'Moving towards the pro-eco end of the spectrum involves at least four levels: thinking, deciding, acting and being.' Photo: Macrovector / Freepik.
‘We might need to rethink subconscious Quaker values.’
Many Friends work hard for environmental justice. But Priscilla Alderson believes we can still learn from other faiths
There is a wide spectrum of carbon use, from people with huge footprints at one end, to the millions of extremely poor people with tiny subsistence at the other. Willingly or not, we all stand somewhere along that spectrum. Many of us criticise those with larger footprints than our own as too slow to change. But we may also accuse those who want very small footprints, like Extinction Rebellion (XR) campaigners, of being unrealistic. We justify our own positions as our reasonable best.
Moving towards the pro-eco end of the spectrum involves at least four levels: thinking, deciding, acting and being. But our Quaker faith may not be very helpful in prompting us to change at those four levels. This is not to say that members of other religions are more or less likely than Quakers to be active on climate change. But it is worth considering whether their faiths may resonate more powerfully with the promptings of love and truth in their hearts to cherish the natural physical world.
Jewish traditions of worship are very physical: dancing and music, feasting and fasting, with prayer woven into daily activities. The natural world is seen as symbolising and expressing the Creator, the father of all, abundantly recreating, providing, protecting like a shepherd, and raging like a storm against injustice when we fail to share His created wealth fairly.
Christianity grew from these Jewish beliefs and rituals and, as it spread, it absorbed local pagan religions that revered nature. Many church services today are strongly physical experiences, in the singing and praying together, the great organ and choir music, stained-glass windows and soaring arches, the standing, sitting and kneeling, the sharing of bread and wine, the baptisms, marriages and funerals that all centre on bodily presence. Services reflect the natural seasons. Besides harvest festivals, there are the six almost bare end-of-winter weeks of Lent, which explode into the white and gold flowers and altar cloths of Easter day. Celebration of renewal, resurrection and joy after loss, death and sorrow is amplified by that sense of the hopeful world reawakening into new life each spring. The sacred can feel intensely physical and natural as well as spiritual.
Early Quakers seem to have broken with these ancient traditions. George Fox’s vision on Pendle Hill in 1652 came after the new philosopher-scientists had been writing for decades and transforming basic popular ideas. Francis Bacon stressed, like George Fox, that we should learn from our direct experience (the modern scientific method) and no longer rely on faith in old authorities and intermediaries. René Descartes separated mind from body and reduced nature from sacred being to mindless machine. In The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant analyses how Francis Bacon’s views, that nature must be mined and plundered to serve science and industry, contrasted men’s intellect with ‘inferior’ women’s bodies and emotions: mind over matter.
Although Quakers personally were perhaps less sexist than many, politically they developed Francis Bacon’s visions for industry. Excluded from the universities (as nonconformists) they became leaders in banking and industry and some were slave-traders. Today, might Quakers feel differently about the natural world if for centuries we had regularly sung Psalms 23, 104 and 121, like other churchgoers? ‘Mind over matter’ is one way to describe our prepared minds concentrating on nonphysical worship in our still, silent, almost absent bodies. And do our prepared ‘hearts’ symbolise only our intellectual, pure, moral emotions, or their hormonal, unsettling, motivating aspects too?
My reason for suggesting that our Quaker faith might not be very helpful in prompting us to change towards more eco-friendly habits is twofold. We tend not to draw on the vast reserves of millennia of poetry, prayer and praise in conscious and subconscious passionate relishing of our part in the sacred natural world, which other religious traditions constantly repeat. And we might need to rethink subconscious Quaker values, which set mind over matter, if we are to revere nature deeply.
My comments could seem to deny that many Quakers are working to combat climate change, whereas I admire their vital endeavours. My aim is to see how our faith and practice can strengthen that work and encourage many more Quakers to join them, and possibly to reconsider aspects of our faith that are less helpful.
The first of the four levels of change is to learn and think about personal change, and perhaps discuss it. Quakers are very involved in these processes. People often argue that climate change is a political problem for governments and big business and other countries, such as China, to resolve. This is true, but governments will not address climate change until enough people demand that strongly enough, and businesses and exporting countries will only change when consumers demand and enforce change. The personal and political are inseparable.
The second level – deciding, or discerning – involves making choices, weighing costs or harms and benefits, trying to work out the best or least harmful thing to do. Our order of values, knowing what matters most, are guided by deep, often subconscious, beliefs. These may relate to how years of worship have celebrated the natural world, or perhaps reduced it into something vaguely precious and beautiful but rather remote. There is the choice between the benefits of a Quaker conference on sustainability and the costs of a venue in Derbyshire (without local public transport and with high carbon emissions for heating, lighting, IT, laundry and food, some of which is thrown away). There is the choice between the beautiful pristine garden at Friends House, and the regular sacrilegious power-hosing of the white stones. London is the fifteenth most water-stressed city in the world, draining streams and rivers, and destroying wildlife in many counties during droughts.
Level three, acting, makes serious actual steps forward along the spectrum of eco-concern. These are not just pick-and-mix choices but new ways of life. Giving up meat, say, can mean new relationships with friends and family. If they strongly disapprove and even refuse to compromise, the painful choice may be between old relationships or the new diet. Choosing to walk or cycle outside instead of exercising indoors in energy-consuming gyms may also challenge friendships.
This leads to level four: being. Sociological theorist Margaret Archer’s research examines how choosing and honouring our values involves not simply doing but also being, raising the questions: What kind of person do I want to be? What do I most deeply care about? The eco-motive may be scientific logic, justice, avoiding terrible waste and damage to the living world, fear of the suffering (even extinction) of all species, or perhaps all of these intensely magnified in the prayer, ‘your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. Religious people draw on their faith when answering these questions about where we stand.
