Climate Church,Climate World: How People of Faith Must Work for Change by Jim Antal

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I sat down to write this review on a September morning, as television programs were reporting on anniversary commemorations of “9/11.” The front page of The New York Times that day featured an image of devastation wrought by hurricane Florence, juxtaposed to a report that President Trump was proposing to loosen regulations on the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that increases the severity of hurricanes. The paper also included a report on the United Nations Secretary General’s warning that the earth is approaching the tipping point at which catastrophe will become inevitable, and that nations are doing far less than is necessary to meet their Paris Accord commitments. Trump, who disbelieves the science and denies the reality of climate change, has sworn to withdraw the United States from the accord. This caused me to wonder what our politicians might have done if they could have known in advance of the possibility of 9/11. Undoubtedly, they would have done everything in their power to prevent it; yet scientists have been telling us for decades that a far greater calamity looms over the entire earth, and our government has done relatively nothing. Now Trump is systematically deconstructing the policies enacted by Obama. As I followed the progress of Hurricane Florence (and, on the other side of the world, Typhoon Mangkhut), I was struck by the odd experience of writing about calamity simultaneous to its occurrence. In press briefings throughout the week, the South Carolina governor used a lectern emblazoned with the words “Emergency Operations Center.” Those words capture what Jim Antal thinks the church should be at this critical time.

How can people in religious communities understand the severity of the threat from climate change, and what actions should they take to counter the forces of denial? Antal asserts that climate change presents “the greatest moral challenge humanity has ever faced” (p. xv). In a recent book entitled This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014), Naomi Klein argues that climate change presents a great opportunity for progress. Antal’s book could bear much the same title, with the addition of a few words: “This Changes Everything for the Church.” We are confronted with a “theological emergency” requiring “new forms of faithfulness, discipleship, worship, preaching, testimony, witness, and even hope” (p. 2). The rest of the book explores each of these forms.

Antal is no armchair theologian. He led the 360 churches of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ from 2006 to his retirement in 2018, and has since intensified his work as the UCC’s national spokesperson on climate change. Indeed, he is a passionate advocate of the role that local churches (and other religious communities) can play, and he has participated in numerous acts of social protest, some of which landed him in jail. President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord was a major stimulus for this book. Within hours of the announcement of the withdrawal on June 1, 2017, the General Minister of the UCC asked Antal to write an “Emergency Resolution” in response, in which Antal declared a new moral era in opposition to it. Passed by the national UCC Synod with a 97% supermajority, the resolution contains three moral imperatives: that local ministers preach about climate change, that local congregations begin to embody now their vision for a hopeful future, and that we claim our prophetic heritage in answering Pilate’s cynical question “What is truth?” (John 18:38) with the truth embedded in our Scriptures (including “the sacred book of nature,” p. 4). Antal contends that, “When the powers that be deny or obscure the truth, we followers of Jesus will proclaim the truth to protect our common home” (p. 6). Now is such a time.

Antal provides a brief survey of the evidences for climate change (melting glaciers and polar ice, massive forest fires, heat waves, drought, famine, rising sea levels and acidification, and species extinction), citing Bill McKibben’s use of the misspelled “Eaarth” to indicate that we have, indeed, changed the planet. Despite the scientific evidence, there are numerous “psychological barriers” (p. 15) that underlie denial of what is happening or of its human cause, along with deliberate obfuscation of the evidence by the fossil fuel industry. Antal highlights one outrageous example of Senator Inhofe’s unknowingly ironic citation of Gen 8:22 (God’s post-diluvian promise to maintain the natural order “as long as the earth endures”). Furthermore, Inhofe accused scientists of arrogance in thinking that humans could change this regularity, unaware that the real arrogance lies precisely in the fact that we have done just that! We have created a new heaven and a new earth (Isa 65:17), but as an act of de-creation that represents the height of humanity’s hubris.

In discussing “what’s at stake,” Antal rightly suggests that climate change is the social justice issue we face because all others will be exacerbated by it. A sad and unjust irony is that underdeveloped countries, which have contributed the least to greenhouse gases, will suffer the most. The residents of Miami or New York may be able to afford adaptations to rising sea levels (and they already are), but many poor communities will not be able to do so. In the conclusion to his assessment of our predicament, Antal insists that we have the technological means to make the radical changes needed in the production of energy to offset climate change, but we lack the moral fiber to do so.

In a sense, the rest of Antal’s book is an exposition of how churches need to adapt, not only in their hearts and minds, but also in their actions. He provides what is essentially a training manual for the “Climate Church.” Antal proposes a new definition of the nature and purpose of the church and the vocation to which it is called. As the church confronts powers that propel climate change, it will find a model in the resistance of Bonhoeffer’s “Emergency Teaching Seminary of the Confessing Church” (p. 50; the Barmen Declaration could serve as a model as well). Antal reminds us of the confrontational dimension of “protestant” identity. The church should embody an economy that values sustainability over unrestrained growth, and the sharing of abundance for the common good. If discipleship is to be effective, it will increasingly have to take the form of nonviolent civil disobedience. Worship will need to incorporate a sacramental sense of earthiness, welcome testimony from those who act for social justice, and extend beyond the Sunday sanctuary to places like pipeline construction sites. Witnessing on a corporate level will need to challenge the private ownership of land and investments in fossil fuel industries.

Antal especially emphasizes the central role of preaching on climate change, suggesting that it should be mentioned “in every third or fourth sermon” (p. 122). To those who would find this excessive, he responds by noting that anything less does not take seriously the ultimate threat of climate change, that “life as humans have always known it on this planet will come to an end” (p. 126). Accordingly, he offers detailed guidelines for effective preaching, and the appendix provides homiletic suggestions keyed to each chapter. Each chapter also includes provocative discussion questions. Recently I asked a church group if they remembered hearing any sermons on climate change: none had, and one did not want to! Silence on this matter is as reprehensible as it would have been during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

In the concluding chapter, Antal invokes a spiritual process that moves from confronting reality (including our culpability), to grief over the wounded Earth, to hope for the future. Hope is not the same as optimism: the latter is passive, while the former is active. When the church hears within the dissonance of climate change the voice of God calling us to the “new thing” that God is doing (Isa 43:19), it can embody hopefulness and model it for a world in despair. Antal quotes a speech given by Abraham Heschel in Germany in 1938 that is germane to the challenge before us: “‘God is waiting for us to redeem the world’” (p. 52).

This is a passionate book, sometimes jumping back and forth on a given topic, but passion is utterly appropriate to the subject. We are living at a time when no less than the fate of the earth is at stake. I hope that many churches will have the wisdom to use this book and the courage to act upon it. God is calling the church to be the “Emergency Operations Center” for a wounded earth.

Thomas W. Mann Winston Salem, North Carolina