If we think of the church as a garden—or maybe a vineyard, to be more in keeping with Jesus’ kingdom parables—that would suggest that we need to keep after the weeds. If we want to bear fruit and continue to cultivate healthy soil, well, some plants just don’t help. They take up nutrients and space that could be going toward the good fruit. The invasive ones become aggressive and can easily take over the whole garden if left to their own devices. I want to be clear here: I’m not talking about people; I’m talking about ideas.
As any gardener knows, spotting the weeds amid the healthy plants takes a little practice. I interviewed a Mennonite pastor a couple weeks ago who referred to weeding as “sorting volunteers”—a lovely expression true to a peace-and-justice tradition. However, it’s still true that certain “volunteers” are more troublesome than others. It’s better to uproot them regularly than to let them proliferate and start going to seed.
So I offer this tentative field guide to weedy ideas. These are ideas or postures or dispositions that particularly get in the way of a renewed relationship to our more-than-human neighbors and our care of a planet suffering from the impacts of climate change.
Anthropocentrism
We can honor the dignity and distinctiveness of every human without making humans the center of every story and the measure of every value. The rest of creation matters to God, and it should matter to us as well. Caring for people and caring for the earth does not have to be a zero-sum game. In fact, quite the opposite. Healing earth and healing people are typically mutually reinforcing endeavors.
Individualism
The signal achievement of modernity, one could argue, is the affirmation throughout society of the value of the individual. In spiritual practice, as well, we affirm that God desires relationship with every person. We are made in the image of God, both together and individually.
For millions of Christians throughout time and cultures, a focus on the individual’s relationship to the Lord has brought consolation and divine communion. A focus on the posture of the heart toward God and the emphasis on personal relationship with God are, I believe, distinctive gifts of evangelical traditions (small E). However, when we imagine the spiritual life as a matter only of each person’s personal relationship with the Lord, we face two dangers. First, we can easily remain self-obsessed even while slathering the demands of our egos with Jesus language. The many books dealing with narcissism among pastors sadly testify to this problem.
Equally problematic, though, is the potential of individualism to become complicit with injustice. If the spiritual life is all about the individual, why bother addressing unjust systems? As long as our hearts are right with the Lord, we can comfortably participate in unjust systems—well, if we’re benefitting from them. Unfortunately, an individualism-focused faith sits comfortably alongside American consumerism, selfishness, and greed.
We need to manage a dialectic here, honoring the inestimable value of each person while also committing to the common good of all people—and the earth.
Dualism
This one is especially difficult, since a dualistic construct is so pervasive across time and human cultures that it’s hard not to take it as the true nature of reality. Some passages in the Bible certainly seem to support a spirit/matter divide as Christian truth: “Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth” (Col. 3:2). Well, there you go! Obviously.
The New Testament, especially in some Pauline and Johannine passages, reflects Hellenistic and Platonic influences, drawing from a culture that regarded the spirit/matter divide as the basic shape of reality. We have tended to double down on those dualistic influences in modern, Western Christianity. Imagining a purely spiritual realm “above” our “earthly” physical realm cannot ultimately be sustained, however, if we want to affirm the incarnation and resurrection. Moreover, not all human cultures have divided reality this way. In many indigenous cultures—including the culture of the ancient Hebrews—spirit and matter always co-exist in creation.
It’s curious that the thorough-going materialism of modern Western culture has often spawned a Christianity that harbors a dualistic disdain for material reality. Why? A dualistic worldview serves power. If religion is only about matters of the spirit, then churches have nothing to say about economics, business, and certainly not about extractive industries. It’s just stuff—why should we care? Even if religion teaches us to care about people, ultimately it’s their souls that matter, right? Their material conditions are of secondary importance. Meanwhile, the rest of creation is useful for providing sublime spiritual experiences on mountaintops now and then and maybe recreational fun, but otherwise can be used at will, exploited as we please. It doesn’t matter; it’s all secondary to the spiritual.
Dualism seems to keep the church safely in a spiritual lane. We do our spiritual things inside the church doors and maybe in our soup kitchen, attempting here and there to treat the symptoms of an unjust world but leaving matters of “the world” and those powerful systems to others.
Placelessness
Typically, North Americans don’t know that much about their particular place, and that includes religious North Americans. The richer we are, the less it matters. We can buy homes in the nicest neighborhoods and drive anywhere we need to go, including to the vast commercial strips of busy roads lined with big-box stores. Even our churches can seem entirely placeless, resembling big blank boxes inside and out–or some design fit for years ago in some other place. It’s possible to live in placeless-franchise-land every day of the week, including Sunday.
