Religion and Ecology from a Postcolonial Perspective Print

Isabel Mukonyora, Western Kentucky University

Isabel “Bella” Mukonyora is an associate professor in the department of philosophy and religion at Western Kentucky University. Mukonyora has found a way of using her training as a scholar of religion to develop courses that help students understand the global society in which we all live today. Her teaching covers a wide range of topics in which she draws attention to many topical issues concerning life in the twenty-first century — from violence, oppression, and gender to even climate change! As someone born in a postcolonial African society riddled with violence, injustice, and poverty, Mukonyora is attentive to questions that matter to her. This history has deeply affected her teaching and research methods; her monograph, Wandering a Gendered Wilderness (Peter Lang: New York, 2007) highlights the need for scholars to examine the public role of Christianity in postcolonial Africa. After having written articles on different aspects of Christianity in Africa that were published as chapters of books and journal articles, Mukonyora is now writing a book on ecojustice and is looking forward to conducting regular upper-level classes on religion and ecology at Western Kentucky University.

Terms, Concepts, and Etymologies

To globalize concepts involved in religion and ecology, it helps to begin with what students know and understand and to broaden out their understandings and widen their horizons. For example, I know that students from Bowling Green, Kentucky, are likely to understand the term "Gaia" and to relate to images of Goddesses from ancient times in the northern hemisphere. I have been able to teach a pilot course on religion and ecology at Western Kentucky University by turning to ideas more familiar to them that suggest the interconnectedness of all living creatures on earth in spiritual ecology. I then widened their horizons by introducing them to Mai Vedu, a Shona concept from my own culture whereby interconnectedness has been distorted by our human failure to comprehend the limits of our power. Mai Vedu has thus signaled to students from a Western hegemonic culture that there are other people making of the Earth a special place and connecting humans to a vast animal and plant kingdom. Mai Vedu, rather than Gaia, becomes that Archimedean point from which someone of my cultural identity can teach religion and ecology in a way that makes students feel that they are being challenged to take an interest in other cultures.

I start with simple words that define religion, especially those I can pick from etymology. For instance, reli-gare is the Latin root word describing religion as an activity that involves believers in community-centered activities aimed at making sure bonds exist between people enough for them to share value systems. Reli-gare, although focusing on human behavior, is important to religion and ecology, mainly because there is an emphasis on the interrelatedness of the living, which can here be extended to all life, albeit centered on the well-being of humans first and foremost. For purposes of discussion in classrooms filled with Christians, agnostics, atheists, and members of a few other types of religion, this simple etymology, associated with an example of religious behavior of members from an entirely different culture and associated with the larger earth community, is a good way of widening the horizons of what it means to be religious. Another useful word in defining religion in this era of climate change is the Latin word salvus. This word is an adjective meaning “safe.” When used in religious terms to refer to a goal, salvus is a way of describing “healing” or “the restoration of things that are broken to their beauty,” so to speak. This I find to be a good theoretical device for getting students accustomed to salvation as a journey to the heavens away from earth; to think critically about that understanding of the term in today’s world. As Bron Taylor notes in a recent book called Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 2009), there is a spectrum of religions from the supernatural-oriented to the animist and Gaian, and each type has “explanatory and interpretive power” that has implications for living on the earth. This pluralist theoretical framework resonates with me because my own goal in this course is to raise the awareness of the earth community through lenses developed from a variety of theories of religion.

Mai Vedu, in this discussion, becomes an example of a “religion” that uses the idea of the evolution of planets to heighten the awareness of the divine in everything. “Our Mother Earth,” as she is described by Aschwanden (1989), is the womb of creation in which we find the ocean, land, mountains, rivers, plants, animals, humans, and whatever else that lives. In Mai Vedu’s womb one finds human beings coming into being and sharing with animals an existence that depends on other lives described in Her story. Almost as scientists describe processes of evolution in which there are other bodies in the heavens — some like the sun and moon, without life, yet a lot older than Earth — the story of evolution according to Mai Vedu has nothing to do with climate change in the way the Karanga people tell it in Africa. Mai Vedu is portrayed as a young planet filled with watery substances facing the threat of death when the sun gets very hot, which the Karanga people from central Africa believe happened to the ecosystem in the past and is guaranteed to happen again. Mai Vedu opens students up to alternative ways of thinking religiously and ethically about Gaia in a global society that pays attention to the predicament of others.


