May 13, 2021 - 5:00pm
Paul Kingsnorth is the deepest of deep greens. And yet he became a Christian. Should that surprise us?
In a remarkable piece for First Things, Kingsnorth tells the story of his conversion — and why it took him most of his life to get to that point:
Yes, that’s the problem right there. Christianity, as the religion of the West, is perceived as the ideological foundation of westernisation — including industrialisation and the despoliation that has followed in its wake.
The Bible can be read for passages that appear to justify our impact upon the natural world. Most obviously there is the Biblical passage (Genesis 1:28), to which Kingsnorth alludes, where God says to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Over-population, exploitation, habitat destruction and human arrogance. It’s all in there.
Except that it’s not. To rip this verse out its context is perverse. Read the chapter in full and you see that God had just created the world and pronounced it “good” — He is clearly not exhorting mankind to destroy it, but to look after it. Read on and things get greener still. For a start, there’s the message that the world as God intended it to be was vegetarian — indeed, vegan (“I have given every green herb for food”). The meat-eating that comes later is a symptom of The Fall — i.e. a profound disturbance of the created order that is caused by and bound up with human evil.
Obviously, it can’t be denied that the first countries in the world to industrialise — and thus wreak environmental havoc on an industrial scale — were Christian in culture. So perhaps one can understand why so many environmentalists in our own time have looked to eastern religions — or to the paganism of the pre-Christian West — for inspiration.
However, that is to ignore the global history — and pre-history — of humanity’s impact on nature. Yes there are examples of pre-modern societies living in harmony with the environment. But there are many others to the contrary. We were remaking entire landscapes before the Bronze Age. Just look at the disappearance of so many giant mammals and flightless birds: mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant sloths, cave lions, and elephant birds — our pre-modern ancestors hunted them all to extinction.
Humanity’s dominion over the Earth is a fact. Whether or not that leads to complete environmental destruction depends upon us accepting the constraints of a higher truth. Or, as Paul Kingsnorth puts it:
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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Subscribe“Christians are torn between plundering nature and protecting it”
I like to think I am a Christian. I like to think we should have a balanced existance, in which we can both protect and preserve ‘nature’ and at the same time, use it for our survival..
I am not a “greeny” nor do I think we should plunder nature.Thus I think the sub heading is total nonsense.
One can read this article two ways. Firstly that there’s merit in the notion that God instructed the human race to steward his creation, but we’ve exploited it instead. Or, that someone is reading his green bias into the bible. That’s no different than the American right reading their bias into the bible. What I find most amusing though, is the idea of the world ‘pre the fall’ being vegan I’ve seen others try to do this. If there’s a book you shouldn’t use to justify your veganism it’s the bible. Most of the Old Testament deals with animal slaughter in a system given from God to Moses. It’s not just that God is ok with animal slaughter, He commands it. Even in the New Testament God appears in a vision to Peter with a smorgasbord of animals & tells him to “kill & eat”. Anyhow, modern veganism has its own religion, handed down from John Harvey Kellog & The Seventh Day Adventist Church. A clear example of a religion being distorted if ever there was one.
Great article and hopefully thought provoking for all of us. If we could all acknowledge within our selves that “knowing about” what a farm-to-table (via a 4 day 2000 mile refrigerated transport) peach might taste like as opposed to having experienced a drops-into-your-hand-when-you-touch-it-its-so-ripe peach that you immediately bite into are, well, two vastly different things.
That’s my metaphor for “knowing about” Christianity (or Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or …) as opposed to living and breathing the experience of Christianity.
I have never found anything anti-green in Christianity but I’ll keep looking!
If your interest in farm-to-table is more than metaphorical, you might like this BBC radio programme I heard last night – ‘Dan Barber: My life in five dishes’. It rang true with my experiences of eating varieties of fruits and vegetables bred and grown for their flavour and picked a few minutes or hours before eating them.
In an illustrious career spanning three decades, there’s little that booking-writing, seed-breading, ‘philosopher chef’ Dan Barber has not put his hands to. Celebrated as the poster child of the ‘farm to fork’ movement, he tells Graihagh Jackson how a visit to a wheat farm called into question everything he thought he knew about agriculture and changed his cooking and ethos forever.
Not sure how you can surmise from one passage about God saying “I have given every green herb for food” that God was saying humans should be vegan. It kind of defeats your whole argument about people taking Biblical quotes out of context.
I have nothing against veganism, but nor do I think there is anything particularly Christian or ecological about it. If you live on nothing but plant food, you have to eat a much greater volume of food than someone who eats animal protein regularly. That food has to be grown, and growing food takes up land, a lot of it. Agriculture of any kind kills a massive number of animals by destroying their habitats and food resources, eg. the clearcutting of the rainforests of Borneo to make way for huge palm oil plantations is driving orangutans and many other indigenous wildlife to extinction. (I remember an old joke in which a meat-eater asks a vegan, “If you love animals so much, why are you taking their food away from them?”) So personally I feel less ethically conflicted about eating organic free-range chicken from humanely raised and slaughtered birds, than eating products with palm oil.
If you live on nothing but plant food, you are helping to plunder and destroy nature. All those extra trees that have to be cut down to make all that extra toilet paper.
The author’s explanation is quite standard. There is a justifiable line of interpretation that holds Adam was given permission only to eat plants. The permission to eat meat is to Noah after the flood in Genesis 9:3.
