An Introduction to Christian Environmentalism

Ecology, Virtue, and Ethics

Kathryn D. Blanchard, Kevin J. O'Brien

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781481301732, 9781481315005
• eBook ISBN: 9781481303729
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christians share a common concern for the earth. Evangelicals emphasize creation care; mainline Protestants embrace the green movement; the Catholic Church lists "10 deadly environmental sins;" and the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch has declared climate change an urgent issue of social and economic justice.

This textbook examines seven contemporary environmental challenges through the lens of classical Christian virtues. Authors Kathryn Blanchard and Kevin O'Brien use these classical Christian virtues to seek a "golden mean" between extreme positions by pairing each virtue with a pernicious environmental problem.

Students are thus led past political pitfalls and encouraged to care for other creatures prudently, to develop new energy sources courageously, to choose our food temperately, to manage toxic pollution justly, to respond to climate change faithfully, to consider humanity's future hopefully, and to engage lovingly in advocacy for God's earth. Readers will emerge from this text with a deeper understanding of contemporary environmental problems and the fundamentals of Christian virtue ethics.

1

CHRISTIAN ECO-VIRTUE

In Search of the Golden Mean

Complex Ethics for Complex Problems

Ethics and morality are sometimes treated like a quiz in class: you are presented with hypothetical moral dilemmas, such as “who would you throw out of a lifeboat—the old sailor or the critically injured child?” Then you are supposed to use logic to figure out the right answer in order to get a good grade. Some moral systems do indeed work in the way of right and wrong answers. A law such as “thou shalt not commit adultery,” for example, is fairly cut and dried (at least at first blush)— either you obey or you do not. When it comes to the environment, however, simple laws and slogans are just not up to the task. Complex problems require complex ethics.

Christian virtue ethics is well suited to moral complexity, because it focuses not on universal rules to be obeyed or applied to specific choices but on habits of human character nurtured over time through daily practice and multiple interactions. Virtue ethics is less like a math quiz than it is like a spin class: the only test is the day-to-day exercise of pedaling the bike; there is no one-time success and no one-time failure. The people who do well at spin class are those who show up again and again to develop their muscles and their discipline until the exercise becomes a natural part of who they are. Like physical fitness, character is about habits. It is about developing excellence by practicing virtues, over and over again, in everyday life. Aristotle argued that it was “no small matter” whether human beings develop good or bad habits from childhood: “On the contrary, it makes considerable difference, or, rather, all the difference” that people train themselves and their children to cultivate habits of goodness.¹

As readers know all too well, fitness does not come from one workout but requires long-term discipline. Similarly, virtue traditions do not label someone “faithful” after hearing them say that they believe in God; instead, virtue is about the ongoing practice of faithfulness, passing not just one test but living an entire life shaped by fidelity to God and neighbor. Christian environmental virtue is likewise not about saying “I love trees,” recycling a can, or signing a petition. It is about the habits and character that shape every perception, thought, and action over the course of an entire lifetime. For this reason, virtue is far more important and powerful than memorizing a few simple right answers. Complex environmental problems will persist from generation to generation, so they call for virtuous habits that will sustain people for the long term and help us continue adapting and learning from the world around us.

While environmentalists sometimes offer lists of commandments (“Thou shalt carpool!”) or a vision of the future (“The promised land runs entirely on renewable energies!”), virtue ethics instead calls for a different way of being human. The focus here is on character formation—the process of shaping human beings into people who can respond well to complex problems specific to their times and places. Environmental virtue ethics, then, is about helping Christians to become people who understand that creation is God’s, who care enough to notice when our neighbors around the globe are sick and dying from environmental degradation, who take responsibility for the ways our choices and social structures create waste and alter the global climate, and who are prepared to take constructive action.

Defining Virtue

Christian tradition has classically emphasized seven moral virtues. Four are shared with pre-Christian virtue traditions: prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. The last three are based in New Testament teachings: faith, hope, and love. It can be tempting to dismiss such old-fashioned virtues as irrelevant to our modern lives. Some sound stuffy and out of date: Who really wakes up in the morning hoping to be temperate and prudent? (Yawn!) Even for those who do aspire to virtue, these classical virtues can seem inaccessible: How often in your daily grind do you have the opportunity to demonstrate your courage, your justice, or your hope? Most days you are probably just trying to get your work done. Moreover, virtue can feel like a purely private matter: citizens of the United States, in particular, tend to resent others’ scrutiny and think that it is no one else’s business, beyond perhaps family and close friends, how we choose to express faith or love.

