Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest by Thomas R. Dunlap and Religion and Ecology in the Public Sphere ed. by Celia Deane-Drummond and Heinrich Bedford-Strohm (review)

Twelve years ago, historian Thomas Dunlap (who is a professor at Texas A&M University) released a groundbreaking book, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest, which received the recognition “Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice in 2005. Its original idea connected the ways of believing in the future of nature with religious practices: “Catholicism, science, and nature all offered ways of accepting the universe, complete with confessions of faith and inspirational literature” (8). The author admitted his exercise could seem dubious: “Applying a religious perspective to environmentalism may make non-believers and believers uncomfortable” (5). Revisiting many Anglo-Saxon thinkers (but also authors like Sigurn Olgon; Teilhard de Chardin; John Burroughs, author of Gospel of Nature; and even Aldous Huxley), Dunlap demonstrates how nature was progressively made sacred during the twentieth century, especially in North America, without any particular connection with a specific religion (75). For example, Olgon’s book The Singing Wilderness was a best-seller in 1956 because the author “wrote of silence and solitude found paddling on a wilderness lake or sitting around a campfire, moments of peace and oneness with the universe” (77). A scholars such as William Cronon (who wrote the preface) was himself in the middle of an academic debate in 1996 when he dared to question whether wilderness was a concept, a reality, or a social construction (87).

As Dunlap demonstrates, environmentalism was oscillating between faith and secularism (121). Consequently, for many people, discovering the importance of the environment would be like “a new life” that comes with “fervor” (106). Dunlap concludes that fondness for nature is not exactly a religion but functions in many points as if it were: “while environmentalism is involved in religious questions, and deals with ultimate commitments, it is not a ‘faith’ in the sense of being a creed” (171).

Even though Dunlap’s Faith in Nature is not quoted or mentioned in the recent Religion and Ecology in the Public Sphere, the idea of linking environmentalism with religion and the sacred is salient. In their introduction, co-editors Celia Deane-Drummond and Heinrich Bedford-Strohm affirm that theologians should become inspired advocates for ecology in all environmental debates because believers have spiritual reasons to defend and promote the preservation of nature: “we therefore need a new public theology of ecology that takes account of the richness of religious resources and relates those resources to the requirements of political praxis” (4).

Almost a manifest for ecotheology, Religion and Ecology in the Public Sphere is divided into ten chapters and three parts. Almost all contributors in this collection are professors of theology, although the Bible is quoted in only a few essays, mainly in the first section. In his chapter (titled “Public Theology of Ecology and Civil Society”), Bedford-Strohm proposes that public theologians take part in public debates about the environment and bring the fundamental ideas of a public theology of ecology to the forefront, in political parties but also in the media, in a very concrete way (53). Like many of the contributors, Pauliina Kainulainen makes a plea for “full-scale Christian theologizing” (117) for a “public theology of ecology,” adding that “a recovery of the sense of sacredness of nature can only happen with a more holistic cosmology” (117). In her case study, she aptly shows the implication and commitment of the local church in northern Finland in the recent debate opposing theologians and priests united against a uranium mining project.

Some of the most interesting chapters in Religion and Ecology in the Public Sphere are grouped in the final section, where the authors link narratives...