Christianity, as the world's largest belief system and therefore most influential religion, illustrates the latter. The Christian emphasis on abstract deity over the material world and personal salvation over societal well-being has a strong tendency toward encouraging ecologically irresponsible behavior and and unsustainable societies.
The concept of a supreme god separate from the material universe devalues that universe in favor of a divinity that is necessarily abstract because of his nonphysical nature. The concept of a soul also devalues the corporeal as it creates an artificial bifurcation between a human being's identity and his or her physical body; a fallacious concept as cognition is an activity of the body, not a separate thing unto itself. Indeed, humanity is seen as hardly related to this world except insofar as we are commanded to rule over it. The Bible says:
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." …God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." Genesis 1: 26, 28
Christianity has disassociated itself from humanity's family--the community of living creatures on this planet. Rather than walk among the low and contemptible "beasts" of the earth, they raise their heads haughtily--proclaiming humans higher life forms. They seek kinship with angels; strive for salvation from the inferior world of flesh and deliverance unto heaven.
Perceiving the Earth to be barely more than a stopping place on the way to Heaven, Christians have little reason to feel any concern for the well-being of its ecosystems. Viewing themselves as separate from the biosphere, Christians also do not easily see a chain of causation between their own actions and the loss of biodiversity or any possible repercussions for humanity. Their disconnectedness from the corporeal world encourages them to dismantle vital ecosystems for their own uses and it is literally to Hell with the consequences.
4 comments:
That's an interesting perspective. I do agree, in part, with the idea that Christianity can encourage environmentally "irresponsible" behavior, but I think it's also a matter of interpretation. I feel that many Christians would actually look at their "stewardship" over the earth and its creatures as a God-given responsibility to take care of it and to be ecologically sound in their actions. Unfortunately, the type of boisterous, simplistic "Christianity" that people like Sarah Palin espouse is not necessarily representative of the Christian community as a whole-- or of the religion's true message.
That is a good point, Justin. However there's very little in the Bible to support the Stewardship view as opposed to a great deal of explicit Biblical text behind the Dominion view. Certainly, those Christians who maintain the Stewardship perspective should be commended but they are using modern secular ethics to interpret the Bible, not the other way around.
I have a hard time understanding the Christian right's opposition to ecological concerns, but I think a lot of it has to do with population control and restrictions on free enterprise, while the Genesis text and apocalypticism is a convenient cover.
But for my two (or more like two hundred by the time I'm done) cents: while early Christians were expecting an imminent apocalypse and thus wanted to disassociate from earthly things, the more established Christians of the 4th century onwards spilled a lot of ink to demonstrate that it is precisely because Christ walked on earth in the midst of a historical situation that the material world and human experience "matters;" God, through Jesus, undid what happened in Genesis, God was no longer an immaterial, abstract being in the sky, and the world was not a mere stopping point for our fallen souls.
Like its Jewish and Pagan predecessors, Christianity had a ritual life that was highly embedded in agricultural cycles and symbols; for example, the Eucharist takes bread and wine--not grapes and grains in their natural state but the products of cultivation and civilization--and uses them to represent the body of Christ. Of course ecological responsibility isn't the natural conclusion to this, but my point is that (for better or for worse) it isn't just a "modern secular" phenomenon for religious communities to work with the everyday stuff of their surrounding culture and livelihood in order to construct their communal identity and evaluate ethical claims; for many Christians, I think the history and tradition of the church, ritual interaction with other people, and personal experience and reason count for a lot more than specific Bible verses do, and a theology of an incarnate God actually supports that.
In fact, I would fault the strain of fundamentalist Evangelicals who assert that the Bible exists in a cultural vacuum, handed down in shrink-wrap directly from God, with the result that they can cherry pick verses at will (e.g. the Genesis dominion one you quoted) as a sufficient and unqualified rationale for their conclusions while ignoring any external evidence such as mere "history" or "reason" or "experience."
As Palin & Co. demonstrate, it's a slippery slope from "And God told them to be fruitful and multiply and gave them dominion over the animals" to "No abortions, no homos, and Drill baby, drill, because the Bible said so, Q.E.D." But it's similarly simplistic to suggest that all tree-hugging, liberal Christians need to do to support their take on Christianity's true message is to find another Bible verse to throw back at the conservatives--or to dismiss the Bible entirely simply because it is not a self-contained ethical panacea.
I will stop now. :-)
Matt-
You bring up a valid argument. The historical traditions of the various strains of Christianity have created overlapping strata of ideologies. The bedrock, however, is within the foundational text and it is to that text that even the more baroque offshoots of the original Nazarene cult return in the end.
In any case, as the Bible itself says, "Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them." Christians have, with the blessing of their ideology, participated in the despoliation of nearly every ecosystem they've touched. Christianity isn't a cause, so much as it is a cheerleader for this maladaptive and ultimately self-destructive behavior.
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