"Worshipping Green Idols"

Charles T. Rubin

Duquesne University

Prepared for the Philadelphia Society National Meeting, Oak Brook, Illinois, April 25, 1998.

All rights reserved by the author.

If we ask "Is contemporary environmentalism a religion?" we must start with three undeniable observations. The first is that many people act passionately out of concern for what we have come to call "environmental issues," and a great many more feel, or claim to feel, passionately about those issues.

The second observation is that mainline, progressive churches and synagogues, along with some elements of the American evangelical movement, have not infrequently adopted the cause and language of environmentalism into their social action agendas and/or modes of worship. At the same time, some environmentalists sometimes speak a religious or quasi-religious language.

The third observation is that there are some--still relatively few--people who deliberately and explicitly engage in a sort of nature worship, some others who in their beliefs and actions come quite close to such worship. Additionally, there are intellectuals, few in number but not without influence, who are engaged in proselytizing on behalf of such worship: say a Father Thomas Berry, who in the name of environmental concern seems to look back fondly to the pagan despotisms of the ancient world¹, or Dolores LaChapelle, who thinks that some of our modern social problems stem from the suppression of ancient orgiastic rituals.²

These three observations certainly illustrate the remarkable affective power of the contemporary environmental movement. But before we conclude from them that this movement as a whole is best understood as a religion, we should deal with two important questions. The first is, does the temptation to call environmentalism a religion reflect more on the character of contemporary environmentalism, or on the character of contemporary religion? The second is yet more basic: if environmentalism is a religion, what difference does that make for our judgement of whether it is a good thing or a bad thing? Let me take up each in turn.

The temptation to call environmentalism a religion may stem in part from something that Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas described beautifully in their book Risk and Culture: the essentially sectarian nature of the movement.³ They illustrate well how in its organization, behavior, and worldview it is like many religious sects: oppositional, egalitarian, apocalyptic. But for Wildavsky and Douglas, the sectarian was a kind of organization first and foremost--it could be religious in character, or not. To know if environmentalism is a religious sect we would need to look beyond its organization and the beliefs characteristic of that sectarian form to something else. What else? What does the word "religion" add to the picture?

If we call environmentalism a religious sect it seems to me to be more telling about what we mean by "religion" in the modern world than about what environmentalism is. The weakening grip of our understanding on the serious nature of faith and the obligations pertaining thereunto is nicely told by the Oxford English Dictionary entry for "religion." It begins with "a state of life bound by monastic vows" and proceeds through an increasingly generic series of meanings to "devotion to some principle." Doubtless a future edition will include the entry, "whatever I feel like doing." If all religion is, is devotion to some principle, then of course environmentalism is a religion--but I doubt that either the friends or the enemies of religion would be satisfied with such a degraded use of the term. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, if our environmentalism is a substitute for religion, then so is our religion.⁴

We need to be cautious about associating any and all deeply or passionately held beliefs with religion or with some sort of religious impulse if we want to use the term seriously. Surely it is possible for there to be serious, faith-based reflection on man's relationship with the created world--something different from "the environment." Furthermore, that, in an increasingly secular world, environmentalism may somehow appear as a substitute for faith in God strikes me as a plausible argument. Yet when we seek to understand the environmental movement and its relationship to such faith we should be wary of accepting substitutes. When people stop believing in God, C.S. Lewis said (At least, I think so--someone in this audience will know for sure), it's not that they believe in nothing, it's that they will believe anything. This "anything" does not have to be at all like a religion in any serious sense to fill a space vacant of faith--particularly if people persistently misunderstand or are made to misunderstand what is missing in their lives. For example, Screwtape wishes Wormwood to encourage his victim's belief in "creative evolution, scientific humanism or communism." Today Screwtape might just as well recommend environmentalism. It shares with the other "isms" the future-orientation which is, as he teaches, at once so appealing and so destructive of virtue. Screwtape admits that the enemy above also wants us to think about the future, but argues correctly that it is no small difference to assert that our father below would have us "haunted by imminent visions of a heaven or hell on earth"-- the stock in trade of contemporary environmentalism.⁵ If these "isms" are to be treated as religions, they are strange religions that act to destroy faith. I grant it can have rhetorical appeal to be able to speak about "the god that failed" or "the religion of secular humanism," just as I think that there are audiences before whom it is useful for environmentalists to speak in religious tones. Still, these tropes do not conform to the highest standard of rhetoric: speaking the truth effectively.

