Christianity and the survival of creation
I’ve been reading in Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community. The collection of essays is uniformly very good, but the final essay is the title of the book, and it is quite outstanding. Anyone with a serious interest in ecology should read it; in fact, anyone with a serious interest in community and the economy and the survival of our planet should read it.
As I began reading, the question foremost in my mind was this: “How are the ecological problems we face related to sexuality?” The answers will surprise you.
One of the essays in the book was published elsewhere. Wendell Berry writes in CrossCurrents:
“I want to begin with a problem: namely, that the culpability of Christianity in the destruction of the natural world, and the uselessness of Christianity to any effort to correct that destruction, are now established cliches of the conservation movement. This is a problem for two reasons: First, the indictment of Christianity by the anti-Christian conservationists is, in many respects, just. For instance, the complicity of Christian priests, preachers, and missionaries in the cultural destruction and the economic exploitation of the primary peoples of the Western Hemisphere as well as of traditional cultures around the world, is notorious. Christian organizations, to this day, remain largely indifferent to the rape and plunder of the world and of its traditional cultures.
“The conservationist indictment of Christianity is a problem, secondly, because, however just it may be, it does not come from an adequate understanding of the Bible and the cultural traditions that descend from the Bible. The anti-Christian conservationists characteristically deal with the Bible by waving it off. And this dismissal conceals, as such dismissals are apt to do, an ignorance that invalidates it. The Bible is an inspired book written by human hands; as such, it is certainly subject to criticism. But the anti-Christian environmentalists have not mastered the first rule of the criticism of books: you have to read them before you criticize them… It entails, furthermore, the making of very precise distinctions between biblical instruction and the behavior of those peoples supposed to have been biblically instructed.”
Related: “Domination or Delight?” in the latest issue of The Journal of Contemplative Spirituality
Related: Ecological footprint