Dr. Sallie McFague

Dr. Sallie McFague was born in Boston, MA  and educated at Smith College and Yale University. She taught theology for thirty years at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, TN.  She retired as the Carpenter Professor of Theology in 2000, moving to Canada and assuming a position at the Vancouver School of Theology as Distinguished Theologian in Residence. For many years she has studied the relationship between religious language and behavior changes.  Her publications include several books on ecology, economics, and Christianity, with the most recent being Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Fortress, 2000), and one being published this spring A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Climate Change (Fortress).

GLOBAL WARMING: A THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM
by Dr. Sallie McFague

         In the late eighties I attended a meeting of the World Council of Churches on “climate change.” I did not know much about it, but the term sounded relatively benign. I was in for a big surprise. I recall feeling a knot in my stomach when I heard about glacier melt. I wasn’t thinking of the global consequences for submerged islands and coastal cities. Rather, I was thinking about myself.  As a regular hiker in the Canadian Rockies, I saw the melting of glaciers as a personal loss: I loved those towering ice-covered mountains circling turquoise lakes. I felt anger and resentment—not unlike one feels at the unnecessary death of a good friend. How could this awful thing be happening to one of the most beautiful places on earth?  I felt even worse when I was told that we, people like myself, were to blame.

         Almost twenty years have passed since my introduction to global warming. It has grown, both in my mind and within our culture—after two decades of denial—to epitomize the fragility of the human experiment on earth. We know “the time is now”: there is no time left for further denial or delay. Acceptance of the reality of global warming is finally widespread, including  such reluctant players as the Bush administration and most of the oil companies. Denial has been unmasked, although large segments of Western culture have not yet accepted it, and governments and the fuel industry are not eager to take the kind of serious action that is needed.  Nonetheless, we are now in a different place than I was twenty years ago: we know that something must be done, and done soon.

         Yes, but here’s the rub: effective action on global warming is probably the most discouraging task that human beings have ever undertaken.  By comparison, mobilizing the Allies in World War II was relatively straight forward. The enemy was clearly identified and we were the “good guys.”  Such a war is an in-your-face-danger which people react to immediately—and feel good doing so (studies showed that psychological health was up during the war). On the contrary, climate change is slow, insidious, partly invisible—and we are the enemy. Moreover, we are a (largely) innocent enemy: we high-level consumers of energy are merely living ordinary Western lives, doing what everyone else in our society is doing. Even as we gradually learn how deeply our actions are affecting the planet’s health, the problem still seems amorphous, abstract, remote. A Katrina hurricane or a torrid summer such as 2003 may jolt us to attention for a while, but the impact fades.

         However, let us imagine that a number, a large number of people, do become centrally and more or less continually concerned—and want to act. The two main avenues for action are personal and/or political. Many people are attempting to live simpler, more environmentally-friendly, low-energy lives by changing behavior at the personal level. However, what these folks soon realize is that the corporate and political institutions of our society pose enormous barriers to such personal changes: the lack of low-energy transportation and buildings; a constant barrage of advertisement for SUV’s, high-energy electronics and appliances; a global food market that transports produce half-way around the world at an enormous expenditure of energy.  Discouragement sets in: Does it make any real difference what individuals do in their personal lives if the culture and political structures are against them?

         Let us now imagine that these people decide they must change the systemic structures that are literally “fuelling” the energy explosion that is producing global warming. How do they do this?  In a democracy, there is only one way:  by changing the government and that is only possible by changing people’s hearts and minds so that they vote differently.  In other words, the political rests on the personal, on substantial shifts within voting bodies on what they want governments to do. Prior to 9/ll, a grassroots movement of NGO’s, church groups, and numerous others was beginning to surface, united by the slogan “a different world is possible.”  Many things were meant by that slogan, but one important thread was certainly an embrace of a communitarian rather than individualistic view of humanity.  At the heart of any revolution bent on changing human behavior lies an anthropology—an understanding of who we human beings are and where we fit into the scheme of things. This communitarian turn is critically important, for it is hard to see how we can tackle our impending climate crisis without it.  Sadly, at least for the time being, it is largely dormant, silenced by “the war on terror.”

         We are, then, in a very difficult place. The kind of thinking we need about ourselves and our place on the planet—our interrelationship and interdependence with all other human beings and other life-forms—has been deadened by the hand of a consumerist/militarist paradigm that exalts the comfort and superiority of elite individual human beings.  We need to elect representatives to our governments who will create laws to limit human energy use at all levels—from emission caps on oil refineries to regulations on emissions from automobiles. The personal and the political need to join to legislate the kind of human action in the world that will create a just and sustainable planet.  Individuals cannot do this simply by trying to live “environmentally” within an energy-mad society.  The system must be changed—the major forces within society that regulate and control our use of fossil fuels.

         The environmental crisis is a theological problem, a problem coming from views of God and ourselves that encourage and/or permit our destructive, unjust actions. For example, if I see myself (deep down) as superior to other animals and life-forms—a privileged individual (Western, white, educated, etc.) -- then of course I will act in ways that support my continuation in this position. If, as a human being, I am basically “on my own,” then it is also “up to me” to maintain my superiority. This sense or feeling of separate and responsible individualism need not be conscious; in fact, it usually is not.  Rather, it is considered by most privileged Western human beings to simply be the way things are. It is seen as “natural” rather than as a personal belief.

         Likewise, if I imagine God (deep down) to be a super-being, residing somewhere above and apart from the world, who created and judges the world but otherwise is absent from it, then I will conduct my affairs largely without day-to-day concern about God. If the God I believe in is supernatural, transcendent and only intermittently interested in the world, then this God is not a factor in my daily actions.  Whether or not I treat myself to that expensive car is certainly not  relevant to such a God.

         In conclusion, theology is the attempt to think about God and the world — who God is and who we are—in light of what the tradition has claimed in the past and what we must say in the present.  Everyone is a theologian--that is, each of us has a picture, a set of assumptions, usually not conscious, of how we think God and the world are related.  And all of us can and do express through our words and actions who we think God is and who we think we are.  These unconscious or implicit theologies are very powerful.  They give us permission or the obligation to act in very different ways, depending on our assumptions about God and ourselves.   Theology matters.