BP, the Blowout and the Bible Belt: Why Conservative Christianity Does Not Conserve Creation Michael

S Northcott University of Edinburgh m.northcott@ed.ac.uk

In his seminal Public Religions in the Modern World Jose Casanova argues that far from retreating to the margins of public life, religious leaders and institutions are growing, rather than declining, in their political inuence in the late modern world. Religions are, he argues, more adaptive, complex and deep-seated in human cultures than traditional secularisation theorists had proposed. In an increasingly unstable social world, where identities are hybridised and mobilised in such a way as to provoke anxiety, and where material and biological habitats are constantly being disturbed and reordered by economic and technological interventions, religion provides a way for individuals and c!!ommunities to negotiate and safeguard!! their sense of being in a fast changing world.1 Social scientists are however still mostly drilled in the secular mythology of modernity, according to which the roots of modernity are not in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, or in the innovations of the Reformers, but in the Renaissance of classical ideas, the rise of scientic rationalism, and the philosophical innovations of Locke, Hume, Smith, Diderot and Kant. However since 2001 the idea that modern societies, far from following a course from religious to secular, are now more religious, perhaps even 'post-secular', is more widely shared in the academy and beyond. Consequently interest in religion as a cultural

1 Jose Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World, Chicago University Press, 1989. See also Tony Watling, 'Re-Imagining the Human-Environment Relationship via Religious Traditions and New Scientic Cosmologies', 77 - 102 in Willem B. Drees (ed.), Technology, Trust and Religion: Roles of Religions in Controversies Overe Ecology and Technology, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 1

force, or a form of 'social capital', is growing in the social sciences, and even among some natural scientists. Thus the atheist director of the British Science Association Lord May recently proposed that religious communities might play a valuable role in 'policing' individuals' carbon footprints - a suggestion that will make Foucaultians smile gleefully - while the atheist E. O. Wilson writes a rather condescending booklength account of the reasons why conservative Christian pastors might address their congregations on the issue of biological conservation.2 The ecological crisis is one of those areas of public policy in which the growing role of religion is said to be manifest. Ever since Lynn White's classic 1967 essay linking Western Christian theological beliefs and ecological destruction, it has seemed plausible to a growing number of environmentalists, philosophers and theologians that ideational change is an important root of the crisis, and a potential source of its resolution. But it is also because of a growing recognition among conservation scientists that science-led conservation practices are not stemming the tide of destructive behaviours that are bringing about what they now increasingly call the sixth wave of species extinction in planetary history. In 1985, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, as the president of one of the most prominent conservation organisations - the World Wide Fund for nature - proposed that the organisation held its 25th anniversary meeting in Assisi in recognition of the one whom Lynn White names the patron saint of ecology, St Francis of Asissi. To coincide with the meeting it was proposed that the leader of the Francisan order would invite four other leading representatives of the world's religions - Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism - to join him at Assisi in order to discuss the religious implications of the environmental crisis. The meeting led to the establish-

2 Lord May, Speech to the annual meeting of the British Science Association, 6 September 2009 as quoted in Richard Alleyne, 'Maybe religion is the answer claims atheist scientist', The Daily Telegraph, 7 September 2009, E. O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, N.Y., W. W. Norton, 2006. 2

