Progressive Christians Uniting

Living With An Inconvenient Truth

If you’ve ever wondered how old you’d have to be to understand global warming, I have an answer for you: sixth grade.  That’s my guess at the age of the girls who attended our first screening of An Inconvenient Truth this past Sunday, at Holy Faith Church in Inglewood.  One of the best experiences I can imagine having was sharing the energy and intense focus of these children of Nigerian immigrants, who gasped as they saw the graphs of temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide go up on the screen, and whispered “oh, no!” when Al Gore explained, “This is what it will look like when our children are my age.”This is a movie that can speak to everyone — especially to those who, like these little girls, are not among those who are most responsible for our situation, but will be bearing the consequences throughout their lives.

An Inconvenient Truth speaks profoundly to a deep moral issue for us as American Christians.  Our culture uses the earth’s resources, and produces the emissions which cause global warming, at a rate far higher than any other society.  Throughout the world, those who will be most affected by climate change and global warming are those living in impoverished areas.  An Inconvenient Truth shows that, for instance, the changes brought about in precipitation patterns are heavily impacting Africa, India, and Asia, causing famine and flood, and exacerbating economic and political disarray and violence.  Our own experience with Hurricane Katrina shows that climate change here, too, will most heavily impact the lives of those with few economic resources to fall back upon.

Environmental justice requires us to consider the impact of our own daily choices upon others who may be far away from us in economic class, race, and nation.  The impact of our choices is not simple, not in a direct line, not necessarily easy to see; it is very easy to believe that our actions have consequences only in our immediate neighborhoods, where we see only people much like ourselves, making choices much like ours, and seeming generally content with the visible results.  We do not see our actions and our habits of life leading directly to suffering and injustice, and so we do not think about them as morally significant choices.  And yet, as we are all part of this complex ecology of life here on a finite planet, our choices, particularly taken in the aggregate, do make a difference…and so we need to consider them, as people of faith, from a moral standpoint.
There are many things we can and should do as individuals — choosing to buy organic and locally grown food, for instance, buying energy-efficient appliances, “greening” our homes — but there is a limit to what we can do as individuals alone.  Our choices are part of an entire pattern of economic life, an entire culture, which needs to be weighed and valued from a moral standpoint — and which we need to act upon together, supporting one another and developing long-term solutions as a people.

So, for me, sharing An Inconvenient Truth with Shawandu and her friends at Holy Faith was an incredibly positive experience.  They got it.  They understood the problem and were appalled — but not despairing.  They left talking about what could be done, what they could do — together.  And the people who remained in the room, of all ages and ethnicities, discussed their own choices, and what they would do to respond to this crisis — together.

We need to face this crisis, which has so many different aspects, not only as individuals, but as communities, as congregations — and with excitement and energy about our opportunities and the grace which can come when we let go, bit by bit, of old habits of consumption and accumulation.  The Gospel tells us that we can live a life full of unexpected grace — if we let go of the things that are tying us to older ways of life.  The book of Acts reminds us that the first Christian communities re-ordered all their economic habits to emphasize sharing, care of the poor and vulnerable, and communal life.  In our own world, we, too, are capable of doing such things, of making such choices.  And every day, we have an opportunity to prayerfully take a step towards that new life — as individuals, and as part of a community of faith.

Posted under: Off She Goes