Using Religion to Go Green

Adorned in a full-length clerical robe with a Bible in hand, Reverend Robert J. Mark, a McDonald Fellow at Memorial Church, stood in front of the Massachusetts State Legislature two Sundays ago, and spoke to a motley crowd of similarly-attired reverends, climate activists, several Boston Mounted Police that gathered on the lawns of the Boston Common.

The event was the start off a month-long campaign for climate change, in which affiliates of the Leadership Campaign—a group of student activists—aim to pressure Massachusetts politicians to adopt aggressive renewable energy legislation by camping-out in scattered tents on the Boston Common until the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

“We are taught all creation is sacred and holy,” Mark said, while speaking to the crowd and reading the Creation Psalm from the Book of Genesis. “We have to protect creation and be ‘stewards of God’s creation.’”

Mark had come to keynote the climate campaign, as part of a recent surge of interest among Harvard’s interfaith community in climate change and environmental issues.

Climate change has landed at the top of many Harvard Christian chapters’ agendas, though the sects and individuals differ in how they frame the issue within Christian theology.

Other participants drawn to the rally for religious reasons included several Harvard-affiliated reverends, Harvard Divinity School students both current and former.

“The number of lives which will be lost and the disproportionate amount of life quality loss will be suffered by people in the more impoverished parts of the world,” said Nicholas C. Hayes ’08, who runs a religious environmental activist group at MIT. “This is a justice issue that we as a Church and we as a country and we as a species face.”

A CALL TO ACTION

Two weeks ago, a large crowd gathered in the Divinity School for similar reasons. Sallie McFague, a renowned feminist and Christian theologian, spoke about the application of Christian doctrine to ecological issues.

“Religion is into the business of forming the imagination and influencing the action of people,” she said. “It can make a significant contribution to the environmental problem.”

To Emma R. Crossen, a third-year in the Master of Divinity program at the HDS, this speech was particularly relevant. Crossen, who had breakfast with McFague earlier that day, is the coordinator of an Eco-Div group at HDS.

Although founded just over a year ago by a group of students focused on making the campus more sustainable Eco-Div is already very active.

She said that the club hosts speakers, coordinates student rallies, and has started a community garden at the Divinity School.

But for Crossen, eco-theology isn’t something new.

“In a way, our need for environmental theology is a statement of how disconnected we’ve become. It’s not a new discovery in theology,” she said. “This is integral to who we are. It’s just this culture has allowed us to forget about it.”

Michael J. Nilon, another third-year HDS student and an Eco-Div member, said that he foresees the eco-theology movement eventually evolving into something that could “potentially redefine the field of theology.”

After graduation. Crossen hopes to continue to bring an ecological perspective to bear on religious life. In addition to joining the month-long camp-out on the Common, Crossen has looked at potential future employers, such as Groundwork Somerville, an organization that strives to bring sustainable living to the community.

SETTING THE STAGE

One HDS student, Christopher J. Ashley, synthesized environmental and religious concerns in his own life after participating in the annual corn harvest in Kenya. For the fourth year in a row, the harvest was blighted with disease.

“Four straight years is not a famine. It’s climate change,” Ashley said.

Ashley’s experience emphasized the far-reaching and indiscriminate effects of environmental degradation, and underscored the importance of global solidarity in combating it.

“The effects of climate change are borne most of all by the most vulnerable people and Christians are called to stand with them in solidarity to protect them,” he said. “I’ve seen people starving and I have a stake in that.”

Ashley also participates in a weekly discussion at Christ Church Cambridge, led by Harvard Reverend Robert M. Tobin.

Tobin’s sermon two weeks ago tail-ended International Day of Climate Action, during which Christ Church rang their bells 350 times as part of a worldwide movement to draw political attention to climate change.

“We have to accept responsibility for not having done more in creating a culture where the natural world is respected,” said Tobin. “We have to repent.”

However, most of the sermon and the subsequent discussion was optimistic. It emphasized the unique ability Christians have to help overcome climate change.

“The language about belonging to something larger, voluntary relinquishment of privilege, and understanding resources and materials in terms of something other than the individual have long been there in the Christian faith,” Tobin said.

A GREENER RELIGION

Traditionally, Evangelical Christians have differed in their interpretation of the Creation Psalm, believing that instead of mandating human stewardship for the environment, Genesis grants human beings ‘dominion’ over it.

But, for one reverend of Harvard’s Memorial Church, Jonathan C. Page ’02, environmental theology isn’t as grounded in eco-stewardship as in morality.

“There’s a long-standing belief that human beings are meant to do whatever they want more or less [with the environment],” Page said. “But in the last fifteen years, there’s been a real change, and Christians have begun to see climate change as a moral issue.”

Page has worked at Harvard to mobilize religious people around climate change issues, including helping organize a Climate Convocation at Memorial Church early last month, which featured multi-faith advocacy for environmental causes and key-note speaker William E. McKibben ’82.

“It’s time for people who do believe in combating climate change to speak up about it,” Page said. “The stakes are very high...it’s an issue [of] death and destruction.”

For Bishop Roy F. “Bud” Cederholm, suffragan bishop of the Massachusetts Diocesis, climate change and environmental degradation is not only definitively linked to Christian theology, but is at its core. It is the “most serious ethical, moral, and justice issue that the church faces today” and should be at the forefront of churches’ agendas, he said.

Cederholm, the acclaimed ‘green’ bishop of Massachusetts, has been active in the past years in getting Anglican churches on board about climate change, encouraging churches to become more energy efficient and network with state-wide groups to pressure politicians to change public policy.

“Creation is a gift from god, it’s an absolute sin to destroy, abuse and harm it in the ways we’ve done,” Cederholm said. “I want my grandchildren to have an earth with the resources and beauty we have all been blessed with. We need to repent, repair, and renew the creation of the earth.”

—Staff writer Natasha S. Whitney can be reached at nwhitney@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Jessie Jiang can be reached at jiang9@fas.harvard.edu.