Being Bold - Counter-cultural Christians in a Climate of Change
Mark Munn
Part of the 2007 Lenten Noon Series
A bold progressive Christian response to the global warming crisis should not only be about the preservation of God's creation In certain ways global warming offers the chance for Canadian Christianity to rescue itself from the smothering embrace of a culture fixated on economic growth and individual abundance The global warming crisis offers Christians a new chance to emerge as the counter-cultural force that the Gospels clearly envisioned.
I was a 10 year old prairie kid from Edmonton. It was a long weekend, probably Easter long weekend, 19 years ago. I had been shipped to a Christian retreat centre just outside Salmon Arm. It was night time. It had been a long day of travelling perilous mountain passes and peering into the darkness on the watch for mountain sheep, and deer, and, if I was lucky, a moose. I was in my hotel room, located in a big wooden lodge that somehow reminded me of that hotel in The Shining. I was in bed, but I was wide awake. This was partly because I'd just met Jacquie, who was three rooms and a chaperon away from me. But what was really keeping me awake were the two other guys in my room. Tucked in their beds, they were excitedly talking about the power of a God that could create the universe, the WHOLE UNIVERSE! All the galaxies, and the stars, and the gagillion blades of grass, and the WHOLE UNIVERSE! Clearly my roommates hadn't been shipped here like me. They had volunteered.
I didn't like this talk about God. I tried to believe in God. A kind of a God rolling out snakes from a big metaphysical ball of plasticine. But I have never been able to believe. You see, I've been an atheist since I was five.
I remember distinctly believing in Santa Claus when I was five. That was easy to believe. Cookies don't just disappear and milk doesn't get drunk and presents don't just order themselves under your Christmas tree all by themselves. There was concrete, physical evidence that Santa Claus existed. God was quite another thing. Everyone told me, you can speak to God, God will listen to your prayers. God will answer your prayers. But God didn't answer my prayers. There was NEVER a new bike the next morning. My brother never disappeared. In fact, praying was a lot like having a one-sided telephone conversation. It makes you feel kind of stupid. So at 5, I decided that everyone else was nuts. There was no God, and I wouldn't believe until God said (and I mean "SAID") something to me.
10 years after that nightmare in the interior of BC, I specialized in materialistic philosophy, which sealed the deal. I rebelled against the Church on the basis of Christianity's literal truth claims about the nature of God and the origins of the universe. And I joined with the secular majority of my generation.
That's not to say that I disliked the Church. How could I? I grew up in the Church, spent every Sunday either in a pew or as a server. As a priest's kid, I was often at church for both services. I have watched people pour in and trickle out of churches and church halls for nearly 30 years. For a long time I knew which old ladies didn't appreciate me taking the church wheelchair out for a joyride. And for a long time I've listened to my father speak passionately about the Church and its congregations, and to my mother about her deep understanding of spirituality. These experiences helped me re-engage with the Christian community in a completely unexpected way, which I will outline for you later.
10 more years later, I am standing here in front of you. This, for obvious reasons, is a first for me. Speaking to a crowd of what probably constitutes a religious group of people. I am here to speak to you about what Christianity has to offer the rest of the world, and particularly the secular world, in the face of a global climate change crisis. Who'd-a-thought?
First, I thought I'd share with you some insight into why my generation has largely rejected the Church, and some ways in which the climate change crisis is an opportunity for the Church to engage in a new conversation with us.
I have become somewhat the resident expert on all things religious in my circle of friends. Which can mean only one thing: they don't know any religious people! Their questions can give us an insight into how my contemporaries perceive the Church.
Suzanne is my wife's best friend. We call her Sue. Sue is someone we respect deeply, and have great affection for. Sue is an economics instructor at Selkirk College. And she's a subversive one! Every semester she shows the film 'The Corporation' to her class. Imagine it, your economics instructor this semester, will show you a film that draws for you the parallels between a psychopathic lunatic and the modern corporation! Can you imagine? Every time I think about it I want to burst out laughing and thank God at the same time.