ment of a global network in which the religious traditions could share how they were taking up the conservation challenge which was formally established as the Alliance of Religion and Conservation in 1995. Prince Philip's proposal for the meeting of faith leaders reected what he took to be an obvious connection between belief in divine creation and the conservation of creation: If your religion tells you (as it does in Christianity anyway) that the creation of the world was an act of God, then it follows naturally that if you belong to the church of God then you ought to look after His Creation. It may not be sacred itself but the One who created it is sacred - so it seems logical that humans ought to have a certain responsibility for it. He also thought that local faith communities would provide a more effective medium for educating the rural poor who live in areas most threatened by ecological degradation about this responsibility than the usual media available to WWF which were more likely to reach the educated middle classes: The people that we needed to get to were the ones who lived in the areas of greatest risk, and the areas where the potential fo biological diversity was highest. It occurred to me that the people who could most easily communicate with them were their religious leaders. They are in touch with their local population more than anyone else. And if we could get the local leaders to appreciate their responsibility for the environment then they would be able to explain that responsibility to the people of their faith.3 In this account of a meeting which anticipated a growing global engagement of conservation and religion Prince Philip indicates two key motives for this move that may be identied more broadly among its many advocates. The rst is the claim that theological belief that the world is a divine creation places a moral responsibility on humans for its conservation that does not arise from modern scientic narratives of the earth's, and life's origins - that the earth emerged from a random chain of physical events which began with the 'big bang' and that life evolved to its present level of complexity by a random chain of adaptations in earlier life forms. The

3 'Interview with Prince Philip', News and Resources, Alliance of Religions and Conservation at http://www.arcworld.org/news.asp?pageID=1 visited June 23 2010. 3

second is the pragmatic recognition that faith communities in many parts of the world engage and inuence individuals in local communities in a way that few other organisations can do because of the cultural rootedness and place-based character of worshipping communities. This makes them more effective media for the conservation message than the government and other professionals whom scientists conventionally seek to engage in order to inuence or reshape development projects that destroy or degrade habitats and biodiversity. What is also important about the approach adopted at Assisi, and subsequently by ARC and WWF, is that it does not require global ecumenical agreement on what constitutes divine creation or the human relation to otherkind. WWF asked the leaders at Assisi not to seek consensus: That avoided any business of trying to achieve any ecumenical solution. But it also gave them the opportunity to talk to each other because there was no talk about dogma or if there was, then it was just about saying "well this is our dogma and this is yours". The purpose of the Assisi meeting was really to say to the religions: "If you think this is important then tell us what you think but don't try and get it agreed with everybody else". In this respect the WWF and ARC approach differs signicantly from some, particlarly North American, advocates of the religion-ecology dialogue. According to Roger Gottlieb, a prolic religion-ecology advocate, religious adherents will only join in ecological conservation when they reach agreement because abandoning the claim to literal veracity of a particular theology allows adherents of very different traditions to recognize common ground and celebrate each others' spiritual gifts. This ecumenism is, I believe, quite beyond the imagination of earlier religious thinkers.4 For Gottlieb religions represent sets of cultural resources that may only become a force for ecological transformation when hybridised and renewed through encounter with the modern ideologies of evolutionism, feminism and political

4 Roger Gottlieb, 'Introduction: Religion in an Age of Environmental Crisis', in Gottlieb (ed.), This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, New York, Routledge, 1996, 3 - 14, 10. 4

liberalism. This North American desire to remake traditional religion nds motive from the peculiar forms of conservative Christianity that have evolved in North America. While conservative Christians in North America have a strong belief in the earth as divinely created - rather than randomly evolved - they tend at the same time to reject scientic accounts of ecological crisis, including those concerning climate change and species extinction. Instead they primarily conform to the worldview as ascribed to Western Christians by Lynn White. That is they place great emphasis on human dominion over the earth, and on the human duty to use the resources God has given those made in the divine image in order to enhance human wealth and wellbeing. This culture of dominion is combined with a strong belief in divine action and miraculous intervention in the cosmos, and for many with a millennialist account of the nearness of the end of human history in a nal conagration in which believers are rescued from the earth before it is burned up in the judgment which precedes the new millennium. Intrinsic to this worldview is a rejection of mainstream science, ecology, and the conservation message. If the earth is soon to burn, and only righteous humans to be redeemed, then the fate of creatures other than human beings is of no account. This worldview provides the dominant religious frame for the interpretation of the BP blowout at the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, and the terrible legacy of oil pollution of the ocean and the shores of Louisiana, Alabama and Florida. In these states the majority of the population self-describe as Christian and the majority of Christians are Southern Baptists or members of smaller baptist or independent churches. Chalmette, Louisiana, one hundred miles inland from the Gulf Coast, is a long way from the threatened coastline but the livelihoods of many of its residents are intertwined with the ecology and economy of the Gulf. A prayer vigil was held in First Baptist Church Chalmette as the rst oil began to hit the shorelline where people prayed for divine assistance in the disaster. In his ad-

