Essay

Climate

Creed

Sustainability

30 May 2024

9 min read

Why Climate Change is at heart, a spiritual problem

Climate change does not begin with technical solutions but with spiritual ones.

Mark Scarlata

Mark is a lecturer and priest. He’s the author of several books and his latest, Wine, Soil and Salvation, explores the use of wine throughout the Old and New Testament.

Planet Earth viewed in totality from space. Africa and Arabia are visible under some cloud in the south.

Captured by Apollo 17, the Blue Marble image is credited with influencing how humanity viewed our home.

NASA.

In 1972 the United Nations commissioned a report called Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet. Its authors chose a cover image which captured the earth from space. The bright blue marble-like planet sits majestically against the black background of the vast universe. The beauty and simplicity of the image was a reminder of the unique habitat we share on this planet and the need to care for it.

Over fifty years after the authors raised concerns about a future ecological crisis, we do not find ourselves in any less critical circumstances. Average temperatures around the globe continue to rise, deforestation and pollution of water carries on and the land still suffers from over-farming and the use of harmful chemicals. These are only a few of the ways the planet has suffered.

The tone of the book, and the tone of the dialogue since then, often depicts environmental issues as a problem to be fixed. Rather than changing our own habits, many seek to maintain our current quality of life by coming up with green solutions that satisfy our levels of consumption.

The trouble with this kind of thinking is that we can reduce the beautifully complex and dynamic ecology of our world to a problem that requires a technical solution. The environment becomes common matter or stuff that can be used as a commodity to be bought, sold or traded on the market. This promotes the idea that the world around us is nothing more than material to be mastered through technological innovations by the ingenuity and determination of the human will. But is it just a matter of time before advanced technologies will solve all our environmental problems? Or is it possible that reframing the environmental crisis through a theological lens could help us see that the problem might not only be technology or industrialization, but that it might be something deeper in our souls?

Looking at creation through a different lens

In 2014 Pope Francis wrote an encyclical (a letter to the Catholic Church) called Laudato Si (‘Praise to you’). The title comes from a song of St. Francis of Assisi to celebrate creation - ‘Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.’ The saint’s hymn of praise celebrates creation as a living being, a partner, a sister, a mother that sustains us and reveals the glory of God. And this is what Pope Francis sets out to remind his readers—that creation is not merely a commodity to be used or a problem to be solved. Instead, the natural world is sacred because it was created by God, is sustained by God, and is filled with his divine glory.

Francis writes,

‘We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will…This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.’

The ecological demise and poor health of our environment reflects our misunderstanding of humanity’s role within an integrated ecology. Francis warns that if we fail to see the deepest spiritual roots of our problem, we won’t be able to work out how we are to live within creation.

Rather than focusing on rising sea levels or changing weather patterns, Francis asks us to step back and see the larger picture through the lens of how God relates to his creation and to our role as human beings.

‘Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm.’

The globalization and technologization of the world have led us to believe that our relationship to the environment is not a complementary one that is mutually sustaining. Yet Pope Francis reminds us that all of life is bound together in an ‘integral ecology’ and that we live in a vast meshwork of living organisms that sustain and support each other. In an integral ecology these interrelations are fully entwined so as we look to address environmental concerns we also examine our own spiritual health as well as addressing social, economic and political issues in order to build and sustain heathier communities especially for the vulnerable and the poor.

An age of gluttony

To look with new eyes at the environmental crisis, however, humanity must also look within. Over the centuries the Christian tradition has highlighted some of the most destructive habits for human beings. These can have a disastrous impact on us and on those around us. In the church these are sometimes called the ‘seven deadly sins’ which outline the most common ways that human beings end up destroying themselves and the world. One of the sins is gluttony.

Gluttony is often associated with overeating or excess. Though excessive consumption may reflect outward signs of gluttony, the real root of it is connected to our desire for more than we need and a fear that we don’t have enough. Consuming more than we need (out of anxiety or for whatever reason) always comes at the expense of the needs of those around us. When we are driven by gluttony, we forget about our interdependence in the world, in our communities or in our families. Instead, we become consumed with satisfying our own needs and making sure that we have enough.

Rowan Williams sums up the dangers of gluttony by saying that we fail to grasp something fundamental in how we relate to others and to creation. ‘Gluttony, as the spiritual tradition approaches it, is another way of losing touch with our createdness: so much comes back to this. We lose touch with what it is to be a created being, and so lose touch with the basic truth that we are because God is.’ When we forget that we are God’s creation, living within an integrated ecology, we forget how we relate to all living things around us. Losing our idea of being created within God’s creation begins to unveil some of the spiritual roots of the current ecological crisis.

Part of what Pope Francis is saying is that a Christian approach to the environment is one that recognizes the spiritual and ethical implications of our actions in the world. A lack of attention to our spiritual condition can result in the abuse of the poor and the exploitation of the earth. When we fail to recognise God’s presence in each person and in his creation we mask the true problems behind extreme global consumerism that seduce us into wanting more without considering the needs of others.