Sue approached me one day and asked me what I thought about the Da Vinci Code. For those of you who don't know, the Da Vinci Code asserts, among other things, 1. that the Catholic Church has engaged in a massive fraud to cover up the fact that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, 2. That Mary Magdalene was of royal blood descended from King David, 3. that Mary gave birth to Jesus' baby, 4. the Catholic church has gone to great lengths, including calling Mary a prostitute, and even resorting to murder, to ensure that the male church hierarchy gains and maintains power, and 5. that the true Christian heritage is based on the sacred feminine. Sue was genuinely disappointed when I told her that these claims were baseless and historically inaccurate.
I can understand why Sue was disappointed that the Da Vinci Code wasn't accurate. For Sue, the typical Christian community is an American Evangelical group that serves the interests of the wealthy and political elite. Christianity is a symbol of male hierarchy and generations of sexual repression and abuse of power. It is arrogant, patriarchal, intolerant, homophobic and exploitative. It is linked to British and American imperialism, violent fundamentalism, the crusades, brainwashing, residential schools, the pillaging of the Earth, the justification for war, and, when she thinks of the gold on display at the Vatican, gluttony and hypocrisy. In this context, her attraction to the Da Vinci Code makes sense. If its claims were true, it would be a kind of vindication for those that have faced and are facing continued discrimination and oppression from Church authorities.
It should be obvious, that rightly or wrongly, Sue and her cohort have rebelled against the church's perceived abuse of power and oppression of vulnerable peoples and the Planet.
I have another friend, Dennis, who is not nearly as critical of the Church as Sue. When I asked him if he'd ever been to Church he said that he went to a Christian camp once, and didn't really get it. He said he remembers a lot of sensitive types singing Kumbaya around a campfire. He thought there was likely some story telling, or Bible readings, but none of them stuck with him. And he certainly didn't apply Kumbaya songs to his life. "It's harmless", he said, "but boring. So what? you sing Kumbaya, and you're going to be all better? Kumbaya is going to make the world all better? Exactly how is that going to make things better? How will that affect my life, or anyone else's?"
Dennis is typical of a large number of my contemporaries that see the Church as largely irrelevant, or at best, disengaged with the rest of society.
And finally there is Matt. We met in a first year philosophy class. We bonded over rejecting that God stuff, and have been the best of friends ever since. Matt finds magical feats in the Bible extremely frustrating. A talking bush that's on fire. Jesus walking on water. The seas parting for Moses. Angels speaking to Joseph. The virgin birth. That people believe these things actually happened, is, for Matt, at best a sign of mental instability. At the worst it is a kind of self-delusion. If people are ready to accept that Noah's ark is feasible, and that a merciful or beneficent God drowned the planet, he asks, then what credibility do these people have left?
Matt, and almost everyone I know, has rejected this kind of literal interpretation of the Bible, and, thinking most Christians read the Bible this way, dismiss most self-professed Christians as loonies.
There is some truth about the Church in these three criticisms. It is true that that the Church has at times used its power inappropriately. It is true that there are elements of the Church that are disengaged from society. And it is true that there is a tendency to read scripture in a literal way. But of course, these perceptions miss a huge element of what our daily lives are like for the average Canadian Christian.
If you've ever wondered why there aren't a lot of people in the Church that are my age, it's not because you did anything wrong! These are just common perceptions of my generation, encouraged by American news media and books like the Da Vinci Code. But please don't despair! I wouldn't tell you these things if I didn't think there was some value in the Church.
One of the ways that I have found to re-engage with the church is by reading the New Testament as a counter-cultural text, as a model for social justice action and integrity. It is my belief that Jesus was saying to us that heaven, the Kingdom of God, comes alive when we make it come alive on Earth. And heaven is a place devoid of abuse. Power is used in heaven only to create inclusive community. Jesus was saying that we must become the Kingdom of God, that we must be the change that we want.