dress to the vigil John Dee Jeffries, pastor of First Baptist recalled the previous disaster to hit the area, Hurricane Katrina when he said life was so dark, so unfair. I was lled with agony and loneliness. But every miracle in the Bible began with someone in a mess. Were in a mess. It may be dark, the prognosis may not be good, but Hes still a miracle-working God.5 Derek Buchert, pastor of World Prayer Tabernacle in Chalmettem, said Anybody can worship in a miracle. Worship in a mess, and God will turn it into a masterpiece. Dont give up. In your crisis, dont give up. People on the coast are losing a whole way of life. There are pockets of pain and almost existential fear. Like other people, we wonder, What does this mean? What if they cant stop it? But we cant live in hypotheticals. God is not always the cause of calamities, but He can use them and turn something painful into something better than we can imagine.6 Another vein of conservative Christian response to the Gulf blow-out takes a more apocalyptic turn. In a blogging site called Godlike Productions an individual who signs himself 'llantrepre 564131' talks of how the oil on the water is red and looks like blood, which seems to him a conrmation of the 'end-time' prophecy of the Book of Revelation: The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed (Revelation 8. 8 - 9).7 A Louisiana Pastor called Ted Turner similarly reads the blowout as an end-time event:

5John Dee Jeffries quoted in Carmen K. Sisson, 'In Louisiana people hope - and pray - for a Gulf oil-spill miracle', Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 2010. 6 Derek Beuchert quoted in Carmen K. Sisson, 'In Louisiana people hope - and pray for a Gulf oil-spill miracle. 7 Mister Obvious at the blog 'Re: This is confirmation of our worst fears...BP OIL', June 6 2010, at http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1107008/pg1, visited on June 23 2010. 6

The Bible prophesized hardships. If we believe the word of God is true and we dowe also know that in addition to prophesying hardships he promised to take care of us.8 The analogy of blood in the water is not however conned to conservative Christians. Conservationists also made the same comparison as Naomi Klein reports: John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to y over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After lming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as "rainbow sheen", he observed what many had felt: "The Gulf seems to be bleeding."9 In reecting on her own response to seeing the oil on the water Klein also feels that the disaster reveals that the earth is a living organism: It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP's live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth's guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.10 And she goes on to quote the ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant who suggests that the real problem is that the scientic culture birthed by Francis Bacon treats of the earth as a machine that human beings can control at will.11 And as Merchant comments to Klein, when BP tried to turn off this particular piece of the machinery, the earth showed itself to be 'an active force' that 'cannot be so easily conned'.12 This account of the earth as a living force is however resisted by conservative Christians - and more especially baptists. And this resistance is not conned to the Gulf of Mexico. The oil industry has a long history of ecological destruction, and of

8 Ted Turner quoted in Lisa Miller, 'Blood in the Water: To some Christian fundamentalists, the oil plume in the Gulf of Mexico heralds the apocalypse,' Newsweek, June 4, 2010. 9 Quoted in Naomi Klein, 'The Gulf oil spill: a hole in the world', The Guardian, Saturday 19 June 2010. 10 Klein, 'Gulf oil spill'. 11 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientic Revolution, NY, Harper Collins, 1980. 12 Klein, 'Gulf oil spill' 7

