Saturday, February 18, 2023

Chronicling Los Angeles’ iconic Virgin of Guadalupe street art

'Whenever you see a virgencita you feel safe. You know that your people, your gente, your raza are around,' said Oscar Rodriguez Zapata.

A man checks his phone near a Virgin of Guadalupe mural in Cypress Park in Los Angeles in July 2020. Photo by Oscar Rodriguez Zapata

February 10, 2023

Alejandra Molina

LOS ANGELES (RNS) — There’s nothing that Oscar Rodriguez Zapata enjoys more than going out for a drive to explore Los Angeles’ vast neighborhoods in search of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

He packs his Nikon Z6 II and a Fujifilm X100V and photographs murals, landscapes, storefronts and people across the city’s Historic South Central and Eastside to South Bay. Street vendors, lowriders and the L.A. skyline are among his favorite subjects.

But his biggest LA muse is the Virgin of Guadalupe, said Zapata. Murals, mosaics and other artwork depicting the brown-skinned virgin and patron saint of Mexico grace the walls of laundromats, liquor stores, mini markets, churches, bakeries, taquerias and tire shops.

“Whenever you see a virgencita you feel safe. You know that your people, your gente, your raza are around,” said Zapata, 35, who, though raised Catholic, identifies as nonreligious. “It makes you feel welcome.”

Oscar Rodriguez Zapata poses with a Virgin of Guadalupe painting in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles that he was photographing, Satuday, Jan. 21, 2023. RNS photo by Alejandra Molina

Oscar Rodriguez Zapata poses with a Virgin of Guadalupe painting in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles that he was photographing, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2023. RNS photo by Alejandra Molina

January marked 10 years since he began documenting images of Guadalupe, at first on his phone for his own pleasure, but eventually taking his hobby more seriously, particularly as he noticed more and more Guadalupe images were vanishing. In late 2017, he created an Instagram profile devoted to his photos of Guadalupe murals in order to preserve them. He now has more than 6,000 followers.

Zapata focuses on examples of the Virgin on dilapidated buildings in need of a fresh coat of paint or the more intricate and colorful ones that take up entire wall space, as they risk succumbing to gentrification and displacement of Latino communities in L.A.

The Virgin Mary, he said, “is much more than a religious symbol.”

“It’s part of the community and part of who we are,” Zapata said.

A Virgin of Guadalupe mural in Los Angeles on a dilapidated building in Walnut Park on Nov. 2021. Photo by Oscar Rodriguez Zapata

A Virgin of Guadalupe mural in Walnut Park in Los Angeles County on a dilapidated building in Nov. 2021. Photo by Oscar Rodriguez Zapata

Our Lady of Guadalupe is celebrated in many Catholic parishes across Southern California on her feast day, Dec. 12, marking the appearance of Mary to St. Juan Diego, an Indigenous man, near Mexico City in 1531. But Guadalupe finds her way into shrines and murals in Latino neighborhoods year-round, and chroniclers like Zapata document her to pay homage to the culture, faith and traditions of their LA neighbors.

Across Los Angeles, images of the Virgin are believed to thwart vandalism and act as “protector(s) of small immigrant-owned businesses,” according to journalist Sam Quinones’ 2016 book of photographs of murals of the saint, “The Virgin of the American Dream.”

Quinones has seen business owners commission Virgin Mary artworks on their storefronts as “purely a commercial transaction,” he told an audience last April at “Guadalupe: Holy Art in the Streets of Los Angeles,” an event hosted by the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California.

He spoke of Palestinian and Indian merchants who have put Guadalupe on their walls, with one man saying her image was meant “to show people that I’m with them … that I’m not some foreigner guy,” Quinones recalled.

Neither Catholic nor religious, Quinones — a reporter who has covered crime and gangs in the United States and Mexico — said he sees the Virgin as “softening the harshness of life,” recalling that he has witnessed how people turned to her in the midst of violence. Once he started photographing her, he said, he became obsessed, turning his head every time he drove by a neighborhood market to see if he would spot a Guadalupe.

A man passes a partially covered Virgin of Guadalupe mural in Echo Park in Los Angeles in 2018. Photo by Oscar Rodriguez Zapata

Between his reporting in Mexico and documenting Guadalupe in L.A., Quinones understood that images of the Virgin Mary served as a guiding force for undocumented Mexican immigrants “to find a way in this new world.”

