Woven Together

Faith and Justice for the Earth and the Poor

James S. Mastaler

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532661679, 9781532661686
• eBook ISBN: 9781532661693
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science

Now more than ever, it's critical that religious stories encompass a call to moral responsibility for the earth and to the global poor. But, the divorce between religious faith and science has left many people feeling unmoored and adrift at a time when we ought to be drawing closer to nature and each other.It is a theological activity to see the world as it really is--to look its suffering squarely in the face and tend to a wounded world. The global poor, especially women among them, are some of the world's most disenfranchised people. Their realities must inform the conversations about God and the world that people of faith are having in the church. There is no salvation from the world, only salvation with the world. This means learning to live as a member of a community of mutual responsibility--to look inward and ask ourselves how we might turn outward and live differently. Concern for nature and social justice must become a central part of Christian moral life.

1

We Need New Stories

I had so much hope. The year after former US Vice President and climate activist Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth made its theatrical debut, I started a graduate internship and then accepted an advocacy position with the Illinois Chapter of the Sierra Club.1 The Club was abuzz with staffers celebrating the “game-changing” nature of the film and its effects on public awareness about climate change. The film contained persuasive graphs and charts. The science presented was solidly vetted and held up to scrutiny. It was narrated by an influential political figure. It won two Academy Awards, and Gore went on to share a Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”2 So many people felt invigorated by what seemed newly possible concerning climate policy at home and abroad. Things were looking up! The excitement was palpable.

The optimism was short-lived. The United States did not soon take any concrete political action to mitigate the climate problem. Few would have believed that any international agreement behind which the US would throw its support was still a decade away from that point. Climate concerns among the US public quickly dissipated. Climate deniers countered with a slew of challenges and counter-arguments, albeit baseless. Gore’s graphs and charts were soon all but forgotten, lost to a mist of doubt and confusion. What at first appeared to be a catalyst for the climate movement quickly faded. This was my first foray into organizing around something that mattered, and I failed. I was defeated.

What happened? Convincing people that climate change is a serious problem is quite a bit more complicated than many of us ever imagined. We live in an era of the twenty-four–hour news cycle, and several networks include entertaining, lively debates as a part of their allegedly fair and balanced coverage of controversial issues. Sometimes the networks serve one entrenched special interest or another by intentionally skewing these debates with the questions that are asked or by whom they choose to include in the debates. At other times the issue is unintentionally distorted when well-meaning journalists give undue attention to climate deniers by allowing such a small number of people holding a given perspective to be equally represented in a debate—an overwhelming 97–98 percent of climate scientists agree on the anthropogenic aspect of climate change.3 When the issue is presented as though experts in the field give equal credence to each perspective, while the “debated” perspectives do not, in fact, hold equal weight, the media does the public an incredible disservice.4 The general public rightly perceives media coverage on climate change as the confusing mess that it has been.

The environmental community’s primary response to this confusion has been its long-standing attempt to improve scientific literacy among the general public. Their focus has been laser-like: more graphs, more charts, better arguments to call out the false science. Outreach and messaging have been almost exclusively geared toward confronting climate denial head-on. For all our effort, this has not worked. Scientific knowledge alone simply does not generate the kind of knowledge capable of moving the general public to take action on important environmental problems such as climate change. What could we have done differently?

By focusing on improved scientific literacy rather than the role of deeply held values and beliefs and in building bridges and coalitions with faith-based religious communities, we in the environmental community missed a valuable opportunity. Stronger bridges would have better directed the movement toward the kind of conversations able to more powerfully sustain enduring public engagement for the long haul. Directly emphasizing the scientific reality of climate change to deniers is not as effective as framing it in terms of the sacred stories and religious narratives—the worldview-level of ideas—that shape a person’s fundamental beliefs about who they are and what kind of people they think they ought to be in the world.5 The movement failed to generate substantial public concern for its issues or create any lasting change. The creative potential of powerful storytelling was not, and has not yet been, fully tapped.

Scientific information is filtered through the lens of a person’s worldview—a person’s general way of seeing the world that makes them more or less receptive to certain ideas. We now know that the more scientific knowledge an individual has, the more likely that individual is to use that knowledge to affirm preexisting values and beliefs about the way they think the world works. In one important and groundbreaking study, the authors marvel at how well “equipped ordinary individuals are [at discerning] which stances towards scientific information secure their personal interests” and they posit that “the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions.”6 The study found that “[m]embers of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were [those] among whom cultural polarization was greatest.”7 In other words, the primary distinguishing factor regarding whether people are likely to accept or deny climate change has less to do with their comprehension of the science and more to do with the cultural and political ideas they use to interpret it. The study concluded, “cultural world-views explain more variance [in beliefs about climate change] than science literacy [ . . . ].”8 So, the scientific community and environmental advocates can confront climate deniers head-on with all the facts they can muster. The simple reality is that they are unlikely to change very many minds.

For many people around the world, religious narratives profoundly shape the way they live in the world. In the West, Christian traditions have held a historic and ongoing role in shaping both individual and public consciousness. Christians, spread across diverse communities of identity with unique histories and traditions, do not represent a uniform, monolithic community. Still, many people of Christian faith see in their traditions and their communities a deep source of meaning that enriches their lives and unites them in solidarity with others of their faith. The clergy play an influential role in helping members of their community to make sense of everyday challenges, whether as a part of pastoral counseling, Sunday sermons, weekly Bible study groups, or increasingly by public commentary in literature, radio, television, online blogs, and podcasts. They do so often by telling powerfully moving stories, relating the deeply held values and beliefs embodied in their respective traditions with the more immediate problems of daily living. The most proficient ministers are often skilled storytellers and cultural translators who are comfortable navigating between the concerns of everyday life and a people’s most deeply held values and beliefs.

This is an impressive skill that need not compete with, but rather complement the kind of knowledge scientific discovery offers. Scientists have developed methods to observe the world and draw evidence-based conclusions about it, but religious and spiritual narratives often shape how those conclusions are perceived. US conservatives, especially those initially skeptical of climate science, are “more likely to embrace climate science if it comes from a religious or business leader, who can set the issue in a context of values that differ from those of an environmentalist.”9 I remember when this revelation appeared in an article that was reprinted and passed around climate advocacy circles and LISTSERVs during my work with the Sierra Club. It makes such clear sense of the dissonance between US conservative voters on the one hand, and climate scientists and environmental advocates on the other.

During my time with the Sierra Club, and especially in representing them at United Nations climate conferences, I often encountered confusio...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: We Need New Stories
• Chapter 2: Facing the World as It Is
• Chapter 3: A Faint Tracing on the Surface of Mystery
• Chapter 4: Into the Darkness with Hearts Ablaze
• Bibliography