Nevertheless, Christian communities teach that character still matters, that the virtues are relevant to every human life, and that they need to be debated and reestablished in each new generation of congregations, families, and communities. Indeed, one purpose of Christian churches is to shape Christians into people whose characters make them distinct from other citizens and societies of the world. Virtue calls Christians to resist the self-serving materialism of our popular culture and to instead embrace wholehearted orientation toward God and neighbor.² It also, increasingly, calls Christians to respect the natural world that God created and of which humanity is a part.³

Christians are not the only ones turning to virtue ethics in response to environmental problems. Secular environmental philosophers have noted that environmental discourse is filled with virtue language. For example, the movement has shown courage in its responses to terrifying environmental truths.⁴ Also on display are virtues that do not appear on the lists of classics— one philosopher argues that perhaps the most important virtue for our time is “simplicity.”⁵ In addition, there are entirely new virtues that have developed in response to environmental problems, such as “sustainability.”⁶

Rather than inventing new virtues or prioritizing one particular virtue over another, An Introduction to Christian Environmentalism promotes the idea that the seven moral and theological virtues passed down through Christian tradition can be vital resources for responding to environmental problems and ordering our environmental lives; for millennia, these virtues have offered guidance about Christian character in the context of political, sexual, and economic life.⁷ Believers who nurture these seven virtues are successfully living the lives for which humankind was created, in service to God and neighbors. Said another way, people are most fully human when they are prudent, temperate, just, courageous, faithful, hopeful, and loving. Humans were made precisely for such habits of character, which in turn foster the good life. Meanwhile, those who ignore the virtues do not experience their full humanity; they are ruled instead by lesser models of the good life provided by thoughtless appetites, profit-driven marketers, or corrupt cultural norms. This is not to claim that the virtues offer a clear solution or set of solutions to environmental problems; again, complex problems do not lend themselves to simple, universal answers. But virtuous habits, formed and practiced over time, can help people to respond with wisdom when facing new and ongoing problems.

One of the most famous thinkers in Christian tradition and a vital guide to the virtues is the medieval European theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who borrowed heavily from Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.). In his great work, Summa Theologica, Aquinas argues that the seven virtues are what enable people to “do good work well.” He also articulates an important division between the first four and the last three virtues. The four “moral virtues” (also called “principal” or “cardinal”), borrowed from ancient Greeks, are open to all human beings, given our natural endowments. The first, prudence, is the foundation for the other three; it is, simply put, the practical application of human rationality—doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason. The next three virtues can be understood as prudence directed toward particular purposes. When human reason curbs unhealthy desires and passions, it is temperance; when it responds to threats and fears, it is courage; and when reason is directed toward enabling humans to live well together in community, it is justice.⁸ Every human being is naturally capable of these habits of good character.

Aquinas argues that the latter three “theological” virtues surpass basic human nature and are “infused” by God’s grace. These virtues relate not only to how to be good as natural persons and communities but more specifically to how to serve God in Christian communities. In the scriptures, these virtues are discerned specifically through the revelation of Christ: faith is defined in the Letter to the Hebrews as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1); this is the habit of fidelity toward God, of orienting one’s whole life toward the unseen truth behind all of creation. Hope is the habit of working for the world God wants to create, even though it is not yet here: “Surely there is a future,” writes the author of Proverbs, “and your hope will not be cut off” (23:18). Finally, love is the ultimate perfection of all the other virtues, “for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7). Love is about spiritual union and friendship with God, developed over time through faithful and hopeful service to and friendship with the neighbor.

While each virtue is unique, the virtues are best understood together as aspects of a whole rather than as seven separate character traits. Just as flowers and bees and bears depend upon one another for survival, no single virtue can exist in isolation without the others. Virtue is about living well, which one cannot truly do without the complete set. The virtues are ultimately unified or else they become unbalanced. One might do the right thing for the wrong reason or at the wrong time or possibly a wrong thing for the right reason. Think of Charles Dickens’ infamous Ebenezer Scrooge (or The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns), who demonstrates an enormous amount of prudence: he invests his money wisely and refuses to spend it on frivolous things. But because he lacks the ability to give lovingly from his excess to those in need, or to recognize the justice of paying a fair wage or a fair share into the communal coffers, he cannot be called a virtuous man nor does he fully embody the virtue of prudence. Character and the good life are not about developing just one virtue; humans become whole persons by cultivating all of them together. In a world beset by complex environmental challenges with no precedents, nurturing all seven virtues may be the most crucial ecological work that humans can do.

The Golden Mean

Virtue is a journey rather than a destination. Human beings are not perfect, an,d according to traditional Christian teaching, no one, at least not on this side of the resurrection, can ever fully embody a character that perfectly integrates all of the virtues. Sometimes courage fails, sometimes love falters, sometimes justice feels impossible, and often communities and nations settle for much less than the ideal. However, virtue ethics is about a lifetime of habits rather than any single choice. Christians can learn from our failures but must continue to practice being more loving, more hopeful, more faithful, more just, more temperate, more courageous, and more prudent. Just like a sport or a musical instrument, those who put effort into practicing habits of virtue will excel. Even if one never perfects all of these virtues, it is worth a lifetime of attempts and failures to try to become fully human.

