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Summary: Is environmentalism Christian?
Review: If you are convinced there is a worldwide crisis of resource management, you can skip the first five chapters. It is a compilation of statistics about how transnational corporations have polluted, clearcut, and overfished the planet. There is no specifically Christian content until the end of the book.McDonagh traces the source of our attitude problem to the Bible-based opinion that God gave humans dominion over nature to use as a resource and care for as a ward. He correctly points out that nature is vast, complex, and harbors billions of unsolved mysteries, so we should never pretend to be competent stewards. He says that Christianity needs to "expand its focus" and "face reality," admitting that we've done a terrible job as stewards and finding ways to clean up our act. Elements of nature worship (he doesn't call it that, but that's basically what it is) should be included in Christian worship. Since the discussion of Christian issues was so short (thirty pages at the end of the book), important questions were left unanswered for me. If the Genesis story and orthodox theologies are so backwards, why don't we just abandon the Abrahamic faith altogether? If they're rotten to the core, how will "expanding our focus" solve the problem and transform the world? And, since Christianity has always emphasized mind/body dualism, generally despising the body, especially sexuality, not infrequently advocating masochism and refusal of medical treatment, and training sights on the non-physical afterlife of the soul...how does McDonagh plan to integrate the sanctity of nature into Christian tradition? What would it mean for a Christian to praise wood, fire, soil, bacteria? He doesn't address the obstacle of mind/body dualism at all. I was raised Jewish but I don't feel Jewish--instead, I feel the ecology of this world, which I can't reconcile with a Jewish worldview. McDonagh hasn't shown me how Christian ecologists could feel Christian, either.
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