“All you’ve got are your guts, your wits and the Virgin of Guadalupe,” he said.

Brenda Perez created the Restorative Justice for the Arts project to help restore and preserve what she calls “windows into the spiritual landscape” of L.A. A doctoral candidate in psychology, Perez has researched how sacred Indigenous symbols and community art can help heal trauma and resist discrimination.

“When murals with her image are whitewashed, it’s a sacrilegious act,” Perez said, recalling a Virgin Mary image on a liquor store wall that was recently painted over. “That’s something that everyone must respect because it’s a culture.”

Nichole Flores. Photo by Dan Addison/UVA

Nichole Flores, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, said religious and political leaders must work to preserve public art, including murals of the Virgin of Guadalupe, that, she said, “shapes and grounds certain communities.”

Images of Guadalupe, whether embodied in elaborate public murals or displayed on taco trucks, sanctify spaces and “invite us to think about how we can relate with each other across our differences,” said Flores, author of “The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy.”

Flores has explored how Guadalupe images shape Chicano communities in Denver, Colorado, where residents have used Guadalupe to stand against gentrification in their neighborhoods.

She recalled asking Denver-based Chicano artist Carlos Fresquez about the significance of his Guadalupe artwork on the side of a liquor store. To the artist, the image was simply a way “to give a sense of place,” Flores said, adding that wherever Guadalupe is, “you will know that Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Chicanos are present there.”

Illustrating her is a way of saying, “Our people are present here,” Flores said. Painting over or covering Guadalupe artwork, “feels like an affront to our dignity and personhood.”

Growing up in the L.A. County city of Paramount, Nydya Mora, a youth librarian with a background in urban planning, said the Virgin of Guadalupe “was everywhere all the time.”

“I just grew fascinated by the creativity that she inspired in people — the creation of these amazing, beautiful, unique murals,” said Mora, 33.

: Photo by Nydya Mora

: Photo by Nydya Mora

In 2012, as she was wrapping up her undergraduate degree at Cal Poly Pomona, Mora began to capture Guadalupe street art, thinking of creating a coffee table book for her Catholic mother “to show an appreciation for our culture.” An Instagram account where she posts her photos of “artistic expressions of devotion in LA” has amassed more than 13,000 followers. Mora has also put together a Google map of her Virgin of Guadalupe sightings.

One of her more striking images shows a statue of the Virgin atop a bollard at a mini market parking lot in Compton. The shrine is embellished with votive candles and vases filled with flowers propped against the post.

Her photographs are scheduled to appear later this year at a museum on the grounds of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, a cemetery in the city of Glendale.

Nydya Mora documents Virgin of Guadalupe murals in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Mora

Mora, who grew up culturally Catholic but is not religious, said Guadalupe represents what she cherishes the most: “My mom, my culture and my cities.”

“To see her (Guadalupe) in the streets of Los Angeles, that’s a form of pride for myself,” she said.

Zapata agrees. On a recent Saturday in January, he drove to Boyle Heights in the city’s Eastside to shoot a spray-painted image of Mary on the side of Valerio Family Barbershop.

George Valerio, part owner of the shop, said he commissioned the mural to pay homage to his family’s Catholic faith and to growing up Mexican in the San Gabriel Valley city of El Monte.

Before heading out, Zapata marked the street and specific neighborhood where Guadalupe was featured. Simply captioning the location of the photo with ‘Los Angeles’ doesn’t fully capture its essence, Zapata said.

“I want to represent the people in the community,” he said.

This article was produced under a grant from Fieldstead and Company, Inc. supporting journalistic exploration of the ways faith traditions inspire artistic creativity.

The ‘He Gets Us’ Super Bowl ads brought back bad memories

How the Christian ‘seeker’ movement can cause serious harm.

A still from one of the “He Gets Us” commercials that aired during the Super Bowl. Image courtesy of “He Gets Us”

February 14, 2023

Kirsten Powers

(RNS) — Almost 20 years ago, in early 2005, I tagged along with a boyfriend to a Presbyterian church service on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I assumed it was a mainline Protestant church and didn’t bother to get any further information because I honestly didn’t care. I was a lapsed Episcopalian and, depending on which day you asked me, agnostic or atheist. I was just going to church to please my boyfriend.

