Abstract
Setting aside both the subtitles of Taylor’s argument and the dubious value of his after the fact disclaimer about labels cited by André Maintenay in our introduction, 1 it seems to me that arguably the central remaining tension of naming environmentalism as a religion is that many people who are part of the environmental movement in the West are often avowedly “secular,” agnostic or even assertively anti-religious. 2 For instance, in my own experience of Environmental Studies / Environment Science courses at the University of Manitoba, the only mention of religion that I recall was a citation of Lynn White Jr’s (1967) seminal article, which was used by the professor to call Christianity to account for its leading role in founding an anthropocentricism that helped to precipitate the Western war on nature. In a discussion-based class, this connection was presented without challenge. Yet, at the same time, the group of students who were enrolled in the Faculty of the Environment’s undergraduate capstone course where this citation was presented were all very committed to transforming the dominant US and Canadian culture in green ways. With perhaps a few silent objectors like myself, the majority of the people in the class agreed with the professor’s analysis and continue to do so. Further, I can safely conclude, from having kept in touch with a number of these individuals as I studied issues at the intersection of ecology and faith at Saint Michael’s College, 3 they would have objected strongly to naming the environmental movements with which they self-identified as religious, despite having participated in similar rituals to the ones that Taylor cites while making his case. At the same time, many of those same students follow what may be a “secularizing” liberal American and Canadian trend and continue to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” In short, this distinction of spirituality and religion did, and continues to, matter for many members of this self-identified group of green persons.
It is important to recognize the real tensions surrounding naming people’s experiences outside of categories to which they themselves would ascribe them. 4 With those tensions in mind, my portion of this discussion will briefly explore vocation as an area of similarity between the contemporary “environmentalism” and what may be considered the “traditional” or “established” religion of Christianity. In this manner and building upon anthropological concepts, I propose that there is both emic and etic (i.e., “insider” and “outsider” analytical) value to describing forms and functions of environmentalism 5 and, further, that making this distinction can reveal one area wherein naming environmentalism’s “religious” qualities can be fruitful. However, it is also important to note that I am making a weaker claim than is implied in Taylor’s work; namely, that the fruitfulness of viewing environmentalism as having elements of religiosity is best located on the level of form and function.
In Christian terms, vocation might represent a transcendental calling to specific religious office. It is this sense, of vocation as a calling to an explicitly devotional life, with which I am concerned here. This concept has its roots in the Western medieval period when it was often applied narrowly to a call (Latin vocatio) towards the “religious” life in a monastery. Since that time, the concept was expanded not only to the priests living without an affiliation to a monastic community but, with the advent of the Reformation, to include the priesthood of all believers (Placher, 2005: 5–8). As such, Christians could be understood as being called to faithful living while pursuing any given occupation.
Returning for a moment to the distinction between the emic and etic with regards to vocation, I am drawn to a key formative moment in the life of Peace Studies advisor David Creamer, who is, amongst other things, both a Jesuit priest and a tenured professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba. 6 Specifically, I am drawn to a story from when he took a group of students to Latin America for contextual learning about social justice issues. The trip was part of a Canadian Catholic Chaplains program in Cuernavaca, Mexico, called “Touch the Poor, Touch God.”
As part of this experience, Creamer and the Canadian students under his charge attended a Catholic Mass in a Base Ecclesiastical Community. During an interactive component of that service, a female congregant, inspired by liberationist themes, singled them out and then specifically named Dr Creamer and his group of apparently American tourists as “the oppressor” come to look upon the poor, which he reports made the group feel rather uncomfortable. Because Dr Creamer is someone who continues to combine education with social justice work (notably, at the moment, living in community with former prison inmates in the core of Winnipeg as they transition to being fully participating members of society), this is not a label that would normally be applied to him, nor is it one that he would generally choose to apply to himself. Nonetheless, this naming was fruitful because it suggested how his particular expression of religious vocation as a Jesuit had afforded him privilege as a white, male, tenured, professor at a Canadian university. He and the group were also given pause for thought at an earlier Base Ecclesiastical Community event when an older woman asked to know the (presumably authoritative) opinion of “the priest” about their programming with the poor. Before being handed the microphone, the female lay leader gave him a qualified permission to speak, noting that his opinion should be given no more weight than the opinion of anyone else in the room. When he spoke, Dr Creamer said his opinion should be given even less weight than those of the locals in the room, because he was an outsider just learning about their programming. In the end, these two experiences of cognitive dissonance “sure gave us [the group as a whole] something to reflect on and talk about afterwards” (Creamer, 2011). Those experiences challenged the elevated status of the priest for these representatives of the Canadian Catholic consciousness, long before the dismay about priestly status emerged subsequent to the full scale of the clerical abuse scandals becoming widely known in Canada and the US (see Higgins and Kavanagh, 2010).
These types of experiences were synchronically concomitant with a general twentieth-century application of the term “vocation” in areas such as nursing and teaching. The term “vocation” is now employed to describe a desired state of commitment (or perhaps even devotion) to service in professions associated with care-giving and the fostering of human potential (see, for example, Booth, 1988). Further, “vocation” no longer necessarily implies a religious connection with faithful Christian living. I want to suggest that a similar transformation of a vocational lens may be fruitful in unexpected ways for ecological thinkers and environmental justice activists.