Francis goes on to write,

‘The current global situation engenders a feeling of instability and uncertainty, which in turn becomes “a seedbed for collective selfishness”. When people become self-centred and self-enclosed, their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume.’

The ecological issues we face today are not problems that can ultimately be solved through technology. They require a change of heart, a change of vision and the ability to see the presence of the divine once again in the world we inhabit.

The re-enchantment of creation

The word ‘re-enchantment’ has seen a recent surge in popular cultural language recently. Indeed, this website uses it to describe its flagship podcast! The word expresses the desire of many to move away from the purely scientific and material approach to the world in order to recapture something that the secular age seems to have lost.

Though the word ‘enchantment’ can often conjure up images of fairies and magical forests, its Christian use is a way to describe how we see God’s divine presence in creation. Both Christians and Jews historically have understood that God inhabits the whole of the cosmos.

This is not some type of pantheism where all things that exist are god. Instead, God’s life and his Spirit sustains all things and brings all life into existence. To see the divine presence in creation is to recognize that the world is not just a material commodity but, rather, as Francis of Assisi understood, it is our companion that sustains us, nurtures us and journeys with us through life.

The re-enchantment of the world has also found its voice through non-Christian environmental approaches that have leaned towards pagan ideas around Gaia. They argue that nature, or Gaia, is something that should be honoured, worshipped and preserved. Philosopher Mary Midgley wrote, ‘The idea of Gaia—of life on earth as a self-sustaining natural system—is not a gratuitous, semi-mystical fantasy. It is a really useful idea, a cure for distortions that spoil our current worldview.’

Though these ideas for creation care move in the right direction, the Christian faith claims that worship should be offered to God alone. To treat the creature as the Creator is a mistake. God is not Gaia. God is the only creator and the creation is filled with his glory.

To see the world through re-enchanted eyes is to see the divine presence radiating through all things—an ocean wave, the sand, soil, trees, streams, birds, insects and animals. All creation breathes with the breath of God. The ancient Israelites understood God’s presence in the wonder of the created world and yet they also saw themselves fully integrated into the life of that world both physically and spiritually. Rather than thinking of God as some eternal entity or ‘thing’ that exists apart from creation, Christian tradition understands that he inhabits his world and sustains all life.

Pope Francis is right—our environmental challenges are not a technological problem to be solved, they’re a spiritual problem that effects all of humanity. Technology can certainly help address some of the issues that we’ve created and move us towards a healthier future, but if we’re serious about an environmental response it needs to include a spiritual change. If we are called to cherish, keep and live in God’s creation, we will first need to change our hearts and our habits. To grow as participants in God’s integral ecology we begin with an understanding of who we are and our inclination towards things like gluttony. Then we can begin to recognise who we are as God’s creatures and how we can live beneficially and generously in our communities, in relation to our neighbour and to the natural world.

Christianity does not offer some ‘heavenly spirituality’ that detaches our lives from the natural world. Instead, it believes in a God who got his hands dirty in the soil of Eden to make human beings. This a God who fashioned his creation and inhabits his creation through his divine presence and his breath of life. This is also a God who inhabited flesh like us in the incarnation. He is a God who brought all things into beings, sustains all things, and invites us to participate and bring hope to a world fully integrated in the peace, justice and mercy of his love.

Essay

Church and state

Creed

Royalty

9 May 2023

6 min read

After the coronation: what next for church and state?

As the coronation recedes, what's the future for an established church or a religiously impartial state, asks Jonathan Chaplin.

Jonathan Chaplin

Jonathan Chaplin is a lifelong Anglican, a Fellow of Wesley House, Cambridge and author of Beyond Establishment: Resetting Church-State Relations in England (SCM 2022)

A team of street sweepers clear up the road after the coronation procession, outside the Houses of Parliament.

Sweeping the street after the coronation.

Westminster City Council.

The magnificent and mysterious pageantry of the coronation, climaxing in the thrill of ‘Zadok the Priest’ bursting out over the royal anointing and the tremulous descent of St Edward’s crown onto the head of the king, are now receding into memory. The performative power of the event may linger for a while, but the time for critical reflection on what just happened has already begun.

The event will have evoked a wide variety of responses in different sections of the nation. Polls suggest that the majority remained largely indifferent, probably including many who had the TV on in the background while enjoying a long weekend spent on other things. A minority, not only vocal supporters of ‘Republic’, will have found the whole thing objectionable in principle. That will likely include many among the majority of young people who now report sharply declining support for the monarchy itself.

To have tampered overmuch with its religious character would have been to undermine their sense of cultural identity, whatever they made of it theologically (if anything).

Some, also a minority, will have looked to it to reconnect with longstanding British traditions that allow us to rise, even momentarily, above the grasping character of party politics and to offer to a fractured and anxious people a renewed prospect of national harmony.

For some among that minority, the religious character of the event will have been important. To many from non-Christian faiths, the coronation consolidates an Anglican Establishment which, they think, serves to protect the public standing of all faiths. The (welcome) participation of representatives of Britain’s minority faiths in the event will have confirmed that perception.