Arrogant stewardship
Every time I hear the word “stewardship,” I cringe. I know: stewardship is a good and well-meaning word. This one is not an aggressive, invasive weed; it’s just not the best plant in the garden right now.
When Christians say that humans are stewards of the earth, they are attempting to express an appropriate blending of the way both Genesis 1 and Gensis 2 present the human vocation. We are made in the image of God and called to have dominion over the earth, and we are charged with serving and protecting the earth. So add those two together and, voila, you get stewardship.
However, as I’ve reflected on this term over the past eight years, I have gathered more than a few objections.
- The term is too easily abused to cover over exploitation of the earth on scales small and large. We’re just “stewarding our resources,” we say as we chop down rainforests to graze meat cattle or farm edge-to-edge to maximize crop efficiency. Note how the earth is reduced to resources here. While we often use the term with the best of intentions, the fact that it can be so easily twisted makes it less useful.
- The metaphor implied in the stewardship suggests that God is the absent landlord and we are here, left behind, to look after God’s property. But God is not absent! God is present, by the Spirit, everywhere in creation.
- The term presents us as separate from and over the rest of creation. But we’re not! We are embedded, entangled, dependent upon it. Yes, we have enormous power. But the term emphasizes our separateness at a time when we need to lean into our interconnectedness.
- Stewardship sounds like a duty. It’s something we have to do. But duty is a poor long-term motivator. Instead, we need to find our love.
- Stewardship assumes we know what we’re doing. But knowing how to care for the earth is hard-won knowledge indeed. Indigenous peoples spent generations building knowledge about the earth, knowledge which arrogant settlers dismissed as primitive. Even with our advanced science and technology, and with a growing effort to listen to indigenous wisdom, we don’t always get it right.
- Stewardship implies that the earth itself is inert. That it depends on us to survive. Not true.
- Finally, while Genesis 1 and 2 provide us with foundational wisdom about our human vocation, we are no longer in Genesis 1 and 2. We live in a post-Genesis-3 world. Stewarding isn’t enough; we need healing. Especially in the last century, we have used our power to damage and destroy so much, our primary vocation cannot be to manage the status quo. We need to repair the damage and establish new house rules for living on this planet.
I would suggest setting aside the term stewardship altogether in order to step as far away as we can from the human arrogance to which we are so relentlessly prone. What if, instead, we always talk about ourselves as partners in earth-healing? Partners with God, with each other, and with the more-than-human creation. That phrase combines both responsibility and humility. It opens us better to the kind of reciprocity and gratitude that Robin Wall Kimmerer emphasizes in her call to renewed relationship with the earth.
I find creation care not as cringe-inducing as stewardship. Many Christian environmental organizations use that term; I use it myself sometimes. It sounds gentle and loving and mild, and that’s good. Some audiences need the term creation care because urgently mitigating the climate crisis evokes politicized rhetoric that unfortunately can make some people defensive.
Even so, I want to keep drawing in the words partners and healing to emphasize both the urgent need for repairing damage and the importance of working together with God, each other, the earth itself.
Paranoia about pantheism
In some Christian circles, when someone proposes that we might object to building luxury homes on dunes or that we might promote legislation banning leasing public lands for lumbering, they are accused of worshiping nature. Any posture other than “use it as we please” is received as tantamount to pantheism.
This is mostly a disingenuous posture meant to bolster the continued power of some. It’s nonsensical to imagine that valuing and caring for something means you worship it. To acknowledge that animals and plants are beloved by God and ought to flourish, to notice that they have being-ness and their own remarkable intelligences does not mean I worship them. Considering the well-being of a forest ecosystem, even when those considerations might cause inconvenience to the humans who wish to exploit that forest, does not mean I worship trees. There are more than two categories in the world beyond “things we worship” and “things we can use at will.” There are also things we love and cherish and seek the welfare of, including things we love for the sake of God.
What fruits might we bear if we fertilize our work again with a rich compost of the incarnation, the resurrection, the vision of a renewed heaven and earth united together, and the dynamic sacredness of all creation, for the sake of love for God?
There may well be other weeds that could become entries in this field guide as we seek to move toward “integral ecology” as the Catholics say. Maybe you can think of some other weeds to identify. For now, keeping an eye out for just these few should keep us plenty busy.