I'll give you an example. You will all be familiar with the story of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, on a colt. John Dominic Crossan, an eminent Christian scholar, believes that this theatrical procession was meant to coincide with a large Roman procession into Jerusalem. Crossan estimates that the population of Jerusalem, at the time of passover, probably multiplied by 10 times. Large crowds, combined with an important holiday marking the Jewish people's escape from Egypt, meant that Rome must have been wary of dissent and uprising. So huge Roman legions, brandishing swords and shields and all the military technology and might of the time, would have marched into Jerusalem and spread across the city, ready to enforce Rome's law by force. They, and Jesus after them, would march past Roman instruments of torture, the wooden crosses, set up at the Gates of Jerusalem as a warning to everyone that Roman justice was swift and brutal. ("Pilate's military procession was a demonstration of both Roman imperial power and Roman imperial theology.... According to this theology, the Roman emperor was not simply the ruler of Rome, but the Son of God.... Jesus' Palm Sunday procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Rome's military procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus' procession embodied an alternative vision, the Kingdom of God." ) It is wonderful to think of Jesus almost carelessly entering the gates of Jerusalem on a colt, as a statement that 'it's not power that matters, this is not how society actually works.'
It turns out that this is exactly what Sue is doing when she presents "The Corporation" to her class.
To some degree, my generation would like to be a counter cultural force in the world today, despite our difficulties in escaping the trappings of materialism. The counter cultural aspects of Christianity, then, might appeal to my generation.
I did my best to address Sue's disappointment about the Da Vinci Code, and told her that the real story of Jesus was a far more interesting one. I saw her eyes glaze over. She could see it coming. She thought to herself "He's going to say something like 'The power that Jesus has, to create all the galaxies and the stars, and the gagillion blades of grass, and the WHOLE UNIVERSE, the power is incredible! Look how he walked on water, how he performed miraculous feats!' "
But I didn't! Instead I told her about how Jesus was a counter-cultural revolutionary, who, in the context of Empire, shattered all social restraints, boundaries, and power dynamics. And that this is why Jesus was so important. With a little more detail, a little more context, Sue was engaged. She felt that, on these topics, Christianity could engage the real world. Christianity offered a hopeful, alternative vision to a world forever dominated by oppression, violence and exploitation.
The context I gave Sue was based on the Biblical narrative, with its persistent backdrop of imperial ambition. It is the story of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. God's people developed their own narrative precisely in opposition to these powers, because these powers annihilated them repeatedly. Throughout the Bible, God sides with the victims of the dominant culture. This story of Empire is also, then, the backdrop of the Jesus story. Jesus was a unique revolutionary. Unlike John the Baptist, Jesus did not anoint the new Army of God against Rome. Instead he shattered social boundaries and power dynamics. I told Sue about John Dominic Crossan's research. How he states that, for Jesus, the Kingdom of God was not an act of God or a place to be attained, it was an eternally present process of open, non-discriminating fellowship. The Kingdom of God, according to Jesus, is attained through radical egalitarianism and the total rejection of abusive power. So Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a colt, powerless, but on equal standing with the great Roman legions. He ate with the ritually unclean, the socially inappropriate, prostitutes, money collectors, men, women, young, old, poor and the wealthy. In all his actions, from healing the sick to sharing his table with total strangers, Jesus was making claims about who regulates social boundaries, who determines cultural norms, who defines religious authority, and who decides political power.
This kind of revolutionary thinking might appeal to Dennis and Matt, as well as Sue. Such actions have clear messages for an active citizenry. They have practical weight. With Jesus' lessons applied in our own dominant culture, Christianity is no longer silly or irrelevant.
This appealing and revolutionary aspect of Christianity may be the way for Christianity to address issues of Climate Change.
