**5. The environmental consequences of the enchanted vs. disenchanted worldviews and the role of religion**

Profound vulnerability at every level—epistemologically, ontologically, and existentially means that living in an enchanted universe is not for the faint-hearted. It is an animate universe charged with spiritual agency that, if tampered with in the wrong way, could have dire consequences. On the other hand, disenchantment objectifies the world, rids it of the numinous, exorcizes it of spiritual agency, and puts the autonomous human being in charge. It brings about the feeling of an invulnerability unprecedented in the history of humankind and, in the process, gives humans carte blanche to exploit

#### *Indigenous Religions as Antidote to the Environmental Crisis: Surveying a Decade of Reflection DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105209*

the world without paying attention to the consequences. But it must be stressed, once again, that such invulnerability is an illusion. When Weber first came up with the idea of disenchantment to describe the new set of relationships that would emerge in a modern world, he warned that it would lead to the "iron cage" of bureaucracy, but he did not anticipate the iron cage of environmental destruction that would ensue [6].

Science has largely replaced religion in our understanding of how the world works and what our role in it is, but that does not mean that religion has disappeared. It is just that religion can now be appropriated into the arsenal of weaponry, along with a transformed epistemology, to further reinforce the human tendency toward the will to power. Gregory Bateson stated this in no uncertain terms.

*If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables … If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you invent an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite. If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured ([7], p. 472).*

Bateson's argument, while stated in rather hyperbolic terms, has been validated by a number of other scholars. A watershed moment in the realization of Christianity's complicity in environmental destruction, for example, came with the publication of an article by the medieval historian Lynn White. White's thesis in his landmark publication paved the way for much of the present debate among scholars about the negative role of Christianity in the environment. The domination of nature in Christianity, argued White, finds its roots in the Genesis creation narrative itself. The import of Gen. 1:26–28 is that dominion over creation is a characteristic of God and because humankind is made in the image of God humans too have dominion, with the creator, over the creation. In White's terms:

*Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions … not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends ([8], p. 105).*

It is important to note first of all that White frames his critique of Christianity by way of a comparison with paganism, setting the tone for the debate that was to ensue. He stated his case in rather radical terms, arguing firstly that the "widespread practice of the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature ….. mark[s] the greatest event in human history since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well" ([8], p. 185), and secondly that "the victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture" ([8], p. 188). The first fundamentally shifted the relationship between human beings and nature from interdependence to dominance, and the second led to the removal of all restraints already spoken about. This

was in accordance with the Christian doctrine of the natural world being given to humankind to use and exploit for its own purposes.3

Kinsley summarizes the tradition of antipathy between Christianity and nature under three headings—desacralization, domination, and degradation ([9], p. 103). Desacralization, disenchantment, or demystification takes place when nature is emptied of spirituality, domination occurs when humans get the idea (from the Bible) that this is the command of God, and degradation follows through overexploitation. Kinsley picks up the point strongly made by White that in the popular religion of antiquity "every stream, every tree, every mountain contained a guardian spirit who had to be carefully propitiated before one put a mill in a stream, or cut the tree, or mined the mountain" ([9], p. 103). On the other hand,

*To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature ([9], p. 104).*

Such an attitude finds its roots in the Hebrew Bible with the attitude of Israel to the Baal cult, which was the indigenous religion of Canaan. This cult was based on "rapport with, reverence for, and propitiation of the powers latent in the land" ([9], p. 106). In this kind of religion, spirituality has nothing to do with the presence of the divine in the environment but with the transcendence of God outside of it, over it, and above it. The environment is only sacred in that it is the creation of God and therefore indirectly bears the mark of God. The move from the indigenous belief that the environment itself is personal and has spiritual agency, to monotheistic religion where spiritual agency lies only with the transcendent deity constitutes, for White, the central radical shift that revolutionized the attitude of humankind to the environment and opened the way for exploitation and abuse.

In spite of his devastating critique of Christianity, however, he finds a single prophetic voice within the tradition, St Francis of Assisi.

*The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, St. Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man's relation to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man's limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our écological crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and re-feel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists ([8], p. 193).*

<sup>3</sup> In some ways, it could be said that the entire system of private property in the West finds its inspiration in the Genesis narrative. This because John Locke, whose philosophy laid the foundation for the private ownership of land, justified his position from Genesis 1:28, following in the footsteps of Francis Bacon, who was the first to articulate the need for an aggressive exploitation of nature.

*Indigenous Religions as Antidote to the Environmental Crisis: Surveying a Decade of Reflection DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105209*
