it gives rise to?
The only way to get real about climate change is to refocus on experience rather than belief, letting go of the Bible as the ultimate source of revelation at least enough to experience something else. But what—experience what?
In the next post, I want to look at the nature of Christian religious experience to see what hope might lie there.
Then I want to explore the possible Quaker contributions.
Climate Change, Apocalypticism, and Christian Failure—Part 2: Apoclyptic Narcissism
September 15, 2022 § Leave a comment
I’ve written about this before. Christian apocalypticism poses its own unique threat to the earth, its peoples, and all our fellow creatures.
When you believe that God will destroy a corrupt world as part of his last saving act, as he did in the time of Noah and promises in the book of Revelation, then an earth in destruction can be a good thing, a sign of God’s immanent return in judgmental glory. Furthermore, humans who are destroying the earth can be seen as, in some way, participating in God’s final act of righteousness. And finally, trying to stop the earth’s destruction can be seen as acting against God’s will, and that is Satan’s work.
Religious apocalyptic ideology, especially that based on biblical apocalyptic, like the book of Revelation, is itself the ultimate conspiracy theory, one of the factors cited by Zaleha in his article as contributing to fundamentalist hostility to action on climate change. The ultimate apocalyptic conspirator is the divine who wrote Revelation, and the belief system is so fantastic that to believe in it warps cognitive thinking itself; it infects all the other things you believe or could believe, and it makes lots of room for more thinking along similar lines. It is so rife with vague and esoteric symbology that it invites an unlimited amount of further speculation. And it offers the ultimate incentive: it invites its believers to feel that they have a role to play in the ultimate drama—when the drama is truly cosmic, even the bit parts in the drama are important. And the final curtain call takes place before the audience of the angels and the throne of God himself (sic).
The Revelation script is now two thousand years old and the failure of its fulfillment to date would, you might think, weaken its hold on believers. But apparently not; it never fails to resurface periodically. And now, the apocalyptic threat is all too real. Now believers have real world events to hold onto, regardless of the disconnect between those events and the specific symbolic elements of the myth. First, those symbolic elements have always been subject to adaptive interpretation, as I’ve already noted. But more importantly, they were never the main thing, anyway—it’s the spirit of apocalypticism that really matters, the feeling that you are part of some ultimate inbreaking of God’s presence, and that it’s all about judgment: a planet will die, but you will live on in bliss in a heaven that transcends life on a planet.
This is the ultimate face of what Zaleha calls “collective narcissism:” the ultimate story is all about us, God’s faithful, and, of course, them, those who face his judgment for their unbelief in the conspiracy theory.
Climate Change, Apocalypticism, and Christian Failure—Part 1
September 15, 2022 § Leave a comment
Climate change clearly poses an apocalyptic threat to human life and civilization, to all of God’s other creatures, and perhaps even to the entire biosphere of planet earth. In their responses to this challenge, Christian communities pose their own threat to our future as a species. Well, “Christian communities” is perhaps too general an indictment. But I have come across a study that describes the threat posed by two such communities in North America and I fear that they do in fact represent a much broader swath of Christendom that we might want to admit. I think—I hope—that Quakers have a role here.
In 2018, Bernard Daley Zaleha published “Dissertation—A Tale of Two Christianities: the Religiopolitical Clash Over Climate Change Within America’s Dominant Religion.” The two communities Zaleha studied were “a fundamentalist confederation of churches,” the Calvary Chapels in Arizona, and “liberal congregations affiliated with The Center of Progressive Christianity,” mostly United Church of Christ and Episcopalian, based in California.
Here’s his summary from the paper’s extract:
I found substantial indifference or outright hostility to environmental concerns and climate mitigation at all of my Calvary Chapel sites, due especially to intense apocalyptic expectation of imminent rapture. Other factors included belief in sovereignty of God (the idea that the Christian God causes and controls all events), a tendency toward collective narcissism, and a susceptibility to conspiracy theories. Progressive congregations were open to environmental concerns, talked about their importance, but ultimately were minimally involved. Social justice issues and the immediate needs of the homeless, immigrants, minority communities, and advocating for LGBTQ equality and against systemic injustice in most cases took precedence.
In the following posts, I want to explore this failure and a possible Quaker contribution in greater detail.
Apocalyptic Climate Migration and our Testimonial Life
January 28, 2022 § 6 Comments
This is an awfully long post. I’m sorry. But I couldn’t figure a way to break it up.
I believe the next couple of decades—the next generation—will see an existential challenge to our Quaker peace testimony and to the relevance of the whole Quaker movement. Millions, maybe tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of Spanish and Portuguese speaking, brown-skinned people will surge north to escape the deadly heat of the tropics and subtropics that global warming will bring in the not-so-distant future.
In a few decades, it will be literally impossible for humans to go outdoors in much of the tropics without literally dying from the heat and humidity alone. Before that, farming will collapse, infrastructures will break down, especially energy grids, and states will fail. All of this is happening already in some places.
The people in the tropics and northern subtropics will migrate north, as they do already. (I imagine the people in the southern subtropics might head for Argentina and Chile.) We’re talking about millions of people fleeing certain death.
Donald Trump and his racist, xenophobic, white Christian nationalist allies are right about this: a wave of human migration of unimaginable size is headed toward us (at some point) and it threatens to change our world, our country, and our lives in really profound ways. And it’s not just the numbers. Most of these people won’t speak English and they will come deeply traumatized, often unprepared for participation in a knowledge economy, and already very needy.
