Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: Americans and Canadians have long assumed that Christianity is the enemy of nature.This presupposition became common in academic circles in 1966 when Lynn White, a professor of medieval history at the University of California, Los Angeles, waxed philosophical in a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled, "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis."His conclusion that "modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian Theology" amounted to a damning indictment of the Christian community's human-nature relationship in North America.The publication of the lecture in the journal Science the following year popularized to a broader North American audience White's theory that "Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt" for America's degraded environment.1 It is unlikely that White understood his article's far-reaching implications.Appearing five years after the sensational publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which questioned the moral authority of science in matters of the environment, it fundamentally undermined the Christian church's future role in either reforming science or restoring the environment.2 In the highly politicized atmosphere of the beginnings of the Age of Ecology in the 1960s, American society characterized Christians interested in environmental issues as interlopers.In subsequent decades the assumption predominated that Christian thought could contribute little to environmentalism because, as the cause of the earth's degradation, it had no basis of reference or tradition for preserving what remained.That White, a
Source: Historical Papers
Author: Bruce Shelvey
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2599686458