Every creature that lives and moves will be food for you; as I gave the green plants, I have given you everything.
What a silly article. The Bible in a pre-industrial age where pestilence, shortages and famine were common. ‘Dominion’ did not mean destruction of nature but controlling it sufficiently to guarantee survival.
Well said!
Our ancestors hunted animals to extinction? How do we know, some may have been predated upon by other creatures or their habitats changed and they couldn’t survive. And which christian-based countries began industrialisation? And without industrialisation and technological advances we wouldn’t have the internet and many other useful advantages. There are some questionable statements here.
I suspect that, although humans may have had some impact, the tundra inhabitants like the woolly rhino and mammoth probably died out principally because of climate change when the ice sheets retreated.
I doubt if there were enough humans (or proto humans) to hunt animals to anywhere near extinction.
“We were remaking entire landscapes before the Bronze Age. Just look at the disappearance of so many giant mammals and flightless birds: mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant sloths, cave lions, and elephant birds — our pre-modern ancestors hunted them all to extinction.”
True (landscapes), and probably true at least in part (extinctions). But it appears that on the whole, while we were shaping landscapes ten millennia ago, we were generally keeping, even boosting, biodiversity at the same time until the recent rise of intensive agriculture. From a recent article on a recent paper:
“Our work shows that most areas depicted as ‘untouched,’ ‘wild,’ and ‘natural’ are actually areas with long histories of human inhabitation and use,” says UMBC’s Erle Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems and lead author. He notes that they might be interpreted like this because in these areas, “societies used their landscapes in ways that sustained most of their native biodiversity and even increased their biodiversity, productivity, and resilience.”
The research team, from over ten institutions around the world, revealed that the main cause of the current biodiversity crisis is not human destruction of uninhabited wildlands, but rather the appropriation, colonization, and intensified use of lands previously managed sustainably.
The new data overturn earlier reconstructions of global land use history, some of which indicated that most of Earth’s land was uninhabited even as recently as 1500 CE.
‘People have shaped Earth’s ecology for at least 12,000 years, mostly sustainably’ – phys.org, 19 April (and similar articles in New Scientist, Science Daily, etc – link to original paper in each)
And I’ve witnessed it a bit myself. Where I live now, twenty-five years ago the rice fields were almost all organic and worked by human and animal labour, producing less crop per hectare no doubt, but providing at least as much again in terms of fish, frogs, crabs, snails and so on – not just my impression or farmers’, but the conclusions of the likes of the UNDP and FAO – in around half the provinces, these ‘extras’ earned more money than the rice crops. In addition, most houses had fruit trees, chickens and pigs, and most villages a nearby patch of forest giving timber, firewood, fruit, animals, mushrooms and much else besides. Not that all was rosy by any means, and when floods or droughts hit, things got very bad very quickly, but most years, most people had plentiful food, and biodiversity was the order of the day.
Today, much of the rural population has migrated (often with encouragement, to be euphemistic) to the expanding cities or richer neighbouring countries to work, the fields are farmed mechanically with plenty of artificial fertilisers and pesticides, crop yields are up, and significantly so, as are profits for the few who still own land – but the biodiversity is dramatically down, as anyone who remembers can see at a glance. Even the cities here were full of huge beautiful butterflies, noisy frogs and cicadas, bats and monkeys – now something urban children come running to see, often as not.
The wonderful result of ‘the appropriation, colonization, and intensification of use in lands inhabited and used by prior societies‘, as the paper puts it, except here it’s not so much a prior society as a prior version of the same society, or appropriation and colonisation by other classes within it. Much has been gained, but much has been lost – did it need to be this way?
(What does all that have to do with Christianity? Next to nothing, but I think it has loads to do with ‘Humanity’s dominion over the Earth’ and the form it takes.)
I had read many years ago that in the original Hebrew, the word that was translated as “dominion” over the animals actually means “stewardship” or “caretaking”. I’m far from a biblical scholar so can’t confirm this – would love to know if anyone else can confirm or refute.
I’ve read the same, but I wonder if scholars can confirm it after all these years so much as debate it – look at how they discuss whether the Greek demos, as in democracy, referred to the people, or the mob – and I think the Hebrew may be a thousand years older.
Isn’t Christianity supposed to be based on love – love of God and of neighbour? That being the case, such love would preclude ravaging (as we do) the earth, because that would impact another person as well as show ingratitude to the Creator of it.
I am pretty sure we don’t need all the things that are produced, but we live in a commercial world that runs on the profit of buying and selling, so things have to be made to sell – the raw source of which is the Earth – and the people on it.
But there is a warning in Revelation 11.18, perhaps we should heed it: The nations were enraged, and Your wrath has come. The time has come to judge the dead and to reward Your servants the prophets, as well as the saints and those who fear Your name, both small and great—and to destroy those who destroy the earth.” But I don’t see anyone heeding that anytime soon. iPhone 14 anyone…?
My local revs have bought green bilge,wholelly even though life Giving Carbon forms 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere…Puts up Energy costs,exports Jobs to india &China
That’s the highest level in nearly a million years. And the entirely natural and organic hydrogen sulphide, which gives rotten eggs and farts their fruitiness, is lethal at 0.08%, so I don’t think small numbers necessarily mean small effects.
Ecocentrism is the gateway to the Kingdom of God
subjectivity or objectivity? That’s the question.