I base this suggestion on the premise that a certain level of dedication that can be described as vocational is present within the environmental movement. Such dedication is displayed in varying degrees and forms within environmentalism, as it is with most religions. Christianity is not solely televangelism, and environmentalism is not solely Earth First! 7 However, both Earth First! and televangelism can also be thought of as providing insight into the nature of environmental spirituality and the Christian religion respectively. For instance, consider the story, cited by both Taylor and Simon Appolloni (see above), of Julia “Butterfly” Hill and Luna. As recounted in her book The Legacy of Luna (2000), Hill spent 738 days living on a platform on a giant redwood tree that she and her Earth First! colleagues christened “Luna.” Hill’s goal in ascending the tree was to prevent Luna from becoming a “victim” of clear cutting. Or, in another, more mainstream example, recall the well-known life’s work of the anthropologist and UN messenger for peace, Jane Goodall, whom Taylor has characterized as “the Energizer Bunny of neo-pagan animism” (2010b). In her co-authored biography, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (2000), Goodall traces the spiritual motivations that have guided her life, inclusive of the eighteen-year period she spent living with chimpanzees. Surely, if we can legitimately speak of an atheist teacher as having a vocation in the contemporary context, then we can also say that Hill and Goodall display elements of a vocation. These elements of vocation are often closer to the Western medieval vocatio when they explicitly note spiritual insights as informing their advocacy, activism and deeper perspectives on being in the world.
Such comprehensive examples are not necessary to illustrate this point. In many ways, Taylor may be instructive when he asserts that “Earth-based religion is escaping its countercultural breeding grounds” (2001: 238). As a result, in terms of the theme I have explored here, we might say the range of vocations permissible within the environmental movement in the Canadian and American context is variable. During the Reformation in Europe, both the radical Anabaptist reformers and the Quakers critiqued the established Church for departing from Gospel values, as a result of a “Constantinian shift” through which Christianity moved towards an embrace of the political establishment (Yoder, 2009: 236). Without denying a possible multi-directionality to such phenomena, 8 we might nonetheless note that a comparable movement can be witnessed today in Canada and the US, as tenets of the environmental religiosity fuse with elements of the dominant culture. As a result, we can witness a phenomenon like “green consumerism.” For instance, in the same Environmental Studies capstone course described above, an informal survey found that 100% of the students in the room had purchased merchandise from the Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) store in Winnipeg 9 and the vast majority of these students had a piece of MEC merchandise on their person (often consciously wearing such goods as a badge of their green identities).
Elements of vocation informed by spiritual insights can also be found at what is perhaps a more subtle level. For example, consider the Canadian political context and the instance of a Green Party candidate going door-to-door, sharing the “Green Values” 10 with anyone who will listen, in a riding where he has little chance of winning, hoping to reach only a few people and get them to “vote with your hearts” / “vote for what you believe in” (slogans used by the Green Party of Canada during the 2008 general election). This activity may be more acceptable in most Canadian ridings than going door-to-door attempting to proclaim “Gospel Values.” But in form and function is it really that different from someone living out their missionary vocation as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints? In fact, when I stood as a Green Party candidate in the 2008 election 11 as a young(er) man wearing a tie, I was, along with some of my similarly dressed campaign team, often mistaken for a Mormon. Upon reflection, this confusion could be telling in relation to the vocational religiosity associated with Green Party campaigning, amongst other “environmentalist” endeavours. If one of the above examples holds for my discussion here, then it follows that there must be some “informative fruit” to be had for ecological thought, Religious Studies scholars and green activists by recognizing at least elements of affinity between environmentalism, vocation and religiosity on the level of form and function.
To ground this point, consider some reasons, specific to their self-identity, why many of my fellow students studying environmental issues at the University of Manitoba preferred to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Echoing Taylor’s research, those I have talked to about this issue often say that they associate religion, and Western religions in particular, with dogma. Further, they associate such dogma with violence against the Earth. However, this may be an instance where understanding elements of religious vocation involved in environmentalism has the potential to prove unexpectedly fruitful. For if there is a real possibility that self-identified green persons might be carrying out a “vocational lifestyle” complete with what are, in essence, dogmas, then naming “environmentalism as religion” may alert environmentalists to the dogmatic nature of some of their positions, as in the example of Dr Creamer being shaken into deeper contemplation of his vocation by being called an oppressor. Additionally, larger spaces may be opening up for such an insight if “vocation” is applied outside of avowedly religious contexts.
From a Peace Studies perspective, dialogue may become fruitful under such conditions. Recognizing the presence of what are, in form and function, dogmatic concepts in socio-environmental conflicts can show a path towards exiting spirals of conflict through dialogue. The dogmatic nature of these concepts also means that in form and function such dialogue would need to be inter-religious. This conclusion contains an important distinction, because successful inter-religious dialogue on dogmatic issues proceeds differently than, for instance, successful “secular” dialogue concerning the allocation of entitlements under conditions of plenitude. Contrary to a frequently normative environmentalist coupling of dogma and violence, this recognition could only aid conciliation by helping to precipitate moral conversion processes and to increase the prospects for more humans to live out their authentic vocations within the Earth community by preventing the conflict-inducing frustration that is likely to ensue from two dogmatically formed positions failing to recognize each other as such.