Something a student said in class last week has been haunting me. I'd put on the board the question which Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim use to distinguish "religious ecologies" (in their special but very influential understanding) from other ways of approaching religion, e.g., philosophical, sociological, anthropological, theological:
Their idea is that much of religion has long been enmeshed in human understandings of the rest of nature and of the place of the human in natural cycles and processes, a reality obscured by anthropocentric modern western understandings of religion. To understand past religion better, and to reconnect with religion as a resource for weaning ourselves from destructive understandings of human-nature relations, we need to rebuild our understanding of religion from the ground (as it were!) up. Far from pointing away from the Earth, religious cosmologies are all about human participation in ecosystems of various kinds, if only we learn to pay attention.
But the student saw something different in the words I put on the board. The very words used filled them with anger. In societies like ours, they said, the human role in the Earth's processes has always been outsourced to people of color. Are Grim and Tucker even aware of that?
I've been haunted by this question because it was a question also to me. Aware of the outsourcing, yes, but not as I was thinking with Tucker and Grim. So perhaps not aware of it, not really. (That's how privilege works, how white supremacy works: we alone can be unaware of it.) Of course decolonial thinking doesn't pertain to all religion across time and space, but it surely does to North American religion and religious studies. Refusing to acknowledge this specificity is part of the settler colonial mindset of American religion, as is the blithe assumption that "our" religious ecological imaginings - Henry David Thoreau say, or John Muir, or Annie Dillard - are of a piece with what the ancients of the Old World were doing, or the religious wisdom of Asia, let alone the indigenous traditions fighting for their lives throughout the world. And don't let's get started on the other outsourcing, which has tethered the exploitation of nature to the exploitation of women.
Framed by these questions, the project of "religion and ecology" seems in need of scrutiny. Arguing for the role of "religion" to reconnect a settler society to the Earth it has coopted and compromised risks mystifying the processes by which that usurpation took - and continues to take - place, processes including the theft of land and human bodies of 400 years of inequality. As there can be no peace without justice, there can be no reclaiming of a healthy role within the processes of the Earth and its ecosystems without acknowledging the interconnection of the processes which dehumanized non-western peoples and those which have ruptured the bond of (some) western people with "nature."
How would this look in a course on Religion and Ecology? Some of the readings I've pulled together (like Grounding Religion) are germane, some (like Grim and Tucker's Ecology and Religion) less so. This is one of the courses where I tell students the syllabus is just a proposal and the second half, especially, is likely to wind up looking entirely different. It doesn't always happen but this time I think it will. I'll keep you posted as it grows!
What is the role of religion within the
processes of the Earth and its ecosystems?
John Grim & Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Island Press, 2014), 35
Their idea is that much of religion has long been enmeshed in human understandings of the rest of nature and of the place of the human in natural cycles and processes, a reality obscured by anthropocentric modern western understandings of religion. To understand past religion better, and to reconnect with religion as a resource for weaning ourselves from destructive understandings of human-nature relations, we need to rebuild our understanding of religion from the ground (as it were!) up. Far from pointing away from the Earth, religious cosmologies are all about human participation in ecosystems of various kinds, if only we learn to pay attention.
But the student saw something different in the words I put on the board. The very words used filled them with anger. In societies like ours, they said, the human role in the Earth's processes has always been outsourced to people of color. Are Grim and Tucker even aware of that?
I've been haunted by this question because it was a question also to me. Aware of the outsourcing, yes, but not as I was thinking with Tucker and Grim. So perhaps not aware of it, not really. (That's how privilege works, how white supremacy works: we alone can be unaware of it.) Of course decolonial thinking doesn't pertain to all religion across time and space, but it surely does to North American religion and religious studies. Refusing to acknowledge this specificity is part of the settler colonial mindset of American religion, as is the blithe assumption that "our" religious ecological imaginings - Henry David Thoreau say, or John Muir, or Annie Dillard - are of a piece with what the ancients of the Old World were doing, or the religious wisdom of Asia, let alone the indigenous traditions fighting for their lives throughout the world. And don't let's get started on the other outsourcing, which has tethered the exploitation of nature to the exploitation of women.
Framed by these questions, the project of "religion and ecology" seems in need of scrutiny. Arguing for the role of "religion" to reconnect a settler society to the Earth it has coopted and compromised risks mystifying the processes by which that usurpation took - and continues to take - place, processes including the theft of land and human bodies of 400 years of inequality. As there can be no peace without justice, there can be no reclaiming of a healthy role within the processes of the Earth and its ecosystems without acknowledging the interconnection of the processes which dehumanized non-western peoples and those which have ruptured the bond of (some) western people with "nature."
How would this look in a course on Religion and Ecology? Some of the readings I've pulled together (like Grounding Religion) are germane, some (like Grim and Tucker's Ecology and Religion) less so. This is one of the courses where I tell students the syllabus is just a proposal and the second half, especially, is likely to wind up looking entirely different. It doesn't always happen but this time I think it will. I'll keep you posted as it grows!
