Home Spotlight on Teaching Religion and Ecology from a Postcolonial Perspective

Religion and Ecology from a Postcolonial Perspective - Widening Horizons PDF-NOTE: Internet Explorer Users, right click the PDF Icon and choose [save target as] if you are experiencing problems with clicking. Print

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.



 

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