Climate change, western individualism, and the Christian Church
In trying to organize the Christian Church around climate activism, I am failing. Well-meaning people brought care of God’s good earth to the local church consciousness, formed green committees, initiated community gardens, and promoted reduce, reuse, recycle. Meanwhile, individuals showed their integrity by composting, buying hybrid vehicles, bringing their own bags for grocery shopping, and taking shorter showers.
These are great initiatives.
These initiatives rhyme with the effort of the fossil fuel industry to place responsibility for climate apocalypse at the feet of individual people and communities. Big plastic and big oil coined the terms “litterbug” and “carbon footprint” to move focus and accountability away from the fossil fuel industry to individuals and communities.
It’s an easy push. The wider culture of western individualism regularly repeats the narrative that morality and the need for transformation lie at the seat of the individual human heart.
This narrative is then appropriated by the Western Christian Church where the solving of individual sin is the primary purpose of the liturgy. Congregations task preachers with prose and parable that revamp people’s compassion and encourage their empathy. The focus on our individual morality keeps grace cheap and rarely calls multiple congregations together for a movement. Even when we are called beyond our individuality within the Christian Church, we do our work as “one-offs” to assuage our personal guilt. Once assuaged, who cares if children remain in cages, Flint or Benton Harbor have no water, or we continue to head toward climate apocalypse? Problem solved!
One side is educated to take responsibility for their actions while they are kept busy so believe they cannot give themselves over to sustained movements. Black Lives Matter somehow broke through to change this for a moment in time. The Poor Peoples’ Campaign has worked valiantly and tirelessly praying the moment will occur. The other side has their anger educated to blame those same movements, their language, the language of another generation, and middle-of-the road mediators for the hypocrisy they see and know and the unraveling of institutions they are experiencing. Meanwhile, institutional and systemic injustice goes relatively untouched in a world constructed to keep racial capitalism in place.
Justice is tough. To do justice requires a spiritual growth that requires us to solve for pattern, to radiate ever outward with regularity, consistency, and persistence. Justice requires the transformation of systems and structures.
I remember protesting the financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline outside the Wells-Fargo building in Billings, Montana. As executives made their way through the line of protestors, they asked us, “Sooo, did you drive your car to work today?” The appeal to individual guilt, shame, and responsibility never ends. Distract and deflect are most effective when invoking the liturgy of Western individualism.
Christian churches have done heroic work around individual and community-based care for God’s good earth. But we need a call to a nation-wide fast of those large financial institutions which fund the fossil fuel industry. Blow the trumpet! Sound the alarm! Consecrate a fast! (Joel 2) We need to do justice to bring about transformational change. We need that kind of repentance, that collective turn.
Stop blaming ourselves! Or yourself! Stop wringing our hands over those long showers, inefficient automobiles, and lack of a compost pile. Yes, those might reflect an inner integrity that help us stand more courageously and resolutely against the principalities and the powers. But do not let the principalities and powers define us.
Tipping points.
We all need to become activists. Science writer, Naomi Oreskes, just posted on her Twitter feed, “Of course I am an activist. It’s irrational and immoral to be passive in the face of imminent danger.” For Christian Churches, embedded in the liturgy of western individualism, this will take a seismic shift where we remember our primary narrative not as individual guilt, sin, and shame, but God’s love for this good earth which was woven together on the backstrap loom of justice.
Are we not aware of the tremendous amount of risk indigenous leaders and movements are showing out and showing up for around the world? An environmental activist has been killed every other day for the past decade! Land defenders and water protectors are being assassinated on our behalf, on behalf of all their relatives.
Would we not want to join them as the earth cries out to us? Follow the money.
Who is invested in that bloodshed?
Blame Wall Street
Adrienne maree brown writes that there is no failure in piecing together movements and doing the work of justice . . . only data. We need a willingness to risk and fail, risk and fail. Repeat and learn. I am also trying to move out of my failure narrative to collecting data points which will be used in my next attempt to be regular, consistent, and persistent. And radiate outward.