association with war. But much of this destruction is hidden since it is not in territories close to the places where most of the oil is consumed. One such distant territory which has been subjected to a fty year ecological disaster by the oil industry is the Niger Delta whose Ogoni people have been subjected to fty years of catastrophic oil leaks from thousands of foreign owned overland pipes and well blow-outs on land and in the ocean, while methane from the wells is burned off and raises the air temperature in the whole region. My doctoral student Nkem Osuigwe, who is a resident pastor in Pour Hartcourt, has completed a detailed study of the response of conservative Christians - baptists and pentecostals - to the oil leaks, and the ongoing civil conict including verbatim interviews. A retired oil company manager who attends Faith Baptist in Pourt Harcourt describes the cause of the conict in terms of divine retribution: The trouble, or problem, in the Niger Delta is due to the fact that God is annoyed. God, the all-knowing God, saw the Niger Delta and its problems; because he is the one that created the place, with its difcult terrain and its people, he decided to compensate them by placing oil inside the ground with the intention of the people using it to develop their harsh environment. But man in his wickedness decided to take the oil from here to another place, leaving the environment devastated. That is why God is annoyed and thats why we will never have peace until God is happy.13 In this religious reading the environmental destruction is not a consequence of oil production without due care to the environment but a divine punishment on the Delta for the wickedness of those in the government and in foreign companies who export the oil from the region instead of giving it to the people of the Delta.14 The company manager argues that the fact that the people of the Niger Delta do not experience the economic benet of the oil but instead the oil is extracted by foreign and domestic companies for their prot, and is claimed to belong to the Nigerian Federal

13 Quoted in Nkem Osuigwe, Crude Oil, Conict and Christian Witness in Nigeria: Baptist and Pentecostal Perspectives, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, June 2010, 142. 14 Quoted in Osuigwe, Crude Oil, Conict and Christian Witness in Nigeria, 151. 8

government who purloin the oil wealth for other purposes than beneting the people of the Delta. A pastor in the same church sees oil as a divine blessing, a gift to the region put there by the Creator. But this gift has only seemed to be a curse because it is being extracted in such a way as not to benet the people of the Delta: I see it also as a blessing, a blessing in the sense that God doesnt make mistakes in his gifts to mankind. So, for us to discover oil in our area, the Niger Delta, its indeed a blessing. The way a blessing should be utilised will go a long way in telling people whether we are using it as a blessing or we are turning around to make it a curse or a problem to ourselves. It is the usage now, since the Niger Delta in a way is not being blessed or not beneting, so to say, in the way it is expected, and many other things are creeping in here and there and people are dying. Therefore people are tempted to see it as a curse. But the truth is that it is a very big blessing to both the Niger Delta and the nation as a whole.15 But this view is not universally shared. Some do see the oil as a curse because far from benetting them the oil has polluted their villages and they have seen no development or economic uplift from it. A younger member of Faith Baptist argues that crude oil in the Niger Delta is a curse to us. I want to state that the rst oil well was struck in Oloibiri in Bayelsa State in the year 1956, but anybody who cares to know should go to Oloibiri, as I talk now, and see whether the oil that was rst struck there is a blessing to the people or a curse... I want to state again that it is a curse, if you go to Bomu in Gokana, or Dere, where oil was struck in 1958 the people are still battling with Shell.16 Nonetheless the dominant view among Niger Delta Baptists is that the oil is a physical endowment hidden in the earth by the creator at the origins of creation. If justly used for the benet of the people in whose land it is found it is a blessing; if it is misused it becomes a curse. There is nothing in this perspective which indicates any sense that the earth is more than a physical mechanism. Whether interaction

15 Associate Pastor, Faith Baptist in Osuigwe, Crude Oil and Christian Witness in Nigeria, 240. 16 Young adult, Faith Baptist in Osuigwe, Crude Oil and Christian Witness in Nigeria, 242. 9