Long story short, it was an evangelical church that sought to be “seeker friendly.” They led with the good stuff: Jesus was an immigrant, a radical when it came to treating women equally and a champion of the downtrodden. It was an intellectually stimulating format, including sermons that were laced with poetry, art references, philosophy and pop culture. I was intrigued, to say the least.

I was also vulnerable. A year earlier, my father had dropped dead of a heart attack at age 61, and my beloved grandmother had just passed away. I was feeling unmoored and anxious and was offered a framework to help make sense of a world that felt out of control and drained of meaning. I reached for the life preserver with no sense that this decision would drive me off course for nearly a decade.

I bring all this up because I recognized the same seeker-friendly tactics in Sunday’s “He Gets Us” Super Bowl ads that I experienced at my first evangelical church, and in others that followed. This matters because these ads direct you to a website that then directs you to a church community in your area where seeker-friendly framing surely awaits.

The organization “He Gets Us” has pledged to spend a billion dollars to target skeptics, seekers and lapsed Christians by “reintroducing Jesus” to them. From CNN:

The campaign is arresting, portraying the pivotal figure of Christianity as an immigrant, a refugee, a radical, an activist for women’s rights and a bulwark against racial injustice and political corruption. The “He Gets Us” website features content about of-the-moment topics, like artificial intelligence and social justice. “Whatever you are facing, Jesus faced it too,” the campaign claims.

These things are all true about Jesus. The problem is that while the organization won’t disclose its financial backers, the billionaire Hobby Lobby founder David Green told Glenn Beck that his family is a major funder. If Green expressed his views on what the phrases “women’s rights” and “racial justice” mean, they very likely would not be what most people think of when these subjects come up. (Green’s family sued the government over the Affordable Care Act because they didn’t want their employees’ insurance plans to cover drugs that might cause an abortion.)

When I asked “He Gets Us” representatives what they meant by “women’s rights,” they pointed me to a link on their website that lays out the various ways that Jesus was extraordinary for his time in the way he treated women. It’s true, he was. But they must know that when most people — especially those they are targeting — hear “women’s rights,” they don’t realize that just speaking to a woman was a radical act for Jesus.

I also asked “He Gets Us” if there were any nonconservative Christians funding the group, and they referred me to their website. They also included a boilerplate description of the campaign’s holding company, the Signatry/Servant Foundation, which, according to The New York Times, “has donated to some [organizations] that align with anti-abortion and right-wing political causes.”

When I asked again (because I still didn’t have an answer) if that meant that there were nonconservative Christian donors, I was informed that their “statement is sufficient.”

The secretiveness is a red flag.

“He Gets Us” social media posts on Instagram. Screen grab

Invariably, the people running seeker movements hide what they actually believe. They focus on the things that will draw people in, and that ironically ultimately play a tiny if not nonexistent role in informing their lives or how the church runs. Once the person is embedded in the community and totally bought into a specific version of Christianity, the real beliefs are casually mentioned like they’ve been saying this all along. It can make you feel like you are losing your mind. The nature of becoming involved in a church community like this is intimate — so there is lots of trauma bonding and vulnerability, such that by the time you realize that this is not for you, it feels almost impossible to leave.

If the day I walked into that Upper East Side church service the pastor had given a sermon calling homosexuality a sin or said that women should submit to their husbands, I would have gotten up and walked out. I only learned that these were core teachings after I had been attending a year and a half and was in too deep. Abortion was never addressed from the pulpit (at least to my knowledge), but once I started asking, I found the church community fairly homogeneous in its anti-abortion beliefs, a view that the pastor expressed publicly many years after I left the church.

You might be thinking “What awful people!” But they weren’t. They were kind people who thought they were doing something good: saving souls. And if you are trying to write this off to the thinking of uneducated or unsophisticated know-nothings, the parishioners were educated, often by Ivy League and other elite institutions, and held impressive jobs. The pastors were intellectually rigorous and thought deeply about issues.

In fact, one of the reasons I was so surprised when I traversed deeper into the theology was that the people in the church frequently made a point of distinguishing their brand of evangelicalism from what they saw as the intolerant, unsophisticated, overly politicized brand of evangelicals outside of major metro areas.

