Theology and Climate Change

Paul Tyson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000366358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Theology and Climate Change examines Progressive Dominion Theology (PDT) as a primary cultural driver of anthropogenic climate change. PDT is a distinctive and Western form of Christian theology out of which the modern scientific revolution and technological modernity arises. Basic attitudes to nature, to instrumental power over nature, and to an understanding of humanity's relationship with nature are a function of the deep theological preconditions of Western modernity. Much of what we like about Western modernity is indebted to PDT at the same time that this tacit cultural theology is propelling us towards climate disaster. This text argues that the urgent need to change the fundamental operational assumptions of our way of life is now very hard for us to do, because secular modernity is now largely unaware of its tacit theological commitments.

Modern consumer society, including the global economy that supports this way of life, could not have the operational signatures it currently has without its distinctive theological origin and its ongoing submerged theological assumptions. Some forms of Christian theology are now acutely aware of this dynamic and are determined to change the modern life-world, from first assumptions up, in order to avert climate disaster. At the same time that other forms of Christian theology – aligned with pragmatic fossil fuel interests – advance climate change skepticism and overtly uphold PDT. Theology is, in fact, crucially integral with the politics of climate change, but this is not often understood in anything more than simplistic and polemically expedient ways in environmental and policy contexts. This text aims to dis-imbed climate change politics from polarized and unfruitful slinging-matches between conservatives and progressives of all or no religious commitments.

This fascinating volume is a must read for those with an interest in environmental policy concerns and in culturally embedded first-order belief commitments.

1 Theology and Climate Change

An Australian Case Study and the Lynn White Thesis

1.1 Australia’s Worst Bushfire Season, 2019–2020

In January 2020 there were abnormally intense bushfires raging all over the Southern Continent. Many properties and 33 human lives were lost. 12.6 million hectares of bush were destroyed, 431 million tonnes of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere, Australia’s largest cities were blanketed in smoke, and a Conservative estimate of one billion bush animals died.¹ Professional, volunteer, and military firefighters were hard-pressed, at the same time, all over the country.

Australia—where I live—is prone to fire, but records have never seen a bushfire summer like this.² Since British settlement, we have not seen this semi-arid continent dried out and heated up like this, over a period of years, resulting in this crisis.³ The penny is starting to drop—particularly among the young—that climate change is not some distant fantasy, but a very real and present danger.⁴ Australian fire chiefs are also deeply aware of this problem.⁵

Yet, Australia’s Prime Minister during the 2019-2020 fire season, Mr Scott Morrison, firmly denied that these fires signalled any climate change policy failure by his or previous Australian governments.⁶ This defensive response was not surprising as the 2019 national election was won by Mr Morrison, assisted by the Murdoch press, staunchly backing the opening of what is likely to become the globe’s largest open-cut coal mine.⁷

The Morrison government resolutely supports the mining and exporting of Australia’s enormous coal deposits, even though there is a clear causal link between carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power stations and global warming.⁸ A strong alliance between the primary resource sector, the mass media, and Australia’s two central political parties has a long back-story in Australia, well predating the twenty-first century.⁹ There was nothing particularly unusual when, before the 2019 election, the media was full of stories about environmental extremism and the need for a strong mining sector to provide jobs for Australians. The facts that there will not be many jobs and, as far as the human causes of climate change go, coal-fired power stations are the worst offenders, were irrelevant to the winning political narrative of the 2019 election.¹⁰ On a platform of sound commercial sense, jobs for regional Australia, and national economic interest, the Morrison government never wavered from its firm commitment to fuelling the heavily air-polluting coal-fired power stations of Asia.¹¹

Currently (in 2020), over 500,000,000 metric tonnes of coal is mined in Australia each year, all of which is burnt, which clearly increases the large amounts of carbon dioxide entering the globe’s dangerously overheating atmosphere.¹² Australia produces enough coal to burn each year for more than four Australias,¹³ but somehow Australia’s substantial export contribution to promoting global climate change does not show up in the Morrison government’s unambitious and trickily accounted emissions reduction targets.¹⁴ The huge volume of atmospheric carbon dioxide released by our enormous bushfires does not show up in Australia’s emission calculations either.

Regionally, Oceania leaders at the 2019 Pacific Island Forum implored Mr Morrison to ease off the climate change accelerator as low-lying island nations are disappearing into the Pacific already. Mr Morrison, a passionate Pentecostal Christian, told the Islander leaders that whilst he stands by them “as family”, he is committed to the economic welfare of Australians before anything else—surely they must understand that.¹⁵

Mr Morrison shows every sign of a genuine, compassionate concern for traumatised Australians who have lost all their possessions in the 2019–2020 fire season. Yet, he shows no signs of ecological grief when our reefs die, when extinctions multiply, when the arctic melts, and when California, the Amazon basin, and Australia burn.¹⁶ Supporting prevailing economic and commercial necessities are more important to the Australian Prime Minister than any serious attempt to address climate change by actively re-configuring our power generation technologies, let alone reducing, then stopping, Australian coal exports.

