Is Religion to Blame for Current Environmental Problems?
by Everywhere we look we hear about environmental worries. Climate change, droughts, floods, destruction of rainforests, reductions in biodiversity – the list goes on. But has religion played a role in our past indifference to the natural world, particularly in the Christian dominated west? And could things have been different?
Whenever you turn on the news or open a paper the chances are there’ll be at least one story focusing on environmental problems. Whether it’s climate related, extreme weather events, habitats being destroyed or species in danger of extinction it seems to be a defining feature of the times. But when we look back at the past is it really all that surprising?
The Past
Over the past few centuries Europeans have begun to spread around the world. And as we’ve done so the last thing on our minds has been the impact that we’ve had on the world around us. We’ve hunted animal species to extinction, been responsible for massive deforestation and generally torn places apart to get at the resources they hold. So why have we shown so little regard for the world around us? Didn’t we feel any hint of conscience at what we were doing to the world, and if not then why not?
When you consider western society it’s not hard to see that Christianity has played a key role in shaping our society. Most of our laws are based on Christian morals and the ethics that go with it are often deeply ingrained in our society. But as someone brought up in a Christian family it’s always seemed a very anthropocentric religion, focusing on how people should act in regard to each other but saying very little on how we should treat other species we share the planet with or indeed the planet itself. Sure it’s implicit in the belief that God created the world and so people should look after it, but it very rarely seemed to come up as a central tenet if Christianity.
The Present
Nowadays it seems that churches are beginning to jump on the environmental bandwagon. I’ve seen signs outside churches and had leaflets through the door pushing the point that God created the Earth and he can save it, but then McDonald’s are trying to convince people that they’re green too so it’s hard to take it all too seriously. It makes me wonder what things could have been like if history had turned out differently. Prior to Christianity most people followed much more earth based religions, believing in spirits of forests and rivers as well as the divinity of the sun and moon and the cycles they followed. Perhaps if we had continued to follow these beliefs could things have turned out differently? It seems likely that people would have remained much more aware of the environment around them and the effects we have on it. Perhaps some of the problems that we’re worrying about now would never have come to pass. And could it even explain the resurgence in the popularity of neo-pagan religions that has been seen over the last few decades.
Obviously nothing is certain. The river Ganges is sacred to Hindus yet remains one of the most polluted rivers in the world. But it’s interesting to speculate on how things could be different if we had remained more in touch with the world around us, instead of focusing our energies on what we should and should not do to each other.
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