In our own context, we have a chance to respond to the dominant culture that is responsible for the climate change crisis. This dominant culture is based on materialism, consumerism, and the capitalist market system. Individuals understand themselves in the world as private citizens with private rights to pursue private interests. Each citizen is not equal, but is in fact in competition with all other citizens to own more and better things. Each person's identity is dictated by how and what is consumed, and it is our collective responsibility, for the growth of the system, to continue consuming. We are fuel for the economic system. It is this economic system that is sovereign today. The so-called "invisible hand of the market" is given free rein. Any attempt by government to point it in the direction of the common good is legislated against. There are clauses in all free trade agreements stipulating that if a nation acts in the interests of the common good, it can be sued. The modern-day corporations are the high priests of our culture, touching, influencing, and controlling every aspect of our lives. We have become servants of corporations, with little time or energy left over for pursuit of the common good.
It's not clear that our materialism is making us much happier, and this is particularly true of North Americans. We use more resources and energy than almost anyone else in the world, but many people are happier than we are, and by quite a few reported measurements - rates of depression, substance abuse, stress and the dwindling number of close friends - we are some of the least happy people in the developed world, whatever our vision of ourselves is as a culture ("we still think we live in little house on the prairie when in fact we live in big house on the cul-de-sac").
What is clear is that if we look behind the televisions and iPods and new cars that we have bought, if we look hard enough, we will see the terrible inequality and violence of the system. Poor people toil to make our laptops, and then are slowly poisoned when they dismantle our old motherboards and batteries and electronics in our third world garbage dumps. We see that the prevailing ethic that 'more is better' is leading us towards a disastrous collision with ecological reality: It's as if the laws of economic reality seemed to us more real than the laws of physics and chemistry. The peril we have placed our society in is extreme - scientists who once moderated their tones are now ringing alarm bells in a barely submerged panic. James Hansen, for instance, insists that we have ten years to reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere or we will live on a completely different planet.
Materialism, just like the Roman Empire, says "We'll give you civilization, but it is essential that we do violence on the vulnerable." In this case the vulnerable are the world's poor and the Earth's ecosystems.
So we have two options in response to the climate change crisis.
In the first, an enormous counter-cultural movement will be required. If what climate change scientists are saying is true, that we need a 90% reduction in green house gasses and carbon emissions, then 9 out of every 10 of us has to give up our car. We need to take 9 out of 10 less flights. We need to use 9/10ths less electricity. Heat 1/10th of our homes. Like facing a Roman legion, the hurdles are almost unimaginably difficult. It's going to feel like a crucifixion, driving the car once every 10 days. Sacrificing our whole lifestyle. But the good news: if Jesus were heading this counter-cultural revolution, he would model an alternative society based on inclusivity... He would unicycle past the cross, as the Romans drove their Hummers into the city. He would unicycle with the knowledge that he was living God's Kingdom as it was meant to be. He, and you, would be supremely happy.
My question to you is, where is your alternative society based on inclusivity? And, who (and what) else should be included?
Now to talk about something nobody wants to talk about.
What if we're too late?
I don't know anybody (and I work in the environmental movement) I don't know anybody that feels that we are going to avoid this catastrophe. The likelihood that we are all going to stop using cars, that India and China and the United States and Europe and Africa are going to reduce their emissions by 90% any time in the near future, the likelihood of that happening is infinitesimally small.
I believe we are too late. And I will admit that I'm frightened out of my skin. If hundreds of the world's best scientists are right, it means millions and millions will die in Bangladesh, Asia, South America, Africa, North America.
Does this mean that this is the destruction of humanity? Will society fall apart? Will everything turn to chaos?
Does Christianity have anything to say to us then?
My answer is that we refuse to participate in the Chaos. Like Jesus walking past the Chaos of the cross, we say that this is not how society works. We walk into Jerusalem, continue to minister to the hurting and to the desperate, and we join in fellowship with the vulnerable, and with our beautiful planet, living the Kingdom of God.