The three top messaging and policy priorities for the Morrison government are 1) a strong economy; 2) safety from terrorists, illegal immigrants, and the COVID-19 pandemic; and 3) national pride. Mr Morrison’s background in marketing stands him in good stead as a successful political leader. He does not deviate from this messaging in promoting his political brand. As a result, he is committed to providing certainty for the mining sector in Australia as their prosperity (and royalties for government coffers) is the central pillar of his first political priority. Climate change is a public relations concern that he must manage, but it is off the main game to him. Indeed, if it interferes with mining royalties, it is a public relations enterprise that must be firmly positioned beneath economic necessity.

In Australia, religion, as an indicator of Conservative political tendencies, only seems accidentally aligned with the commercial interests of the fossil fuel sector. Prime Minister Morrison happily expresses religious sentiments when communicating his personal convictions, but his sharp political pragmatism, his calculative electoral realism, and his government’s close ties to the mining sector, are neatly cordoned off from his personal faith. To Mr Morrison, politics is public and religion is private, so how could theology have any real influence on climate change policy in Australia?

1.2 Can Theology Cause Climate Change?

In 1967, Professor Lynn White Jr. published a short but highly influential paper titled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”.¹⁷ White argued that there is a distinctive Western way of thinking about our relation to nature which is causing our present ecological crisis, and that this way is intimately bound up with Christian theology. Clearly, both politicians with deep personal religious convictions and board members of entirely secular natural resource companies would likely find this an incomprehensible claim. However, White cannot be dismissed.

White thought that our technological powers had become so great that we were now placing depletion and despoiling pressures on the natural environment that it may no longer be able to absorb. White did not think we would solve this problem without re-thinking and re-feeling our most fundamental relationship to nature—our theological relationship. We somehow need to reconfigure the operational and imaginative horizons that shape our understanding of who we are, what nature is, what technological power should be used for, and what our relationship to nature should be. To White, as a historian of technology,¹⁸ such a reconfiguring could not be achieved without a close and deep exploration of Western theology.

It is important to recognise that White is not simply blaming Christianity, or theology, for our ecological woes—for White does not think culturally embedded theology is optional. Indeed, White’s understanding of theology in general, and Christian theology in particular, is both filial and hopeful. White finds it natural to assume that drawing on the rich resources of Christian theology provides us with the best set of ready-at-hand tools to use if we wish to fix the causes of our ecological crisis at its theological roots.¹⁹

White’s short, crisp paper has been immensely influential. It has largely produced the contemporary scholarly field of eco-theology. This field is strikingly inter-disciplinary, combining environmental science, socio-cultural studies, theology, feminism, history, philosophy, biblical studies, and religious studies. Eco-theology, though indebted to White, has steadily grown in sophistication and scholarly range since 1967.²⁰ By now, an enormous literature has grown up around White’s Thesis, so I must make it clear what type of treatment of White’s Thesis I will employ in this book. Importantly, I am not approaching White’s Thesis as an eco-theologian, but as a sociologist of knowledge.²¹

“Knowledge”—sociologically—is an expansive category. We are all born into a socially situated understanding of reality that tells us the kind of things that are factually true. We also simply absorb those things that our society takes to be normatively true and operationally realistic, and these, too—sociologically—are integral with the knowledge which constitutes our social reality. We don’t choose the assumed reality framework we are born into in exactly the same way that we don’t choose what language we learn as a child. Having always simply assumed the reality and language we are born into, the first principles that shape the deep values, beliefs, and meanings that underpin our collective way of life are usually invisible to us. The sociologist of knowledge tries to do two things: firstly, to make the underlying assumptions defining the knowledge that is native to any given life-world visible; and secondly, to understand how those knowledge categories shape the parameters of realistic action within that life-world.

Reading White’s Thesis as a sociologist of knowledge, three things seem uncontroversially true:

1. Contemporary Western modernity knows nature in a distinctive way, which shapes what is normative to us regarding how we use nature.

2. The deep meaning, belief, and value foundations of Western modernity’s present knowledge of nature are tied up with how we understand science and technology, and that understanding is shaped by a deeper backstory of assumed meanings and truths embedded in Western Christian theology.

3. If we cannot re-think our presently assumed first-order knowledge categories, there seems little hope that we will change the entrenched pattern of ecological degradation that is native to our prevailing life-world.

Taking these three insights from White as valid, this book will not delve into the expansive literature in eco-theology concerning what other aspects of White’s Thesis are right or wrong. Instead, reading White in a sociology of knowledge manner, this book offers a brief defence of the following startling two-pronged claim:

A. A particular type of Christian theology is the primary underlying cause of contemporary anthropogenic climate change; and

B. Christian theology still provides us with the best starting place to seek to respond to this crisis.

The above is a startling claim because White thinks that whether you personally are religious or not, a certain type of Christian theology is the most primary definer of your culturally assumed approach to the meaning and use of nature. White has what I will call a “big” and substrata-located view of what theology is, which ignores secular/religious separations, and which does not situate theology exclusively within a religious domain. Theology—in White’s “big” usage—is someth...