The problem of the lack of up-front honesty about theological beliefs in evangelical churches led to the creation of the organization Church Clarity. My story is not a one-off. It happens all the time.

Which is why the refusal of “He Gets Us” to disclose their donors is so problematic.

The link they sent me explained that they are keeping their donors a secret to keep the focus on Jesus, which doesn’t really make sense. How would saying that there are progressive Christians funders in addition to the conservative funders violate anyone’s desire to keep their involvement secret or distract from Jesus?

This group is free to run whatever kinds of ads they want and to spend grotesque amounts of money doing it in a way that seems anathema to the teachings of Jesus. But when they co-opt the language of social justice to draw people in, then they need to be clear about who is funding this and what the people they attract into churches with these ads will be told. Without such transparency, many people may very well get hurt.

(Kirsten Powers is a New York Times bestselling author and writes “Things That Matter” on Substack, where this column first appeared. Powers is a CNN senior political analyst and the author of “Saving Grace: Speak Your Truth, Stay Centered and Learn to Coexist With People Who Drive You Nuts.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Nikki Haley says she’s Christian, but it’s complicated

Dogged by questions about her faith, what is she trying to prove?

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley greets supporters after her speech Feb. 15, 2023, in Charleston, South Carolina. (AP Photo/Mic Smith)

February 16, 2023

Khyati Y. Joshi

(RNS) — In the opening seconds of Nikki Haley’s video launching her 2024 presidential bid this week, she described her upbringing in the South: “I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Not Black, not white, but different.” The words are accompanied by a childhood photograph of Haley, with her mother and turban-wearing father smiling behind her.

While we share virtually no political views today and there is no circumstance where I would support her candidacy, Haley could have been describing me in that video. She and I are the same age, both daughters of Indian immigrants, raised in the South and schooled at segregation academies — independent schools founded after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, so white students could avoid public school integration.

Growing up Indian American in the 20th-century South was dissonant not only racially but even more so in terms of religion. Haley grew up Sikh, and I grew up Hindu, in a place where both the landscape and the culture were dominated by evangelical Christian megachurches.

Particularly for our generation of 1.5- and second-generation South Asian Americans who identify as Sikh, Hindu, Muslim or Jain, religious identity is a source of struggle, strife and isolation. First, Christianity’s domination of U.S. culture meant that all the ways we had to start making sense of the world were steeped in faith language not our own. One of the young women I talked to for my first book said she “just wish[ed] that Hinduism had a Ten Commandments.”

Second, many Indian Americans have expressed that because they don’t understand the language of the prayers — like Gurmukhi for Sikhs like Haley and Sanskrit for Hindus like me — they weren’t really sure what they were doing or saying when performing religious rituals. Research shows us that language loss is a factor that contributes to religious minorities’ sense of disconnection from their home faith. In Haley’s own words, she could “feel God in the room, but I couldn’t understand it because I didn’t know the language.”

Not understanding the words used in prayers and teaching, they have difficulty grasping the rituals, their theological meaning and the underlying religious principles. Some of the young people I interviewed found comfort going to churches, or with Christian prayer, because they understood what was going on.

Religion, and her conversion to Christianity, has made Haley suspect in the eyes of both Christians and non-Christians. The first time she ran for the South Carolina Legislature, she identified both with her parents’ Sikh religion and with the Methodist faith of her husband. As she grew in political stature, however, her campaign faced more and more questions that sounded something like this: “OK, she’s talking about God, but which God?”

Republican South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley delivers remarks at the Federalist Society 2016 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, on November 18, 2016. Photo couretsy of Reuters/Gary Cameron

Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley delivers remarks at the Federalist Society 2016 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, on November 18, 2016. Photo by Gary Cameron/Reuters

The language on her campaign website was revised, with a reference to “almighty God” changed to make specific reference to Jesus Christ. At one point, she added a section to her website titled “Is Nikki a Christian?” The answer, of course, was yes. For many South Carolina voters who needed reassurance that their candidate would represent them, that meant praying to and believing in a Christian God.