with the mechanism causes benet or harm arises from the distribution of the economic benets of a particular resource. And when harm arises it is visited externally by God as a miraculous intervention of divine retribution on human wickedness. Whether in the Gulf or in the Niger Delta, the modern scientic belief that the earth is a mechanism whose resources are to be disposed of by humans for their benet nds little challenge among conservative Christians. The oil spills are a result of human carelessness, a mess of human making. They may also be signs of divine punishment for human wickedness, or even of the 'end-times'. But baptists and pentecostals in the Niger Delta and in the Gulf of Mexico do not read the catastrophic human and ecological consequences of oil pollution as signs that human beings ought not to be drilling deep into the earth. Lynn White famously identied the historic roots of the ecological crisis with the disenchantment of the earth, which he associates with the Western doctrine of the earth as a divine creation from which the creator is absent.17 But this account of divine absence from a mechanistic cosmos is by no means a consistent feature of Christian theology in East or West. As Amos Funkenstein has shown the metaphor of the cosmos as machine is preceded by the secularisation of knowledge which occured during the Reformation when laymen took over the teaching of non-theological disciplines and treated of what had been traditional theological themes, including the origin of the world and the nature of knowledge.18 This secularisation of knowledge was the logical concomitant of the Reformation claim sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola de which frees knowledge from the control of the Church. And lay scholars found new purpose in the argument of Francis Bacon in Novum Organum that the world is open and available for human destruction and reconstruction and that through such

17 Lynn White, 'The historic roots of our ecological crisis', Science, 1967. 18 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientic Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1989. 10

reconstruction humans would at last unfold the mysteries of life, matter and motion. For such a project to proceed, lay scholars such as Newton, Galileo, and Kepel had to reconceive of the cosmos as a machine, for otherwise Baconian science would desecrate the divine Spirit and not just matter. The cosmology of mechanism thus required that God was reconceived in Deistic terms as an absent deus ex machina. The cosmological metaphor of the machine has its roots at least in part in the inuence of the new conceptions of time that arose in conjunction with the new mechanical clocks of the late Middle Ages that depicted the earth in night and dark, the phases of the moon and the movement of the planets. And as the metaphor acquired philosophical as well as scientic power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it became possible for matter and motion to be explained with the aid of mechanical laws and without reference to being or will. The difference between medieval and early modern accounts of mechanism is accounted for by the growing sense of humans as articers of nature, and hence as acquiring 'knowledge-by-construction', for in the Middle Ages it was widely understood that humans could only really know what they had made.19 Funkenstein's analysis helps to explain the failure of conservative Christianity to conserve creation in the modern world. Conservative Christianity as it has developed in the United States since the nineteenth century, and as now replicated on every continent, sustains a wholesale adoption of the metaphor of the earth as machine even as its adherents continue to afrm that this machine is divinely made. Divine interventions for the conservative Christian are miraculous or supernatural interferences in the xed laws of nature and in human life and society. By such special interventions ensouled life - human beings - are also said to have been specially created since there is nothing - certainly no imminent divine mind or spirit - present in the given order of creation that could have led to such beings evolving without spe-

19 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientic Imagination, 292 - 9. 11

cial divine action. Hence the existence of human beings is not evidence of a deeper and underlying implicate order of divine-creation interaction but rather of a very particular set of acts of will around which all cosmic life is said to be ordered. According to the deeply voluntarist tenor of conservative Christianity the key to reading history is the choices individual human beings make in relation to their maker. The division between the redeemed and the damned - while originating in the mind of God - nds a simulacrum in the wills of individual men and women who choose to be included - or not - in the atoning and saving effects of the death of Jesus Christ on a Roman cross. This cross - and the choices made in relation to it - are the keys to the cosmos. And compared to it no other creature or artifact is of eternal or spiritual signicance. Consequently conservative Christianity does not constitute a public space, or a set of ideas or practices which can be mobilised in public space, through which believers critique or resist the ecological and human consequences of a science-informed culture that treats the earth as a lifeless mechanism, or that destabilises the life support systems of the planet. Instead it offers a pietistic subculture in which the individual can nd compensatory experiences in which miraculous divine aid is invoked to repair the human suffering caused by ecological destruction. The claim for a post-secular turn in late modernity towards a recovery of the sacred stands in need of some revision, at least with respect to the overpowering and destructive reach of scientic modernity on the earth. Some of those who advance the religion-ecology dialogue see it as a way to restrain or redirect a material scientic perspective on the earth towards a more responsible use of nature through the lens of a sacred perspective that views the earth as divinely made. But most of those who engage and promote the religion-ecology dialogue do so from a pragmatical belief that it represents a way of involving non-experts in conservation. And herein lies the heart of the problem with the religion-ecology conversation. Those who propose a 'greening' of church, temple and mosque do so because they wish to 12

