By Rev. Michael Reed, MassIPL Executive Director
Many of you know that I’m an unlikely type for a leader of an interfaith climate organization. That's because I started out life as a nondenominational evangelical Christian. White evangelicals are, as a group, the least likely to be concerned about climate change of any religious community in America. (They’re also fairly wary of interfaith work.) When I was growing up, we never talked about climate change, and rarely about the environment.
Except, when I go back and think about it, it seems to me that we were constantly telling stories about the climate and the environment. Just not always the right ones.
As an undergraduate student, I attended an evangelical Bible college in Chicago. We weren’t allowed to drink or dance or watch movies in our dorm rooms. Instead, we were encouraged to read the Bible every day and attend chapel four times a week.
One particular morning, I was sitting in chapel, and the president of the Bible College got up to preach. He started talking about how this world compares to heaven. I’ll never forget: he said, “Remember: at best, this earth is just a clean bus stop.”
Just a clean bus stop.
If you think about it, that’s a climate story. It's a story that comes out of a particular version of Christianity, one that sees the Earth as something temporary, disposable. Sure, it’d be nice if things were clean and tidy while you’re waiting to get somewhere Else—but ultimately creation isn’t worth caring for.
Many things have changed in my life since that day in chapel. But even back then, all those years ago, that story didn’t sit right. As a young Christian, I felt there had to be a better story of God, and of humanity’s relationship to the created world.
I was speaking to an interfaith group not long ago and told that story. When I got to the part about the ‘clean bus stop,’ a woman in the third row quite audibly muttered: “Oh, that is so not Jewish.” We all couldn’t help but stop and laugh. Now, I’ll leave aside the question of what is or isn’t Jewish, but after many years of study, seminary, and ordination, I will wholeheartedly claim that it isn’t Christian.
The problem is that we haven’t always done a good job at framing climate change as part of people’s religious story — or framing it as a story at all. And we absolutely have to do better.
The reasons are obvious: first, because there are so many ‘clean bus stop’ style narratives in many of our religious communities, and (to borrow language from my own tradition) bad theology exists because good theology doesn’t. In the last year alone, we’ve seen leaders at the highest levels of power frame their political attacks on climate policy in explicitly religious terms—talking about how their personal faith motivates them to attack "climate change religion" and thereby weaken pollution regulations, cancel clean energy funding, halt climate studies, and silence dissent.
But second, and more positively, we need to frame climate change in personal and religious stories because it just might be one of the only things that gets through.
Somewhat ironically, there is a tremendous amount of data which suggests that—especially when it comes to climate change—most people are not motivated by data. Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a remarkable increase in the number of people concerned about climate change (including white evangelicals!). However, behavioral change during that same time period has remained largely flat. More and better statistics aren’t moving the needle.
Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe talks about how people interpret new information in light of the cognitive frameworks they already have in place. Rather than allowing new climate information to be slotted into people’s preexisting narrative frameworks, she points to the power of invoking the religious and spiritual frameworks that people already have.
In other words, as people of faith, we have a way to reframe the whole conversation, sidestepping the political landmines and partisan bullet points, in order to have an open conversation about climate. Hayhoe's insight is that piling on more (often frightening) information rarely moves anyone. However, when we start with something personal we hold in common with them, something climate change touches, and then showing what people like us are already doing about it, we begin to see real breakthroughs.
But to tell a better story about the climate, we need examples of what that looks like. How does faith motivate people to act on climate—both within a familiar religious tradition, and for others who orient around religion differently? How might acting on climate make us a more authentic version of who we already are?
This fall, MassIPL is publishing a new series called “Sustainable Faith: An Interfaith Season of Creation.” We’ve gathered essays and articles from leaders who live or work here in Massachusetts. Each is located somewhere within a different religious or ethical tradition, and each was asked to write and think in the first-person. Rather than giving us a world religions encyclopedia article, we challenged them to speak personally and plainly about how their faith or religious experiences connect with climate.
The series takes its inspiration from the Season of Creation, an ecumenical observance held each year from September 1 to October 4, when communities around the world unite in prayer and action to care for our common home. We've borrowed its spirit and stretched it much wider, inviting voices from across many traditions to join the same season of attention.
You'll hear from different authors, including:
This is a special series that we’ll publish weekly to your inbox on Sundays from today until October 11th. We will also publish the articles on our website at www.massipl.org/sustainablefaith.
Each article will end with questions for us to reflect upon and be challenged by. Hopefully, as you read each article, you’ll find areas of resonance with your own faith journey. You might develop deep appreciative knowledge for other traditions that are less familiar. Our goal is not to suggest that all religions are essentially the same, or that we all agree on everything. However, as an interfaith climate coalition, we want you to see how people of diverse backgrounds are uniquely inspired to take action on climate change, and work together for our common home.
I am so tremendously excited to share this series with you. And I hope you’ll share some of the articles you love with others. Our hope is that this series will create a narrative framework for our work in climate, and that we can continue to share faith and climate stories from new voices and perspectives not yet represented.
Finally, I want to add a special thanks to Susan Starkey of Faith Communities Environmental Network, who helped us design and edit this series. We are so grateful to partner with her and the folks from FCEN on Cape Cod and the Islands. We also want to thank Interfaith America for funding this project, as part of our goal to grow an interfaith organization investing in the deep work of religious pluralism.
Keep an eye on your inbox the next few Sundays for upcoming articles, and help us move forward together, as we tell a better story on climate change here in Massachusetts.
With hope and resolve,
Rev. Michael Reed
Executive Director, MassIPL
Sources:
Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (Atria, 2021), 10–11.
Kris De Meyer, "Why We Need to Change How We Talk about Climate Change," TEDxLondon, 2023.
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In this Sustainable Faith essay, Dayenu organizer Lenny Somervell reflects on climate grief and the pressure to "don't mourn, organize." Drawing on Jewish traditions of mourning, Somervell argues that grief and action aren't opposites, and that the climate crisis wasn't created by individual choices and can't be solved by them. Our power, like our responsibility, is collective. Rabbi Laura Bellows closes with a High Holiday reflection on recommitting to the world as it could and should be.
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Gopal Patel reflects on three bodies of water, the Ganges, Walden Pond, and the ocean, and what each teaches us about the change we're asked to make.
