Jonna Higgins-Freese

Jonna Higgins-Freese is environmental outreach coordinator at Prairiewoods: Franciscan Spirituality Center in Hiawatha, Iowa. She is a fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program.

This week took an interesting turn for me when an ongoing debate within Prairiewoods about how best to do our environmental work heated up. It's the time of year when we start going over our budget -- and number-crunching always lends an edge to theoretical debates about what we should do and how we should do it.

As I said yesterday, Prairiewoods already does a great job of modeling a number of environmental practices, and we provide a space where people can connect with the sacred through nature. But the organization faces some challenging decisions: Is it appropriate for us to move from inner (private) communion with nature to outer (political) action to protect it? Should we move beyond demonstrations and "consciousness raising," as the Outreach Program does? Are personal behavior and political advocacy central to our work as a spirituality center?

These questions highlight some of the important challenges facing the faith-based environmental movement today. On the one hand, some secular environmentalists are skeptical of the value of working with churches or using spiritual language in the struggle to protect the Earth. They're concerned -- and rightly so -- that organized religion has been responsible for a lot of pain and suffering in the world, and some may have experienced this pain and suffering personally.

On the other hand, most religious people don't see the environment as central to their faith. Thus the movement's first task was to make the case that environmentalism is a legitimate and appropriate concern for people of faith. These days, there is a vast body of literature on the relationship between spirituality and ecology. Cal DeWitt has re-read scripture from an ecological perspective. Matthew Fox and others have reclaimed St. Francis and the Christian mystics, including Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen. Elizabeth Johnson, Sallie McFague, Gordon Kaufman, and Rosemary Radford Reuther have reconstructed theology wholesale to address our current environmental situation. Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme have incorporated new scientific understandings into the traditional creation stories.

The theological work is mostly done; now the challenge is to integrate that work more widely and deeply into faith practice. I find that people of faith are generally quite open to these new theological arguments. But, like most of us, they become uncomfortable when they're pushed further and asked to make a change or take a stand. The problem is that religion, when it's functioning well, is about taking a stand for an alternative vision of the good life.

Happily, the movement is heading slowly in that direction. For example, the Interfaith Climate Campaign began by educating people of faith about the issues surrounding global climate change, but is now mobilizing them to contact their senators to ask for better energy policy. (More on that tomorrow.)

But many people are still more comfortable with "private" spiritualities, so Prairiewoods is wrestling with tough questions: Is it enough to provide a place where people can sense the sacred in nature while hiking our trails, walking the outdoor labyrinth, and watching the deer and goldfinches? Do we conduct general "environmental education" and hope that people will be moved to learn more and take action? Or do we also challenge people to make real changes in their lives, provide specific information on where they can buy local foods or compact fluorescent light bulbs, and then support them as they change? Do we run savvy media campaigns and focused political advocacy drives?

As for me, I'm convinced that if religious and spiritual people want to be taken seriously in the environmental arena, personal action and political activism will have to become as indispensable to the spiritual life as prayer. As Paul Gorman, director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, says, "Care for creation and the work of environmental sustainability and justice must become central to what it means, now and henceforth, to be religious."