enlist local religious communities in the progressive cause of environmental conservation: religious communinities provide access or reach to people in ecologically at risk regions in local communities and so can engage non-experts in local consevation efforts in a way that bureaucrats and scientists cannot. But for conservative Christians, as for conservative Muslims in the Middle East, the destruction of the environment in oil rich regions is seen as a price worth paying to derive a livelihood - and wealth - from the mechanistic earth. Even when faced with an ecological crisis that threatens human health and peace this machine cosmology remains unchallenged because it is so deep-rooted in the religious culture - as well as the scientic culture that they inhabit. The attempt to engage religion in the scientic conservation effort misses the ideational origins of the ecological crisis in the late medieval theology of mechanism and in the modern scientic worldview which it birthed. It also misses the deep implication of modern capitalism in this worldview. The mechanistic cosmology of the Baconian world view produces also a new form of political economy. Just as the resultant deism of Paley, Malthus and Chalmers locks God out of the creation, these same thinkers sustain an economics that locks God out of economic exchange so that political economy acquires an autonomy from moral and spiritual communities and ways of judgment.20 Without a challenge to these seminal origins of the ecological crisis the conservation enterprise - whether or not it is hitched to religious communities - lacks cultural purchase. It remains, as Wendell Berry observes, a sideline; an attempt by enviornmentalists to separate out parts of nature - and of human community - from the machanistic drive of industrial capitalism while leaving the beast

20 John Milbank, 'The body by love possessed: Christianity and late capitalism in Britain' in Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology, Eugene, ON, Wipf and Stock, 2009, 66. 13

fundamentally untamed and still at large.21 This is why, as Berry notes, the Sierra Club continues to invest its pension funds in the rapacious corporations that drill and strip mine coal, oil and trees while at the same time attempting to conserve wilderness. In the same way the Church of England proposes to shrink its carbon footprint through an institutional process inaugurated by the Archbishop of Canterbury and pursued by Diocesan environmental ofcers while the Church Commissioners continue to hold their largest per-company proportion of shares in major oil companies. The dialogue in the public square of religion and ecology therefore faces a fundamental conundrum. The public square provided by industrial capitalism rests upon fossil fueled consumerism. Without challenging the public iconography of capitalist-fueled consumption, and the corporations and governments that promote and sustain it, the dialogue mistakes the roots of the threats to biodiversity and habitats in the failure of conservationists to 'engage' local communities. But the locales of these communities are already being engaged by far more insidious and powerful corporate forces that are licensed by national governments such as the Federal Governments of the USA and Nigeria to engage in local ecological destruction in the pursuit of national and international wealth accumulation. It was in 1953 that the then Anglo-Persian Oil company - renamed British Petroleum in 1968 - saw its interests threatened by the intention of the democratically eletected President of Iran - Musadeq - to nationalise his country's oil wells so that Iranians could enjoy the fruits of oil instead of seeing 90% of its value exported to the UK. Prime Minister Churchill, lacking the geopolitical instruments to intervene, called on the Americans to do so and the CIA instigated a coupo against Musadeq. The Shah of Iran was installed and his oppressive regime fueled the rise of funda-

