What if Ceasefire is an Ecological Vision for the Future?

Photo by Ryan Arnst on Unsplash

LAST WEEKEND I was in San Diego, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR)—a massive conglomeration of scholars that’s more or less facilitated my relationship to the field since I started attending in 2008. It’s always a kind of festive event for me, mostly because I have a chance to reconnect with old friends, and to talk about new ideas. But, especially since 2020, the event feels like it’s increasingly tinged with a bit of melancholy. Some of my old friends no longer attend, because they’ve been squeezed out of the field. Other friends who still attend are really struggling in their institutions. Academic life (like much of the rest of life) feels bleak these days. We do, after all, live in the world—even if academics also live in bubbles. And the world right now is filled with violence and struggle.

One of the panels I presented at was on the broad topic of religion and ecology. And one of the other panelists was Bron Taylor, a senior scholar in the field who’s spent his career thinking about radical environmental activism, and the potential that religion might have to positively impact environmental action. He mentioned, during his presentation, that this might be the last time he attends the AAR. And he lamented that he’s not ending this tenure with a feeling of optimism. Rather, he said, he’s lost hope that either radical or mainstream environmental activism has the power to counteract the forces of destruction at work in the world today. It feels, he memorably noted, like “pissing into a catastrophic whirlwind.”

During the discussion of our presentations, some of the people in the audience seemed to be pitting me and this senior scholar against one another, or at least contrasting our takes. This was perhaps in part because what I had to say wasn’t exactly hopeful, but it was a little less bleak. I don’t think I was disagreeing with him at all. But I have been thinking about the conversation a lot since then.

The talk I gave was mostly about an old book that’s been haunting me since I randomly glanced at its cover back in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. Nuclear war—and the possibility of it—was on my mind in ways that it hadn’t been before. And I was suddenly looking at an old book of early ecotheology, by my old professor Sallie McFague, in a new light. I can remember (though I also recognize it sounds trite) that as a grad student Models of God: Theology for a Nuclear, Ecological Age looked especially retro to me. Part of it was the 1980s cover design, of course. But honestly, I think that another part of it was the presence of the term “nuclear” in a book title about ecology. It felt to me then like a book for a different kind of planet.

By the time I was in grad school this historical moment in the 1980s when ecotheology was a sub-discipline preoccupied with what Edith Wyschogrod called manmade mass death seemed far in the past. By the time I was thinking about ecology and the environment, the conversation had already begun to feel disconnected from political violence and more distinctly oriented around consumer choices (and the structures that shape them). Now, I think, people are remedying this in various ways. But it was strange for me to realize that whatever ecotheology is, it had essentially begun around this time as a preoccupation with the global (social and environmental) problem of manmade mass death.

The talk I gave was, for the most part, a bit of intellectual history. I won’t belabor you with too much of that, for the time being. But I will say that I spent some time talking about Cold War religion, and how the culture wars were essentially shaped by liberal theology, and its critique, during this time period. I also spoke about how, during the Cold War, the idea of earth as a unified vessel that carries us all—earthlings—was also emerging, in the wake of space exploration. The planet became our space ark. My primary reference for this was a great book, by Sabine Höhler, about Spaceship Earth. While many American Christians were doubling down on nationalism, during the Cold War, Sallie McFague was holding onto an imagined community that was much bigger than that—the planet, Earth. That was her political focus. Violence against the planet was violence against people. And violence against people was bad for the planet. Some of this message she was pulling right from Jonathan Schell’s influential 1982 book The Fate of the Earth, which was clearly informing her book.

I also spent a little time talking about what theology actually is, according to Sallie McFague. One of the things that really struck me, as I returned to this book after many years, is the very loose and very speculative definition she has, of theology itself. Those kinds of definitions tend to agree with me. Theology, she writes in that book, is “mostly fiction.” Theology is a kind of storytelling, a way of thinking in pictures. It’s a method for presenting people with symbolic images. And it’s especially useful, she suggests, for presenting people with images of one of the most speculative things of all: the future, which doesn’t yet exist and can only be imagined. This task of making pictures of, and for, the future is a theological one. But in her view theology also holds to another fundamental commitment: it makes the wild (and not evidence-based) claim that there is something benevolent at the core of reality. Something that harbors love or good will for us. That’s the leap of faith (which I wrote about here, recently) that the universe loves us.

Apart from a novel definition of theology, something about Sallie’s book has been speaking to me since 2022. Part of it, I think, is a bit of nostalgia. I’m always a little mistrustful of my nostalgia. It’s never all that productive. But I try to listen to it, because it’s usually giving me information. I think the nostalgia I have is, in part, for what seems to me now like a simpler and more idealistic world. I’m nostalgic for a world where peace was something to hope for, rather than a name for what happens when you pacify a subset of people with capital while those with less power and voice continue to suffer. I’m nostalgic for a world where peace felt like something that could help human, and more than human, worlds thrive. I’m nostalgic for a world where disarmament feels like a possibility, rather than a fiction from the past. Because that’s what the hope of peace sounds like, today: it sounds like an image of the future built for people of the past.

My nostalgia has, however, forced me to look more carefully at the world that I’m actually living in. And it’s made me wonder if there really are people offering images of the future that respond to this faith that there is more than just antipathy towards us at the heart of the real. And it’s made me feel as if the image of the future that’s being offered up, and being called for—the image of the future that takes seriously both social and environmental violence—is the call for a ceasefire. Peace and hope have become words that have lost their power, but ceasefire is a word with power.

I know that ceasefire is a very particular term, directed at a very particular context. I don’t intend to minimize or distract from the call for ceasefire as a call to end the violence in Gaza. But I have also wondered if ceasefire doesn’t also carry a distinct sort of emotional power. The image or possibility of a ceasefire responds to tensions simmering deep in our conscious awareness: a planet that’s heating up, and often burning with real wildfires, a planet where groves or trees and livable landscapes are being decimated by weapons of destruction. We see this happening in Gaza, and we have seen it happen in elsewhere. Many of us are afraid that the earth will only keep burning. Against this, the possibility of a ceasefire feels powerful.

I think that, on some emotional level, the possibility of a ceasefire taps into a deep set of desires that many of us have for the future, and for the earth: a desire for a future where people aren’t being decimated, where people can pick olives from the trees that their ancestors planted, a future where the planet is not shaped by the mass death agendas that haunt us, where our landscapes and communities aren’t threatened by all of this burning. This offers, I think, a kind of speculative image of the future—one we could call theological. It’s a picture of the world with more love, and less fire. Even on this little planet that burns around us.