The protest at the heart of Protestantism – perhaps the most successful protest movement the world has ever known – began as a cry against the sale of indulgences. In order to finance the construction of its fabulous building projects, such as St Peter’s in Rome, the Roman church invented an ingenious way of separating people from their money. They would sell the prayers of the religious to the laity, these prayers ‘guaranteeing’ a short cut to salvation, time-off from languishing in an invented place called purgatory where one atoned for one’s earthly sins ahead of one’s final judgment.
Indulgences turned salvation into a business model, whereby ordinary people could amortise their spiritual debt to the almighty. “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul out of purgatory springs”, was a quote that Martin Luther attributed to Johann Tetzel, one of the Pope’s most successful indulgences salesman. For Luther, one had to take personal responsibility for one’s relationship with God and not subcontract it to another, and especially not for money.
The comparison with this and Elton John paying to offset the carbon footprint of Harry and Meghan’s use of his private jet to fly to their summer holiday is compelling. The sins that Harry and Meghan have made against the environment can be paid for by someone else. Green is the colour of money. With wealthy friends, your sins can be forgiven. Those who are poorer, those who take cheap package holidays to Tenerife, they will have to account for their sins alone.
That said, in the overall scheme of things, the Protestors of the 16th century could be said to bear the greater responsibility for the current environmental crisis. For, as Max Weber famously explained in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the idea that one has to manage one’s relationship with the Almighty alone created a kind of anxiety about one’s final destination that was only mitigated by the reassuring idea that earthy success somehow prefigured heavenly access. In this way, the burgeoning bourgeoise explained their accumulation of wealth as a sign of God’s favour, and thus provided moral cover to the capitalist equation of continual economic growth with progress and success.
And the reason this is such a theological mistake, not to say environmental one, is that it flies directly in the face of a key Biblical teaching that would support the idea of sustainability: the idea of having enough.
Remember the story in the Bible of the manna that falls from heaven? The people of Israel have escaped from their slavery in Egypt, and are on their way, through the desert, to the land God has promised them. In this wilderness, God teaches a lesson about sustainable economics. There is enough bread to go around, but not enough to be stockpiled against future want.
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