In the book A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming (Minneapolis, MN: Augsberg Fortress Publishers, 2008), Sallie McFague makes an important point about the climate for thinking about religion and ecology today. She shows that we now live in a world where millions of people, converted to Christianity since the colonial era, are starving to death or dying as a result of violence, poverty, and the destruction of the environment. Not only does she refer to cultures with ancestral religions of their own in this way, McFague wants us to know that Christianity has fast become the dominant religion in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I mention this aspect of McFague’s book here because my teaching career began far away in Zimbabwe, a postcolonial society where 80 percent of its people are Christian despite the persistence of ancestral religious beliefs and practices. The experience of teaching victims of the AIDS pandemic, of sporadic droughts, social upheaval, and extreme poverty led me to take seriously the goal to make my teaching a way of preparing people to become good citizens. I am in the Bible Belt of America now. I still teach with stories about human survival in twenty-first century non-Western cultures. With newspapers so full of stories about war, there is no shortage of information that highlights the problem that McFague is suggesting we all take into account when using classrooms to promote knowledge about religion, ecology, and good citizenship.

Briefly, the threats to the lives of human beings who are victims of climate change are addressed in my courses on global Christianity. Most of my American students are not ready to take seriously the fact that millions of people who share their faith as Christians are at the same time victims of the destruction of the environment, injustice, violence, and poverty. By insisting on an international perspective and voice, however, I am able to develop pedagogical tools with which to help my students understand secularization and globalization as processes linked to the history of colonialism and the spread of Christianity into other religious cultures. My teaching strategy thus comes out of my own philosophical reflections of life on earth as a way to help young people look past the limits of their own culture.

The popular practice of Christianity in the culture of students from the Bible Belt has led me to push toward widening horizons. Defining religion from a global perspective is crucial to my teaching under these circumstances, not least because introducing religion and ecology demands that students recognize something found in religious traditions from cultures far away from their own. That “something” is the teaching that humans belong to a biotic community whose “intelligences” need to be taken seriously on the terms that different religions use to articulate them.

In order for the “intelligences” just mentioned to receive notice properly, one place to begin the critique of culture is with the familiar Jewish and Christian concept of “God-the-Creator” and that of man’s dominion on Earth. Not only does the anthropocentric view of life resulting from these concepts of God and man on Earth make it hard to introduce the alternative idea of ourselves as biotic creatures, but also scientific ideas that include theories of evolution can result in serious tension in the classroom. Offering ways of thinking about creation from the point of view of other religions and cultures, where life on earth is sacred without clashing with scientific theories of knowledge, has a good way of calming nerves, especially when the religious ideas concerned enhance rather than clash with the predominantly Christian understanding of the students’ cultural backgrounds. Defining religion on the basis of several theoretical models and connecting the divine to nature must, however, be done carefully in order to avoid dead-ends in classrooms located in the Bible Belt.


I find it enjoyable to engage my students in a conversation about the meaning of life on planet Earth according to pioneer scholars of religion in other cultures like Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) and James George Frazer (1854–1941). Tylor and Frazer are, according to Bron Taylor, pioneers of an animistic spirituality. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Rudolph Otto (1869–1937), both responding to the Enlightenment with arguments for an experiential knowledge of the divine, provide us with different learning devices for transforming Christian teaching about “God-the-Creator” in a way that makes these teachings more attentive to what can be seen, heard, and felt. These theologians tell us something useful that connects students to worlds of meaning that help them develop nuanced definitions of both religion and ecology in their Western culture. What is left is to test these and other theories of religion in and outside the classroom.

Teaching religion and ecology in a pluralistic society led me to approach “religion” using a variety of definitions and/or concepts. For example, in my course on women and religion, I begin with a multidimensional definition of religion even though the main textbook that students use focuses on ideas of women in the history of Christianity. The multidimensional definition of religion prepares students to understand and identify the different aspects of religion including beliefs, practices, symbols, and the day-to-day activities that men and women do as social beings — all of which make it easy for students to see that it is possible to identify different elements of the natural world in a religion and ecology class.

In another course, “Introduction to Religion,” I now begin class with references to mass media and day-to-day experiences of life, both of which usually include an ecological component. Besides sharing facts about life with students like this, I also try to help students arrive at knowledge experientially. For instance, Bowling Green, Kentucky — where I teach — is not known for getting snow at Christmas. Since the winter of 2010 was different, I thought about student reactions to debates about climate change because the campus has had to close several times because of snow. I also learned about heavy snowstorms in Europe and received Christmas messages discussing floods in Australia. Had students been around, I would have been sure to have dealt with this news in the classroom — a place to examine the implications of climate change.

To end, I am honored by the invitation to submit this piece to Spotlight on Teaching. It is my hope that by teaching courses on religion and ecology, or by integrating questions about them into other subjects, we can improve our understanding of life today and make decisions to act in ways that honor our interconnectedness.

Resources

Eric-Bain Selbo. “From Pride to Cowardice: Obstacles to the Dialogical Classroom.” Teaching Theology and Religion 6/1/3 (2003): 8.

Kimberly Rae Connor. “Teaching in the Global Village: Notes towards a Religious Studies Rhetoric.” Teaching Theology and Religion 6/1/18 (2003): 23.