We read the founding document of the field of religion and ecology today, Lynn White's 51-year-old essay in Science which does, and doesn't, blame "our environmental crisis" on the unprecedented anthropocentrism of Christianity. It was that caricature that made the essay so influential, provoking secularist ecologists to paint Christianity as Public Enemy Number One and theologians to defend or pledge to reform it. But White's actual argument is rather more nuanced.
In particular, he thinks those scientists and others who think they're post-Christian still have all the vices of a certain Christianity - an anthropocentric sense of distance from and mastery over nature - and need, as much as anthropocentric Christians (alas still abundant today), to find a more ecological answer to the existential questions posed by religion.Because White can't imagine Zen or Eastern Orthodoxy (both of which he praises) effecting the necessary culture shift in the West, he famously proposes Francis of Assisi as patron saint of ecology, for a humble "pan-psychism" which recognizes the "democracy of all God's creatures." Next week we'll read the best effort at thus reorienting of western Christianity, the encyclical on the environment by a pope who didn't just take its title - Laudato si' - from a poem of Francis'; he took his name from Francis too.