If we have come to a point where we can say "he recycles religiously" with the same seriousness that we might have once said "he prays religiously," it is a tribute to the secularism that is inherent in what many mean by "religion" today, more than to seriousness about recycling. The category has come to put all faiths, revelations and principles on an equal footing regardless of their content--a fine rubric for a secular society, but one which those who live by faith might be wary of. Such creeping secularism makes it hard to be sure about what we are seeing when we find environmentalism infiltrating worship. When progressive congregations adopt programs and prayers calling attention to our environmental sins, they might be making genuine efforts to rethink the status of God's creation as it can be understood in sacred terms. Or they might be falling prey to the temptations of paganism. But it seems to me more likely that they are exhibiting here, as they already have in so many other forms, their readiness to adopt the intellectual fashions of the secular world, whether that secularism is called environmentalism, existentialism, communism, feminism, or postmodernism.

We are justified in calling environmentalism a religion, then, only if we are satisfied that "mere faith," (if one might generalize beyond Lewis in this way), is the same as "mere religion." I think it is not, and hence regard this way of conceptualizing environmentalism as problematic. In its origins and still today in its essence environmentalism is a secular, utopian, political ideology. ⁶ In fact, most of its key founders were intensely secular in outlook, an accompaniment of the scientific pretense that was so central to their arguments. In its formative period, the 1960s, environmentalism was more hostile to established religions than not. The fact that Lynn White's famous, and famously bad, essay blaming mainstream Judeo-Christianity for the environmental crisis was published in Science magazine--the nation's most prestigious general science journal--was as much symptomatic of this hostility as causative.⁷

Now, it is always possible that in some manner unknown to them, these environmental popularizers were building on assumptions, or using language, that can in some way be linked to a faith tradition. Such a claim would be easier to make if there were a bright line to be traced between the conservation movement of the earlier part of this century, and contemporary environmentalism, since conservationism shows more signs of having been influenced by various strands of Protestant belief. But I think there is no such bright line, that history shows more discontinuity than continuity, as the very terms we use witness. We are not all conservationists today, but environmentalists.

On the other hand, suppose I am wrong on that point, and that the linkages can be made. What does it tell us if we can find remnants of older American faith concepts or modes of thought within contemporary environmentalism? Not much, it seems to me, because the secular intentions of today's authors count for a good deal. It may be that the phase "environmental apocalypse" would not have some of the meaning and resonance it has without the Apocalypse of St. John. But at the very least, the use of such a term commits the contemporary author who uses it to nothing in Christian doctrine. Wildavsky and Douglas show nicely how apocalyptic tendencies are part of sectarian culture generally, a glue to hold together a mode of organization that is always on the verge of schism. As a matter of our anthropological or sociological study of environmentalism, playing the religion card is not even strictly speaking necessary, except in cases where the faith content is overtly developed. Furthermore, from this point of view to speak of finding "secularized religious concepts" in environmentalism may or may not say something interesting to a historian of ideas, but in connection with any serious conception of faith it would be immediately seen as conceptually oxymoronic.

Let me turn now to my second question: if we accept that environmentalism is a religion, does that tell us anything about whether it is a bad or good thing?

The answers sometimes provided to this question might give the friends of faith some pause. If environmentalism is a religion, then we should fear it as we would fear the domination of any religious orthodoxy. If environmentalism is a religion, it should not be taught in schools. If environmentalism is a religion we should, in my friend Marlo Lewis' memorable phrase, "disestablish the green cathedrals" and privatize the National Parks.

It may be a problem for such arguments that they appear to rely on a Jeffersonian "wall of separation" understanding of the first amendment that in other contexts conservatives would be (rightly) loath to rely on. Nor do I imagine that many libertarians would look forward to a world in which a property developer might face free-exercise legal challenges should he wish to infringe upon what is suddenly a sacred grove. But I think this kind of negative judgement of environmentalism as a religion faces yet deeper problems. The fear of environmentalism as a religion is here implicitly a reduction of faith to dogma, by way again of our easygoing rubric of religion. We fear the victory of a dogma that will be enforced by law and policy. However, at the same time, the thoughtless toleration that has come to be implicit in "religion" assures us that in matters of dogma there are no meaningful disputes. We don't want the state supporting teaching Talmud to children, and we equally don't want the state supporting Druidical child sacrifice. As between the two, what can one say?

