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ABSTRACT
Sacred places today are at grave risk from climate change as the waters rise around these sites and fires approach and engulf them. Even the briefest online search results in a long list of examples. Summers of record heat in northern Spain imperil pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. Rising sea levels in the Florida Panhandle threaten hundreds of ancient Indigenous sacred sites. Flooding across East Asia has displaced Buddhist monks from their monasteries. Extreme heat in Mecca led to stampedes in 1990 and again in 2015, killing hundreds of pilgrims. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey inundated the sanctuary of the oldest synagogue in Houston, Texas, Congregation Beth Israel. Shrines and other sacred spaces caught in the path of extreme climate events and their aftermaths constitute a distinctive field of lived religious experience and practice in the post-Anthropocene, another name for our cataclysmic post-secular globalized world.
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Notes
1 What are we to call these times? I want to say post-Anthropocene because something has changed in recent decades that marks a break from what went before. But this is not quite right. Although the term is debated, Anthropocene is still used by many scientists and climate activists for the current era of earth’s history. Certainly, the consequences of human behavior that it was intended to name continue to unfold. In this context, the “post” seems aspirational or simply misleading. On the other hand, humans are living with a new and urgent awareness of what they have done to the planet. The evidence has always been there, of course, of species, landscapes, and cultures destroyed; there have always been sages, prophets and scientists to caution humans and to point to alternative ways of living on the planet. Most humans ignored them; very many still do, pretending that a warmer-than-usual winter, say, is a pleasant anomaly. But the reality of climate crisis is inescapable now. It has entered the language, dreams, terrors, and memories of contemporary humans. “Climate anxiety” is a recognized (albeit contested) psychological diagnosis. The urgent warnings of scientists are carried on multiple communications platforms. Nature itself has intensified its messages. The glaciers melt faster and faster; successive summers set heat records; parts of the world approach uninhabitability; and more and more species disappear. For the first time, on November 17, 2023, the average air temperature near the earth’s surface was 2 degrees Celsius. Never before “in the era relevant to modern humanity,” climate journalist Zoë Schlanger writes, has the planet been this hot. “We are now,” she says, “a large margin away from the climate in which nearly all of human history has played out.” “2023 Just Notched Its Most Ominous Climate Record Yet,” The Atlantic, November 20, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/11/climate-change-2023-global-temperature-records/676065/.
Amitav Ghosh argues that it is the Anthropocene itself that “has forced us to recognize” the agency of the nonhuman, including the earth itself, and the interconnectedness of all beings. The Great Derangement, 65–66. “Anthropocene,” unmodified, does not seem adequate to our era. Is this the awakened Anthropocene? The conscious and frightened Anthropocene? “In these times” will serve for the moment as a place-holder. On “climate anxiety,” see Rajalakshmi, “Does ‘Climate Anxiety’ Belong in the DSM?”; on the threshold crossed on November 17, 2023, see Schlanger, “2023 Just Notched its Most Ominous Climate Record Yet; on the instances of climate change on sacred sites cited in the paragraph, for example on the pilgrimage to Santiago, see Seitz, “The Changing Way”, and more recently, Seco, “It’s Hot on the Camino”; on the danger to Indigenous peoples’ sacred sites in Florida as a result of rising sea levels, see Mehta and Skipton, “Florida’s Indigenous Heritage Faces a Watery Grave”, and Hunt, Estus and Walker, “Climate Change: Homelands in Peril”; on the danger of floods to shrines in East Asia, see “Historic Temples Bear Brunt as Monsoon Floods Hit Thailand,” Union of Catholic Asia News, October 4, 2021, https://www.ucanews.com/news/historic-temples-bear-brunt-as-monsoon-floods-hit-thailand/94387; on Mecca, see Masters and Henson, “More Warming a Threat to the Hajj—and Human Habitation—in the Middle East”; on the flooding of Congregation Beth Israel in Houston, see Feldman, “Hurricane Harvey ‘Bigger Than Anything We’ve Faced Before,’ Says Jewish Leader”; on Lahaina, see LaPier, “Native Hawaiian Sacred Sites Have Been Damaged in the Lahaina Wildfires—but their Stories will Live On”, and Thebault, “Maui Fires Destroyed a Cultural Center of Native Hawaiian History”.