Once she was in the Legislature, her conservative colleagues’ skepticism could be cruel. According to a 2021 Politico Magazine profile, “Some of her Republican colleagues would try to provoke her with jokes about alien gods; others would force uncomfortable discussions about religion.” Jake Knotts, a veteran GOP lawmaker, said: “Everybody knew she wasn’t a real Christian. Everyone knew she converted for political purposes. Her whole career has been stair-climbing, and becoming a Methodist was just one of those stairs.”

Haley has also faced questions and criticism about her conversion to Christianity from South Asian Americans and other racial minority groups. She is seen by some as a racial and religious “sell-out.”

In a political culture where “flip-flopping” is a derisive term, religious conversion can look like the ultimate flip-flop: a disloyalty not just to a political position or party but to God.

These criticisms ignore the complexity of being a second-generation Indian American, or of being a racial and religious minority in the United States.

By her own account, Haley continues to visit her gurdwara with family from time to time, and she has resisted the opportunity to criticize her parents’ faith when interviewed about her own. She and her husband gave their children Punjabi first names.

Haley is not the first person to fall in love with someone of another faith and convert. There are couples across the United States and the world who have made that decision, whether so they could marry in a particular church, commit to raising their children in a particular faith or simply please pious relatives.

Haley married a white Christian man and became a Methodist. I married a white Christian man and remained a Hindu. So what?

We can never know what’s in someone’s heart. So I’m not interested in saying her conversion was sincere or insincere. Haley’s life shows us what religion is for many people in the U.S.: beautiful, rich, textured — and complicated.

The Rev. John Hagee offers a prayer at the start of Nikki Haley's 2024 presidential announcement, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, in Charleston, South Carolina. Video screen grab

The Rev. John Hagee offers a prayer at Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential announcement, Feb. 15, 2023, in Charleston, South Carolina. Video screen grab

However, while we can’t judge what is in people’s hearts, we must take note of the choices they make. Haley’s decision to invite televangelist John Hagee — who has demonized Islam and described Adolf Hitler alternately as an antisemitic Catholic and a “genocidal half-breed Jew” — to deliver the invocation at her campaign launch is worrisome.

It shows that, if elected, she will assert her Christianity through policy. Whether that’s to prove her Christian bona fides or because she genuinely believes that the law should be used to enforce the dominant religion’s purported code of conduct is of no moment to those who will suffer as a result.

However, I suspect we will never have to grapple with that issue. In today’s Republican Party of absolutes and enemies, the richness of Haley’s religious background is anathema. The GOP’s version of Americanness is as religiously and racially exclusive as it’s ever been. What we might see as beautiful, they see as disgusting. It will be interesting to watch how different Christian segments of the Republican Party react to Haley as a presidential candidate.

The rest of us can extend her some grace when it comes to her family life, while still criticizing her embrace of Christian nationalism on the campaign trail. Nikki Haley’s political and religious journey represents some of the ways we live religion and understand and relate to one another as people of faith in America. And that’s a good thing.

Christian nationalism needs to be distinguished from civil religion

The latest PRRI survey shows it's a Black-white thing.

White #MAGA QAnon Jesus image carried during the Jan. 6, 2021, invasion of the Capitol. Photo by Tyler Merbler/Flickr/Creative Commons

February 13, 2023

Mark Silk

(RNS) — Ten percent of Americans are adherents of Christian nationalism, with another 19% in sympathy with its ideals, according to a new PRRI survey. These two groups are far more likely to hold racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views than the rest of the U.S. population. Among white evangelicals, 29% rate as adherents, with an additional 35% as sympathizers.

None of this is particularly surprising. Donald Trump cranked up God-and-country fervor, and no religious segment of the population has been more fervent than white evangelicals.

How did PRRI arrive at its numbers? The scoring is based on respondents’ degree of agreement with five statements:

The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

If there’s a surprise in the survey, it is that fully 20% of Black Protestants who identify as born-again or evangelical agreed sufficiently to count as adherents. Overall, 38% of Black Protestants scored at the adherent or sympathizer level.

During a panel discussion on the survey at the Brookings Institution last week, historian Jemar Tisby, the author of “The Color of Compromise” and “How to Fight Racism,” said he thought the survey language resonated with so many Black Americans because of their high degree of Protestant Christian religiosity. But, he contended, this did not make them Christian nationalists.