The pressure to build Trump’s wall—and to fortify it and militarize it—will become impossible to wave off as simply racist fear-mongering. The case for cultural survival of “the American way of life” will seem rational, even to some of the most liberal among us, even though the argument will be morally flawed and it aims at saving something that was already under extreme stress and never even really existed in the first place, except as an idea, if a powerful one.
The mounting suffering on the Mexican side of that wall will become its own source of trauma, exceeding by orders of magnitude the pain of watching videos of children in cages under mylar blankets. We will just stop looking. But we won’t stop shooting.
Part of your mind wants to deny that this is true. But it is true. Part of our optimistic Quaker worldview wants to seek peaceful resolution of looming problems. But there won’t be one. We will finish Trump’s wall. We will militarize it. At some point, the vast majority of Americans will believe that we have no choice. Some of us will even agree.
The only questions are, when do we reach that point, and what do we do to prepare in the meantime. That meantime is NOW.
We must right now begin to think much more creatively about our testimonial life. What do simplicity, equality, earthcare, integrity, justice, and above all, peace and nonviolence mean in the face of this inevitable future?
More importantly, where do the Light within us and the Guide whose wisdom we seek in our corporate discernment processes lead us? What would Jesus have us do? We must right now pray and worship as we never have before, for guidance, strength, clarity, wisdom, and a prophetic voice and call to action that will make sense to our fellow Americans.
That must start with integrity. We must be honest with ourselves, and with our society, about what we face: this threat is real and inevitable; only its timeline is unknown. And we must be willing to make the sacrifices commensurate with our prophetic challenge.
I invoke Jesus because I believe he offers an alternative to denial, to the violent reaction that the self-proclaimed protectors of the American Way of Life will demand, and to helpless, incoherent hand-wringing and the approval of some minutes of conscience, which is the utterly predictable Quaker response. That alternative is love. Love as Jesus taught it, not as something one feels, but as something one DOES.
Love for the migrants swarming over our borders. Love for the landowners and the communities on the border, both here and in Mexico. Love for the white Christian nationalists. Love for the moderate majority of Americans who will reluctantly agree to extreme measures, who will feel forced to act in violation of their own moral compasses. Love for all the victims, which will be everyone.
I have a thing for apocalyptic popular fiction. I am an avid fan of The Walking Dead, for instance. That show is all about moral injury: how do you recover from having done the unthinkable, which you did because you thought you had to. It’s about all the ways in which humans deal with catastrophic collapse, and all the ways humans deal with the ways that the communities around them deal with catastrophic collapse, because the real danger is our fellow humans. It’s about what Walter Wink calls the myth of redemptive violence, the myth that violence can save you from violence. The zombies in that show are just the mythic carriers of our fear, our fear of losing what we have.
My take-away from this kind of apocalyptic fiction is the Quaker message: when things get really bad, you can only stand firm in the Light within you, sink down in the Seed, and act from Truth with love. Jesus is again the model here: it matters more how you live, how you suffer, and even how you die, than whether you live or die. For we’re all going to suffer and die.
I harp on Jesus because liberal, neoplatonic theology about that of God in everyone will not speak to the white Christian nationalists who will dominate the public reaction to the coming tide of migrants, and who may very well control the official state reactions, both locally in the border states and nationally in our immigration policy. It will not speak to most of the Americans who will feel caught in the middle, either. But Jesus might speak to them. Jesus will at least give them radical cognitive and moral dissonance.
More to the point, the spirit of the Christ is a real power in this world, and in their world. It can be denied. It can be suppressed. And it can fail to break through in this struggle. It’s failing right now, and we’re nowhere near the catastrophic collapse that is coming. In fact, I fully expect the failure of love and the spirit of the Christ to stop this disaster. I expect another crucifixion.
But the spirit of the Christ cannot be killed. By the spirit of the Christ, I mean the Spirit that anointed Jesus into his ministry, that gave him his charismatic power and the power of his love; the Spirit that has inspired, strengthened, and gathered the faithful for the two millennia since. The Spirit that gathered the first Quakers, the Spirit that still gathers our meetings for worship, if only now and then.
That Spirit is not all powerful. It did not give us a holy church after Jesus; we got a violent and imperialist church instead. It did not give us a “city on a hill”, as the Pilgrims hoped; we got the genocide of Turtle Island’s First Nations instead. But it did give us Mary Magdalene, Hildegard of Bingen, Jacob Boehme, George Fox and John Woolman, post-war food kitchens for starving Germans, and the many saints of our own time.
No wall can hold all these desperate people back. And trying to hold it back will morally injure this nation. It will shred our national ideals, leaving us with nothing to work with as a nation when the wall finally falls, however and whenever that happens.
But we might be able to build a new future on the faithful few who stood in the Light as best they could throughout the suffering, who insisted on steadfast lovingkindness in the face of it all. Assuming that our changing climate does not wipe us all out—which sometimes looks pretty likely to me—there will be some kind of resurrection, and we could carry its Seed.
I know this sounds extreme. It is. You would like to think it’s unlikely. But I urge you to look at your denial. I urge you to read the articles I link below, and the many others like it. And then I urge you to sink down in the Seed.
Let us begin now a public ministry of the message of love at the center of Jesus’ message. Let us preach—and live—in the spirit of the Christ, the gathering spirit of Presence and Love. Let there be at least this one candle in the house and let us take off the bushel that hides it.
NYTIMES articles:
Through the Flaming Sword 