2 What to call these special beings, especially in cross-cultural comparison, is a challenge. Marshall Sahlins calls them “metapersons.” The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity, with the assistance of Frederick B. Henry, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022). I use “gods” to preserve a sense of the heightened reality of these beings and their radical otherness even in the context of their connectedness to humans.
3 For a recent excellent historical study of human response to weather catastrophe, see Thuesen, Tornado God; also, Jenkins, Climate, Catastrophe and Faith.
4 For a critical reflection on the whole question of the origins of the Anthropocene, see Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, especially chapter 2, “Golden Spikes and Dubious Origins,” 23–64, which also reviews the various efforts to date the era’s origins. Yusoff identifies herself as a “professor of inhuman geography.” Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin make a case for the earlier dating in The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, as do Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything.
5 Cadena, Earth Beings; on the Yamuna River, see Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution; Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity, 12.
6 I have made this argument at greater length in Orsi, History and Presence. Ghosh hints very briefly at a similar historical timeline, marked by “the advent of Protestantism,” in The Great Derangement, 65.
7 This paragraph is informed by Estes and Dhillon, eds., Standing with Standing Rock; Dochuk, Anointed With Oil; and Wenar, Blood Oil. On the controversy over Modi’s plans, see “Char Dham Yatra: Can India balance development and devotion in the Himalayas?,” BBC, July 20, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-62227694; and Joshi, “Modi’s Development Plans for Uttarakhand Can Wreck Its Ecology”.
8 See, for example, Everington, “Video Shows 700 year-old Buddhist Temple Defy Yangtze River Flood”; Archana, “Amid Heavy Floods 700 YO Temple in China Stands Strong, Image Stuns People”.
Some progressive Christians, including a number from Indigenous backgrounds, have proposed that what might be called an apocalyptic consciousness generates a kind of prophetic creativity. As Episcopal bishop and Indigenous activist, Steven Charleston, writes, “Apocalyptic times give rise to apocalyptic visions.” We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope (Minneapolis: Broad Leaf Books, 2023), 199. The latter possibility, that a new consciousness is called for now, underlies my entire argument in this essay. But I am also aware of how very many conservative Christian evangelicals, believing in Christ’s imminent return, have stood against climate science; their eschatology has generated not creativity, but passivity and a dangerous joy born of resentment.
9 Sousa Santos, If God Were a Human Rights Activist, 71. Adorno, Prismen, 267, quoted in de Sousa Santos, 65.
10 On petrocrats, see Ross, The Oil Curse, cited in Wenar, Blood Oil, 26–27.
11 On the ethically transformative power of sacred sites, see, for example, Taneja, Jinnealogy; also Bastin, The Domain of Constant Excess.
With due attention to questions of discrepant power, neo-colonial appropriation, and racial romanticism, I understand the journeys to Indigenous communities with which many non-Indigenous authors conclude their works on climate catastrophe to articulate a longing for such subjective and religious transformation in relation to the gods encountered in sacred spaces. See, for instance, the “fourth movement,” of Sherrell’s Warmth, 215–234. This sort of journey, which has been a dimension of the culture of the Anthropocene all along, is enjoying a revival of considerable existential urgency, sometimes building on existing pilgrimage routes, sometimes creating new ones. A search for “eco-pilgrims” calls up numerous and varied examples. The new attentiveness to animal lives, to relationships between animals and humans, and to the ethics of these interactions, is another instance of an emergent ethics. The long career of Peter Singer is exemplary in this regard; see also, Nussbaum, Justice for Animals.
12 One of the best studies of the question of the legality of the gods is Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law.
13 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 293; Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, “Outline for a Book”, 484–487, quotation on 485.
14 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 290.
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Robert Anthony Orsi
Robert Anthony Orsi is a professor of religious studies and history and Grace Craddock Nagel Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University.