Andrew Sullivan’s Green Faith
Although I don’t have the same religious impulses that Andrew Sullivan does, much of my conservation activism springs from similar feelings of reverence for our natural world. At least, much of what he describes in this blog post on Green Faith is familiar to me.
Like many of us this week, he’s been watching Planet Earth, and is astonished and moved by the vision it gives us of this place we call home.
At its root, this is a conservative impulse. In America, in particular, love of the land has long been a part of patriotism. And where religious faith appears, it isn’t necessarily a paean to Gaia. “America, The Beautiful” is an environmentalist hymn. America’s greatest poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, are intoxicated with the natural beauty of this continent. Part of their intoxication is their sense of the divine saturating the natural. Read Thoreau or Emerson and the same American interaction with nature is palpable. Americans, after all, forged a relationship with wilderness more recently than any Europeans. And there is, therefore, a deeply patriotic form of green thought in America that has been overly neglected by environmentalists and that can and should be reclaimed by political leaders, especially on the right.
I agree with his statement there, even though it is a vision of Gaia that moves me. And it is odd but somehow heartening that where he has found confirmation of his deep faith by watching this series, I have found confirmation of my own.
Watching the first episode, Pole to Pole, I was struck by the way they framed their presentation in the movements of the sun. Sun worship, marking the year’s journey around the sun via solstices and equinoxes, is the most basic of pagan rituals and still frames most pagan worship to this day. There is an impulse the pagan that is atavistic, sensual, and no doubt grounded in some genetic past where the return of the sun in springtime literally meant life would continue after a time — winter — where the ability to stay alive was severely tested.
I would argue that Christian beliefs are an overlay on the old pagan traditions. But I certainly don’t think the two need to be at odds, when it comes to appreciation of the planet we share.