Christians have learned a great deal about virtue ethics from Greek philosophy, which teaches that the virtuous path arises as a balance between extremes, a happy medium between polar opposites. Consider, for example, the well-known story of Icarus, whose father Daedalus built him a set of wings out of feathers and wax to free him from the island maze where they were imprisoned. When Daedalus taught his son to fly, he instructed Icarus to stay on the middle course, safely above the ocean waves and below the sun’s heat. Icarus, however, was tempted to excess by the joy of his flight. He flew too close to the sun, which melted his wings’ wax and sent him plummeting down to a watery death. The moral of the story is clear: extremes are deadly. Better to keep to the middle way.

Virtue is therefore best understood as a middle way, or what Aristotle called a “mean,” between two vices, “one of excess and the other of deficiency . . . some vices exceed and others fall short of what is required in emotion and action, whereas virtue finds and chooses the median.”⁹ Sometimes we miss virtue because we seek to fly too high toward the sun; sometimes because we dip too low and get soaked. For example, the virtue of courage can be seen as the sensible middle ground between the extremes of cowardice (too little courage) and recklessness (too much). Justice is, similarly, the middle ground between overly strict legalism and indiscriminate lawlessness. The theological virtues, too, can be understood as “golden means.” While it is not possible to have “too much faith” in God, faith is nevertheless a middle course between what Aquinas called “contrary heresies”—potentially good ideas taken too far in a single direction.¹⁰ When measured in human terms, it is possible to have too much hope (presumption or blind optimism) as well as too little (despair); love can likewise be too extreme when one is tempted to turn it away from God and toward something unworthy of ultimate devotion. Virtue is thus always about discerning the sweet spot between vicious excesses in one direction or the other.

This is no less true in a time of environmental problems. Virtue in the context of Christian environmentalism is about looking for sensible answers in a polarized political and cultural landscape, about seeking the middle path in response to environmental problems. This requires looking to many different sources to understand environmental challenges and consulting multiple experts for ideas on how to respond. The path of virtue assumes that the best way to approach complex challenges is likely to be found somewhere in the uncomfortable middle territory between dangerously clear extremes that tend to present themselves in our political debates. In Christian terms, seeking the middle path is part of the lifelong work of learning to love one’s human neighbors and the rest of God’s creation.

The Middle Path of Eco-virtue

Virtue is particularly useful in environmental conversations because environmentalism has too often been perceived as a polarizing force, an extreme to be avoided. For example, a group of conservative evangelicals called the Cornwall Alliance asserts that “without a doubt one of the greatest threats to society and the church today is the multifaceted environmentalist movement.”¹¹ They identify environmentalism as the “cult of the green dragon,” a religion all its own that competes against Christianity with “deceptions” about the seriousness of environmental problems. According to this argument, traditional environmentalism gets its values from a heretical pantheistic belief system in which nature takes the place of the one transcendent God. For these critics, environmentalism is not only a theological threat but also a social one, because the green dragon de-emphasizes human importance, distracts people from concern for the poor, and encourages the expansion of impersonal and inhumane government regulations.

In stark contrast to the concern that the environmental movement is a vast and threatening conspiracy against Christianity, others worry that environmentalism is entirely too mild mannered. Philosopher Patrick Curry worries that the movement is no threat to the status quo at all and is in fact not nearly influential or radical enough to handle the seriousness of environmental degradation. Noting that the biggest environmental organizations collaborate with and take money from the same polluting industries they purport to fight, Curry argues that environmentalism has been “colonized by the anthropocentrism it was originally meant to counter.” Corporately sponsored environmentalism is focused on human health and the sustainability of modern capitalist cultures rather than on protecting ecological integrity and the nonhuman world.¹² Curry advocates an even more expansive “ecological” ethics that goes further and deeper than traditional environmentalism in its argument against human domination of the rest of nature.

Thus is environmentalism attacked from two sides: theological conservatives worry that it radically de-emphasizes the importance of humans as the center and purpose of God’s creation, which threatens our way of life. Leftist critics worry that it clings too closely to the status quo and fails to challenge human dominance and our current way of life. Such attacks are evidence of the preexisting commitments that each side brings to environmental problems. Patrick Curry is certain that anthropocentrism and capitalism are at the roots of environmental degradation. The Cornwall Alliance declares that environmental stewardship requires anthropocentrism, human dominion, and free markets. Because both sides have already made up their minds and neither leaves much room for conversation, it is difficult to imagine such opponents working together to try to solve, or even fully understand, a real environmental problem.

This book uses the Christian virtues to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 CHRISTIAN ECO-VIRTUE
• 2 PRUDENCE
• 3 COURAGE
• 4 TEMPERANCE
• 5 JUSTICE
• 6 FAITH
• 7 HOPE
• 8 LOVE
• CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index