21 Wendell Berry, 'The ecological crisis as a crisis of character', in Berry, The Unsettlling of America, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1989, 1 - 17. 14

mentalist extremism in Iran and ultimately led to the rst truly Islamic revolution in 1979 which installed a theocratic state in this once democratic country. The rst scholar in either East or West to devote much of his career to the engagement between religion and ecology is the Iranian philosopher Syed Hossein Nasr. In his Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man Nasr argues that the ecological crisis is spiritual in origin. For Nasr it is the secularization of nature in the West consequent on the secularization of science and ultimately of all knowledge that has to be challenged. And the roots for recovering a sacred science Nasr nds not only in the Qu'ran but also in the Hebrew Psalms and Prophets, in the New Testament, in the teachings of the early Church Fathers in whom both Muslims and Christians nd shared roots, and in medieval metaphysics. He notes that the earliest Christian documents see in the death and resurrection of Christ 'a withering and rejuvenation of nature' which points to 'the cosmic character of Christ' and that is manifest in St Paul's account of the redemption of creation. Among the early fathers he notes that the Logos doctrine applies not only to humanity but to all of nature and to all creatures. And he nds in the Irish neoplatonist - John Scotus Erigena - the 'rst complete metaphysical formulation' of the implications of the belief that the whole creation comes from God and is created and redeemed in Christ.22 In De Divisione Naturae Erigena unfolds a Trinitarian metaphysic in which the essentia of the Father is the source of existence, the sapienta of the Son is the source of wisdom and the vita of the Spirit is the life of all creatures. And man/woman is the triune microcosm of this Trinitarian macrocosm in his nous (intellect), logos (reason) and dianoia (sense). As microcosm man stands in fact between the material and spiritual creations and partakes of the nature of both. In him the whole creation is contained in an essential rather than a material or substantial sense. Man is created in the image of God, yet as an animal, so that from one side the spiritual world is reected in

22 Syed Hossein Nasr, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1968, 101. 15

him and from the other the animal world. His destiny is inextricably tied to both the spiritual and natural worlds.23 In this perspective all creation, and not just the human soul, is caught up in the events of redemption and restoration which are inaugurated in Christ's Resurrection from the dead.24 And it is the loss of this sacred vision among theologians as well as scientists that is the root of the secularisation of nature in the West. And given the role of theologians in shaping a culture in which nature is conceived as a profane machine they have a crucial responsibility 'for reinstating a more wholesome and integral attitude toward nature'.25 In this perspective the adoption of religous communities as forms of 'social capital' which may be mobilised in the scientic conservation project is doubly problematic, rst because it neglects the ideational and spiritual roots of the ecological crisis and because it treats of religion and metaphysics as units of 'capital' to be mobilised in supporting rather than critiquing the underlying assumptions of that continue to inform the technological and scientic interaction between humans and creation. The metaphysics of the Gospel of John, Irenaeus, and Erigena stand in direct oppostion to the cosmology of mechanism and to the capitalist and technicist reshaping of the world in which natural forces and species are subjected to ever more invasive human control and gradually homogenised. The Mexican Gulf blowout reveals close to the shores of the greatest contempmorary Western power the hubris of the modern treatment of nature as the profane object of human control. Three miles beneath the surface of the ocean robots and computers and video cameras create the illusion of control but in reality the earth in

23 Nasr, Man and Nature, 101. 24 See also Michael S Northcott, The Enviroment and Christian Ethics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, ch. 6. 25 Nasr, Man and Nature, 106. 16

the depths remains a living force that is beyond human powers. It is because modern science-informed and fossil fueled political economy excludes the sacred from the human remaking of the world that faith is pushed to the margins in secular modernity.26 The attempt to bring it back from those margins in the religion-ecology project to serve as a moral or social force cannot succeed when political economy itself is beyond restraint. In Nasr's powerful survey of the metaphysics of Christian and Muslim theologians from Irenaeus to Avicenna nature is given and not made and is therefore beyond human attempts to reduce it to 'natural capital' to serve the industrial economy since humans can only fully know what they themselves have made. What they receive they must therefore treat with greater reverence. Without this recogntion the attempt to marry conservation science and religion will remain a marginal constraint on the continued industrial assault on the earth. And the claim that religion is acquiring new public force in the late modern world will remain at best an aspiration rather than a reality when humanity's microcosmic and sacred power - to frustrate or to full the given order of the cosmos - remains so marginal to the core and driving rationale of modern political economy.

26 Milbank, 'The body by love possessed', 71. 17