“I contrast white Christian nationalism with Black Christian Patriotism,” Tisby said. “When you talk about white Christian Nationalism, it tends toward a rigid, narrow, authoritarian kind of politics. When you’re talking about Black Christian Patriotism it tends toward an expansive, flexible, inclusive kind of politics. And so it’s not just the words people use, it’s the ramifications of what they mean by those words.”

While I’m reluctant to cut Black Protestants quite so much slack, it is important to recognize that the same religious language can be — and over the years has been — put to contradictory political purposes in the way Tisby suggests.

In the 1930s, “Christian,” long employed as an umbrella characterization of American society, was appropriated by America First nationalists to signal that no Jews need apply. Antisemitic radio preacher the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest, prompted the creation of an organization called the Christian Front; other such organizations included the Christian American Crusade, the Christian Mobilizers and the Christian Party.

In response, liberals began using “Judeo-Christian” to rename the religious tradition that all Americans were presumed to share and that was supposed to undergird the struggle against fascism and, later, communism. But then, in the 1980s, “Judeo-Christian” was seized upon by the religious right as a rhetorical cudgel in its political war against secularism and the values of “the ’60s.”

In its inclusivist heyday, Judeo-Christian language served what Italian scholar of totalitarianism Emilio Gentile defines as “civil religion”: the “sacralization of a political system” that guarantees “a plurality of ideas, free competition in the exercise of power, and the ability of the governed to dismiss their governments through peaceful and constitutional methods.”

In the hands of the religious right, “Judeo-Christian” has served what Gentile calls “political religion”: an “intolerant, invasive, and fundamentalist” faith employed as a weapon in partisan combat.

Civil religion still lives on, however. It’s represented in a resolution condemning white nationalism that the Democratic National Committee passed earlier this month, harking back to the “Judeo-Christian” version that took shape during World War II. It’s there in Tisby’s concept of Black Christian Patriotism, which resembles the civil religion of America before the rise of fascism.

The “Christian” political religion of the 1930s lives on as well, in the form of today’s white Christian nationalism.

Christian climate activist challenges church to take action

Kyle Meyaard-Schaap's 'Following Jesus in a Warming World' is a field guide for Christian climate action.

“Following Jesus in a Warming World: A Christian Call to Climate Action" and author Kyle Meyaard-Schaap. Courtesy images

February 17, 2023

Kathryn Post

(RNS) — When Kyle Meyaard-Schaap was 17, his brother came home from a semester abroad and announced the unthinkable: He was a vegetarian.

“It was as if he announced to the family that he was a dog now,” Meyaard-Schaap told Religion News Service. “I didn’t know anybody who had ever made that choice.”

At the time, a meatless diet didn’t fit into the definition of Christianity he’d learned in his conservative religious community.

“(My brother) helped me understand that him making that choice wasn’t him rejecting all of the beautiful values that we had been taught in our Christian community,” said Meyaard-Schaap. “It was him trying to live more deeply into those values. It was the first time someone had given me permission to consider things like climate change, pollution, environmental degradation through the lens of my faith.”

Years later, Meyaard-Schaap is now the vice president of the Evangelical Environmental Network, a group that advocates for climate action because of, not in spite of, their faith. His new book, “Following Jesus in a Warming World: A Christian Call to Climate Action,” offers personal accounts, theological frameworks and practical advice for Christian climate action.

RNS spoke to Meyaard-Schaap about his book, releasing from InterVarsity Press on Feb. 21. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did your trip to West Virginia complicate your perspective on the climate crisis?

That trip helped me see that creation care equals people care. I think before that, it was easy for me to hide behind the numbers and statistics. I was pretty strident in my convictions around the need to dump fossil fuels immediately and get on a path to clean energy as fast as possible. And I still believe that’s vitally important.

But during my trip to West Virginia, I met people who were shining with pride at how they had kept the lights on in America for decades. They were proud to work in the coal mines. And then on the other hand, many of them were dying from black lung disease or had granddaughters who had pediatric cancer because of the heavy metals that have leached into the drinking water from the contamination from the mine sites. It helped me understand that fossil fuels have done a lot of good for our country, and they brought a ton of people out of poverty. And at the same time, it’s had profoundly damaging consequences on our air, our water, our climate.