To others in the same minority, Christianity – represented here by the Church of England – is an essential thread in the weave of a national culture in need of shoring up. To have tampered overmuch with its religious character would have been to undermine their sense of cultural identity, whatever they made of it theologically (if anything).

To still others – we are now talking about a small minority-within-a-minority – the Christian character of the event is decisive to its intrinsic meaning and public significance. Mostly but not exclusively English Anglicans (the category includes many Catholics, for example), such voices claim that the coronation expresses a distinctively Christian theology of accountability and service that has been vital in the formation of Britain and should be retained if such goals are to be kept alive.

Political authority, they argue, is a trust from God, laying on its holders a solemn, ‘covenantal’, duty to govern according to God’s justice and to serve the common good. This theology was lucidly expressed in the Church of England’s commentary on the Coronation liturgy and appeared in many other Christian statements ahead of the event (for example, here, here and here). Bishop Graham Tomlin expressed doubt that there could be a better way to uphold a vision of accountable government.

This Christian theology of accountability, while truly at the core of the coronation liturgy, was almost entirely ignored by the media before and during the day.

The few in the secular media that did recognise its specifically Christian character mostly reacted indifferently or adversely to it (the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley, a Catholic, was one exception). Some drew attention to the incongruity of one small and declining English Christian denomination continuing to preside over the investiture of the head of state of a pervasively secularised, religiously plural, and multinational, United Kingdom. The Guardian’s Martin Kettle even claimed that the event amounts to ‘a lie at the heart of the British state’. ‘The lie is that Britain is a practising Christian nation, and that it is defined and held together by the established Protestant religion, of which the monarch is the embodiment’.

Whether or not we accept that harsh verdict, it is surely necessary for the Church of England to confront the bleak sociological facts behind it. With fewer than three per cent of the population actively committed to the Church of England, what remains of its entitlement to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of being the ‘national Church’? Is there not a glaring presumption in wishing to remain the custodian of ‘the faith of the nation’ when the nation has overwhelmingly abandoned that faith – however much some still feel an affection for it as an embellishment of English culture?

But the Church of England should not be driven primarily by sociological considerations, telling though they are. It should be guided by theological imperatives. And that requires it to revisit the theology of accountability outlined above. The problem is not with the claim that rulers are accountable to God and people. That has long been the central assertion of Christian political theology; I affirm it. The problem is with granting that claim a constitutional status – which is exactly what investing a head of state in the context of a Christian service amounts to.

Defenders of the coronation typically refer back to the polity of biblical Israel to justify its sacral character. But they tend not to acknowledge that, in the Hebrew scriptures, biblical Israel was, uniquely, established by God as a covenanted confessional polity in which only the religion of Yahweh was permitted (and in which the priestly anointing of kings was prescribed).

But this arrangement has now been rendered obsolete by the ‘New Covenant’ inaugurated in Jesus Christ. The people of God have been transformed into a transnational voluntary fellowship of Christ-followers, no longer bound to any one territorial national political community, still less to one legitimated by one religion and protecting only that religion. In the era of the New Covenant, states no longer possess the right to express an official view of the truth of religious claims. By implication, that also means they may not decide that any religion should be endorsed or preferred. This suggests they should maintain a posture of impartiality towards religions, and indeed towards other ultimate truth-claims (such as secular humanism). That is one way of treating their citizens equally, which is another basic political principle originating in Christian theology.

A religiously impartial state is not a morally empty state, but a limited state – a humble state.

Some will reply by claiming that this is a ‘secular liberal’ stance that abandons the political community to agnosticism, leaving a moral and spiritual vacuum at its heart. Rather, this view of the religious incompetence of the state is itself an outcome of Christian claims. These claims originated with the theologically orthodox seventeenth-century Dissenters but were eventually taken up by thinkers such as Locke and others in the broader liberal movement.

A religiously impartial state is not a morally empty state, but a limited state – a humble state. It certainly needs the resources and challenges of faith communities, among many others, to fulfil its vocation to serve the common good. But it need not, and theologically may not, confer constitutional privilege on any religion or religious organisation.

If the UK were to become such a state, its head of state could still be installed in a rich, morally freighted civil ceremony, perhaps in Westminster Hall, in which the monarch, and the governments acting in their name, could be solemnly charged to uphold ‘law, and justice, with mercy’ (as the Coronation oath puts it). Other European constitutional monarchies without coronations perform as well as ours on that score, mostly without any elements of an established church at all.

The task of the Church of England and other churches, alongside other citizens, would be to project into political debate their particular visions of what these commitments mean, and employ all democratic means to hold governments to account for fulfilling them. They are already doing this; they could do so more effectively.

The Church of England could then do so unburdened by the jarringly mixed messages sent by its retention of constitutional privilege and by its very visible association with the royal pomp and opulence of a traditional coronation. It may have only a decade or so to prepare itself for such an eventuality.