There was (probably still is for all I know) a sub-current in Evangelical Christianity that derided using “Christian” as an adjective. Looking around the ghetto that Evangelicalism created for itself one could find “Christian’ magnets, movies, and music, ”Christian” t-shirts and toys, “Christian” books and baubles of all kinds.
The problem was baptizing and separating things that didn’t necessarily need that kind of labeling.
So a friend of mine sent me the link to a podcast episode about Christian Animism. Christian Animism? What is that? Noel Moules explains on the Nomad February 2020 podcast.
To start with, what is Animism? Many indigenous religions can be seen as Animist. Moules cites Graham Harvey, a British professor of Religious Studies, who says Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, but only some of whom are human and that life is to be lived in relationship with others.
That leads to the question of what is a person? Online dictionaries aren’t much help in defining “person,” giving different forms of the word, but not nailing it down. The Latin root persona means a mask for an actor.: individual, body of a human, a living, self-conscious being, as distinct from an animal or a thing; a moral agent; a human being; a man, woman, or child. So, at least according to Western dictionaries, God, animals, demons, plants, stars and rocks are not persons. Yet Christianity teaches that there are persons who are pure spirit: God, angels, and demons. Animism preaches that everything is a person. Moules doesn’t help in that he never defines “person.” He briefly mentions panpsychism--everything has an awareness, which is something that appears to be a component of personhood.
Moules provides six tenets of Animism, which doesn’t have the benefit of an authoritative text like the monotheisms:
Everything is alive (for which he fails to define). Rocks and stars are alive? They don’t respirate. They don't reproduce.
Everything is sacred. Refrigerators? Calculators? Sweaters?
Everything is connected. Now we’re getting somewhere. Ecology teaches this. Merlin Sheldrake discusses this in his book Entangled Life.
Everything is person. Again, what is that? If everything is person doesn’t that mean that nothing is a person as well?
Everything is nurtured. By whom? Lots of things are abused, too.
Everything is respected. Again, by whom?
Can I buy that rocks and stars are alive in some sense? Actually, I can. I can’t explain it, I suppose you could say I’m agnostic on the question of life outside of what we know as living.
I certainly accept that creation is sacred. God made it, after all. It was doubly blessed when its creator put on the human dress and breathed the air, touched the ground, and bathed in the water of this realm. The waters of the world are blessed through the action of the water cycle and that Jesus drank, bathed, sweat, and urinated, Even His spit would be sacred.
As a Christian Animist, he claims that Jesus was an Animist. I can see some overlap, but then Moules rejects any kind of hierarchy, like something found in the Medieval Great Chain of Being
Even if one rejects the Chain of Being, Jesus himself talks about human life having more value than animal life (Matt. 10:31 and 12:12). He destroys a fig tree that angered him...so much for everything being person, sacred, and respected (Matt. 21:18-19). Luke recounts the story of the man of the Gadarenes whose demons Jesus exorcised into a herd of pigs which then flung themselves off a cliff to drown in the sea below (I have wondered why the demons needed to do that. Why not steal away to torment some other soul?)
Genesis 1:26 clearly indicates that Man alone bears the Imago Dei (the Image of God...which is open to interpretation about what that exactly means) and Man is given charge of Earth and all who inhabit it.
Panentheism “has a hint of dualism about it,” and calls it Western, yet it is a current of thought from our Eastern brothers and sisters. It is simply the notion that God in around and in everything. God is in your cells; God is in the atoms. God is in the negative space between quarks.
He talked about covenants and how they are made because of our rebellion, but are animals and plants capable of such? The only thing that comes close is the Noahic covenant in which the Lord pledges never to create such total destruction on the world by flood; this is promised to human and non-human, but there is no reciprocal requirement on ours or non-human’s part.
He exclaims, “There is still a huge amount for us to learn!” I’m with him on that as should the rest of us be. We certainly don’t know everything and we can’t even get ecology right. Take the case of Autumn olive (Eleagnus umbellata) a deciduous shrub (if you’ve ever dealt with any, you’d know they are more tree than shrub) native to eastern Asia, but planted for wildlife food and shelter in Michigan (among other places). It turns out the fruit are akin to junk food for Michigan birds and the trees themselves grow rapidly crowding out other native plants (I’ve only listed two problems with it--there are many more). Even in our attempts to do good, we can severely screw things up. So, yes, we have much to learn as also evidenced by the mention of Sheldrake’s book above.
He mentions that the desert mothers and fathers, Celtic Christianity (oops, added an adjective), St. Francis and Hildegard of Bingen were all connected to the natural world. Clearly, there is a strain of Christianity that values Creation much more than we moderns do.
My question for Moules, is why do we have to create some separate strain of Christianity to properly venerate creation? Why not recover lost practices and thinking about the Earth household that many of our ancestors in the faith lived out? Why bother attempting to create a new tribe?
I get that many of us modern Christians (look, another adjective) are disconnected in harmful ways from creation, but it isn’t necessary to carve out a new tribe to do it. Read beyond the New Testament (which he does), get to know the ecosystem you live and breathe and have your being in (I suspect Moules does as well), and find ways to connect your faith to the natural world. No adjectives needed!
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