Frederica Ghesquiere

Summer 2008 Fellow, The Regeneration Project

Up until this past summer, I had been unaware of the subtle and steady divergence of my values and my faith. It was a stealthy severance; my values seemed justifiably progressive and I could easily claim to be a "different" kind of Christian-- a liberal one, who obviously ascribed to these values because I'm sure Jesus would have felt the same way. I found myself asserting that I was an environmentalist, a feminist, an aspiring pacifist, an (unsatisfied) Democrat, a hater of racism and classism and heterosexism and, oh yes, I'm also a Christian. But how did those identities really connect?

By the end of our first weekly fellows meeting in the Gibbs parlor at CDSP, I started to recognize the danger in my unexamined, isolated progressive values. I could provide convincing social, political, or economic reasons for the values that I hold, but not religious reasons. I could not explain why my Christian beliefs, my own theology and my understanding of the Bible led me to hold these progressive values. Del Brown, former Dean of PSR, lead our group each week in the practice of articulating succinctly, lovingly, persuasively, and gently, why our Christian theology leads us to be pacifists, to support equality in gender and orientation, to care for the earth, to care for the immigrant and the working class poor. The answers were there before, but they were rusty from lack of use, buried underneath years of avoiding unpleasant discussions in which someone was likely to out-quote me scripturally.

I've worked in the overlapping realm of Religion and Environment for quite some time. In the beginning, those of us who saw these two arenas as completely reconcilable and sensical got plenty of practice in explaining our reasoning to doubters. Recently, however, with the increased media coverage of religious groups' slow embrace of climate change issues and attention to the environment, I find that we are called upon less and less often to explain why concern for the earth is a Christian mandate. I think it's dangerous to assume that we no longer need Biblical or theological justifications for holding these progressive values, or that rooting our values in our religious convictions is an archaic and rightist tactic. I've heard Sally Bingham devote presentations to convincing the audience that climate change is indeed a moral issue because it's still not obvious. And it probably won’t be for a long time. This realization is what I’m carrying with me back east when I return to school.

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