It helped me understand that if we’re going to address this with compassion, and in a way that actually does put people first, we have to wrestle with this idea that livelihoods and people are wrapped up in the current status quo. And we need to transition away from fossil fuels immediately, but we have to do it in a way that doesn’t leave these people behind.

Young Evangelicals for Climate Action demonstrate in Washington, D.C., in 2017. Courtesy photo

What does Jesus’ incarnation have to do with climate justice?

In Jesus, we have the infinite Creator God choosing to take on the stuff of that creation, and to bind himself to it forever. I can’t think of a greater affirmation of the goodness of created things. It’s such a powerful counter narrative to some of the more Gnostic, dualistic theologies that many of us who grew up in the American church in the ’80s, ’90s and early aughts breathed in — the rapture, “Left Behind” theology that says that our souls are what matter, and the body has nothing of eternal importance.

I think the incarnation and the resurrection fly in the face of that and affirm the inherent dignity of humanity and of all created things. It helps us recover a more radically integrated theology that understands body and the soul as inseparable.

What’s your response to Christians who argue that humans were called to have dominion over creation?

I would say yes, but it’s incomplete. Yes, Genesis (chapter) 1 says, God creates humans in his image and tells him to rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air and everything that moves along the ground. And I wish that Hebrew word for rule, “radah,” was softer, but it’s harsh.

“Following Jesus in a Warming World: A Christian Call to Climate Action” by Kyle Meyaard-Schaap. Courtesy image

But I think the error is separating Genesis 1 from Genesis 2. In Genesis (chapter) 2, God takes the man that he creates from the dust of the ground, breathes his breath into him and says “avad and shamar” this garden, which is translated as “serve and protect.” I think these two commands become a couplet of instructions. So Genesis 1 and 2 tell us to rule by serving and protecting.

The rest of Scripture is clear that creation has one king, and it’s Christ. If we’re going to rule alongside Christ, we have to look at how Christ exercises his authority. He becomes a baby. He washes feet. He climbs up on a cross. Christ exercises his authority through humility, service and sacrifice, not through exploitation and domination. So rule, yes, but rule through service and by protecting the vulnerable.

Why did you include a chapter on being pro-life in this book?

I think many of us, particularly in America, are suffering from a myopic idea of what it means to be pro-life in the modern world. So many of us associate it simply with the issue of abortion. If we truly want to honor life as the gift that it is from God, let’s think about things like climate change, pollution and the spread of disease, which is made worse by climate change.

If we’re going to be serious about protecting and defending life in all of its fullness, we have to be concerned about not just abortion, but young kids, adults, the poor, people of color, the elderly, the disabled. And we have to think about how other issues like climate change affect people’s ability to access that abundant life that Jesus said he came to give right here and now.

Kyle Meyaard-Schaap. Courtesy photo

What advice would you give to people who are wrestling with the ethics of bringing new life into this world?

So many people in our generation are really grappling with that. I want to honor that and say, good for you for realizing we need to think about these giant issues that will affect our children. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe there’s ever been a generation that hasn’t felt existential dread. Our parents and grandparents were living under the specter of nuclear holocaust.

Ultimately, where my wife and I land is that our trust in God’s good plans for the world has always been stronger than our fear of what could happen. But I think with that trust also comes responsibility. So we are raising our boys to understand the consequences of human greed and selfishness that have led to the degradation of the world they are inheriting. And we’re trying to raise them in a way that lives more lightly on the earth and incorporates advocacy for policies that can change that. I don’t think it’s morally defensible right now to choose to have children and then go to sleep to the realities of climate change and the future our kids are facing.

Who did you write this book for, and what do you hope they take away from it?

I wanted this book to be accessible to anybody who’s a believer or is interested in how believers talk about this. When I sat down and I had a person in mind, it was for a millennial or a Gen Z Christian who grew up in the American church who was concerned about climate change but doesn’t think their church cares about it. I want those people to come away from this book encouraged. I want them to feel seen and to go away empowered with actual tools to integrate this more deeply into their life of faith. So if a young Christian is standing on the edge of climate despair and thinking the church doesn’t care, I want this book to pull them back and say, you’re not alone. Millions of other Christians like you understand this. We’re concerned, too. And we want to do something about it. So let’s get to work.

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