In other words, if we want to critique environmentalism as a religion, we are left with an awkward choice. Either it is bad because it is a religion, on a par with all others in its potential danger if it gains public power, or it is a bad religion, i.e., in its still relatively rare overtly religious forms, polytheistic and idolatrous in fact or in tendency, while in its more attenuated mainstream forms skirting a heretical pantheism. Such concerns will have the appearance of mere bigotry if the real issue is framed only as what the state should or should not be supporting. While if we start from what the state should or should not support, the "religion of environmentalism" quickly gains the status of its at least more venerable brethren.

As I would want neither a public crusade against environmentalists for being pagans nor the perception of moral equivalence between every tree-hugger and every rabbinic student, I find this result a Hobson's choice. If we come to accept the proposition that environmentalism is a religion, it will as a result of this choice only make the movement the more difficult to criticize. The most likely result would be that environmentalism increases in respectability. We easy going Americans rarely publicly criticize a religion not our own, even as many would tend to be encouraged in their Ben Franklinesque willingness to cooperate with and contribute to what must, as a religion, obviously therefore be a good cause--even if it is not exactly their church. Neither would environmental policies suddenly disappear from the public agenda if the public thought environmentalism was a religion, any more than the fact that some people think our laws against murder are grounded in the Ten Commandments makes those laws disappear.

Thinking of environmentalism as a religion, then, obscures the ground on which we are to judge it a good thing or a bad thing. That comes as no surprise if we see it less as a religion than as a political movement. Like any political movement, it is based on a normative vision of how the world should be, and a diagnosis of what is wrong with the present world based on that vision. Finally it presents a program for achieving the vision. To judge it requires confronting its norms and the means put forward to achieve them. To say all of this is a religion is either to accept the notion that any strongly held normative claim is religious, or to suggest that environmentalists should be as free from external scrutiny of their faith claims as any other religious group--i.e. to denigrate religion or to elevate environmentalism.

The result again is that environmentalism becomes harder to criticize starting either from faith or from reason. But these are just the sort of critiques that are most necessary. Environmentalism has to be displayed with all the inadequacies of its scientific foundations, without implying that flawed science is the essence of religion. Its utopian and indeed often totalitarian political assumptions need to be investigated, without the dogmatic assumption that it must share such characteristics with faith. And when environmentalism does make faith claims, they need to be critiqued for their theological or Biblical inadequacies, without the assumption that "anything goes" under the banner of religion.

This necessary road is a hard road, and the virtue of giving up and calling environmentalism a religion may be evident to those who think that the battle against environmentalism is lost in principle, and its ill effects can only be confined, its less problematic aspects channeled in healthier directions. Whether such tactics will work against a still young and vigorous sect may be open to doubt. But to treat the matter tactically is to forget something so basic and so obvious that I almost hesitate to say it. If religion retains any meaning, it is a meaning that centers on God. The environment is not God, and God is not the environment. Environmentalism does not start from faith in God, but from faith in our own powers. It may pretend to be a religion, or we may pretend it is a religion. But as the old joke goes, you can call the cat's tail a leg, but a cat still doesn't have five legs.

Notes

1. Thomas Berry, The Dream of Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988).

2. Dolores LaChapelle, Earth Wisdom (Silverton: Finn Hill Arts, 1978).

3. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

4. The original statement is "Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion." T.S. Eliot, "A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry," in Selected Essays: New Edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964): 32.

5. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (New York: Bantam Books, 1982): 44.

6. For a full discussion of the political program that drives contemporary environmentalism see Charles T. Rubin, The Green Crusade: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). For an intelligent and more sympathetic view of environmentalism's political roots, see Bob Pepperman Taylor, Our Limits Transgressed: environmental Political Thought in America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992).

7. Those strands of environmental thinking mentioned at the outset that are overtly and self-consciously modes of paganism or nature worship even stand to some degree in tension with the radical environmentalism with which they are most frequently allied. It is among "deep ecologists" that such religious forms are most likely to be found. Yet in principal, the "ecoegalitarianism" of deep ecology, its postulation of the equal value of all forms of life, stands in tension with any hierarchical kind of spirituality. That eliminates a fair number of older forms of worship. That, in turn, may help explain why so often these modern believers in the old ways end up inventing their rituals and doctrines, choosing with abandon among older forms and adding new at will. It might be said that they are less inviting old gods back than inventing new ones. Such an approach to faith is itself distinctly modern and, ultimately, secular in inspiration.