One Thing

So. What’ll it be today?

Rage or despair?

Or can I manage to set them aside for a while? At least enough to get my work done? What would that be? Indifference? Duty? Pragmatism? Something else?

I could joke about no coffee yet, this being Monday morning, to rattle the familiar tropes and play for laughs. I carried in a couple of conversations with my pastor, a lectionary ping of Mark 10, a Bonhoeffer quote (offered by another Lutheran pastor), a day of earnest student meetings, and a theological tick embedding itself in my neck.

It’s a lot to lug to my new office on the second floor. I could take the stairs and burn a few extra calories or take the elevator and cycle a few electrons driven by a coal-fire somewhere else, or a fossil gas, maybe (I should know this).

In Mark 10, the rich young ruler argues his piety to Jesus and Jesus says (my paraphrase), “I love you, but you lack one thing. Go and sell everything you own, give the money to the poor, and follow me.” After which the young ruler goes away grieving because he had lots of stuff. 

That “one thing” comment does a lot of work in Jesus’ response and perhaps enables a cultural relevancy.

It juxtaposes with an important video featuring climate scientist Kevin Anderson on the official Youtube channel of the United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security. You should give a listen.

In the video, Anderson describes lucidly how the climate crisis is exacerbated by or even a product of wealth disparities. This is true for wealth disparities between nations as well as between individuals within nations. In short, carbon emissions scale with wealth such that the climate crisis is a cumulative effect of wealthy nations and wealthy individuals emitting far more than their fair share of greenhouse gases. This is based on “equitable emissions,” reflecting earth’s capacity to absorb and mitigate those wastes and still dissipate enough heat for the climate to maintain the relative stability that is has since the dawn of human civilization. 

True as well, wealthy nations and wealthy people have many more options for avoiding or mitigating effects of a warming climate (at least in the short term). Hence the deeper injustice, the wealthy cumulatively and mostly caused the crisis and resist using their power and agency to fix the crisis, while the poor (and the non-human) creation bear most of the misery and damage. This scenario is exacerbated further by a recent paper in Nature (one of the top science journals in the world) that carbon sequestration in natural systems, which has largely increased with human-caused emissions, is starting to break down at a mechanistic level (article in the Guardian here).

This is where the moral authority of religion should be speaking. The stakes are global and long-term. This is a moment where the need for a socio-religious revolution is as ripe as it was in Medieval Europe when the protestant reformation was birthed. It is humanity’s greatest project right now. And an American church flirting with Christian nationalism and authoritarianism has indulgences for sale. 

Anderson is careful to say, several times, that the culpably wealthy in his framing include professors in western universities – and by extension the middle/upper class church people who, I suspect, are the core readers of the Reformed Journal (and I confess my own hypocrisies). Hence I rebel at the thought that politics should be kept separate from our Christianity. The climate crisis is a political issue, and it bears directly on Christian mandates to love selflessly. 

There is a direct parallel between the rich young ruler arguing his piety and the argument (made to me before) that Christianity need not concern itself with a climate crisis because 1) our all-powerful God will fix it, or 2) the earth is destined to burn anyway.

It is a perverse theology. The argument essentially says that God loves us rich, western Christians so much that we can continue to live unaware and untroubled while the rest of the world burns and degrades. Otherwise, God will work a miracle of planetary scale and against the laws of physics to enable our unique privilege – as we all the while maintain the same pietistic gloss (look how strong MY faith is!). 

That “one thing” in a climate crisis is a certain sort of wealthy North American idolatry. It includes a whole list of high-emissions activities that we accept as normal, even as blessings (e.g. second homes, lavish travel habits, excess consumption and waste) with the mistaken assumption that the future will essentially look like our present does now. More importantly, because the stickiest challenges are systemic, it includes a resistance to using our political and financial agency to strategically steer the battleship in the direction of reduced emissions and just mitigation for our global human and non-human kin. 

Theology to be meaningful at all, needs to be meaningful outside of the self-referential bubbles that we create for ourselves. And not to put too fine a point on it, but there is a critical election coming up. Vote for people who take the climate crisis seriously. 

Here’s the Bonhoeffer quote: 

If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.