Three Crises
Climate, Democracy, and Christianity
I am troubled by the urgency of three crises in 2025—climate, democracy, and Christianity—and I am trying to remain hopeful about the agency of people and communities of faith in responding to these three intersecting crises.
Especially in the halls of power in our nation's capital, I am seeing rampant denial about the climate crisis, cynical acquiescence in our nation's slide into fascism, and the pernicious ascendance of white Christian nationalism.
I am also sensing outside the halls of power the stirrings of a robust ecological spirituality that is commensurate with the magnitude of these three crises. I draw on Brene Brown’s definition of spirituality as a way of framing this emerging spirituality:
“A robust ecological spirituality recognizes and rejoices that we are all inextricably connected to each other, and to the Earth itself, by a Spirit far greater than all of us. Our relationship with that Spirit and one another and the Earth is grounded in deep reverence and fierce resilience.”
Both spirituality and religion have to do with the inextricable connections between human life and a Higher Power. The root meaning of the word “religion” is in fact “connection.” It’s similar to ligament, which is a connective tissue in the human body.
In my particular religious tradition, which for lack of a better term is progressive Christianity, there’s a recognition that we humans have too often severed these connections, we have too often alienated ourselves from the animating Spirit we call God. This alienation, this brokenness, is what we call sin.
We Christians also believe in reconciliation, in a God who passionately desires to restore us to right relationship with our Creator and with all Creation. We Christians are also no strangers to conflict in our religious traditions. In a time when North American Christians in particular should be all about restoring right relationship with Creation and Creator, we are hampered by a longstanding legacy of imperial Christianity.
I don’t claim to be a historian, but I think that when Emperor Constantine proclaimed Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, he set us on a course that took us far away from Jesus of Nazareth, who after all had been crucified by that same Empire.
I think we can trace a bright line from Constantine through the Crusades and the European Doctrine of Discovery and the American ideology of Manifest Destiny. Our newly inaugurated president has aligned himself with this nineteenth century ideology, invoking this phrase in his inaugural address.
This bright line of western Christian imperialism has helped to undergird, for millennia, the human lust for domination and exploitation. Historian Lynn White Jr. was not mistaken in his claim that western Christianity “bears a huge burden of guilt” for the environmental crises of his time and our time.
Western Christian white supremacy also bears a huge burden of guilt for egregious violations of human rights: from the Holocaust in Nazi Germany to the demonization of immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community by the President and Republicans in Congress.
When Lynn White Jr. implicated western Christianity in environmental degradation, he also proposed an alternative strand of western Christianity as a correction to what I’m calling imperial Christianity. He nominated Francis of Assisi as the “patron saint of ecology,” a nomination that was eventually ratified by Pope John Paul II in 1979.
My wife Mary and I had the privilege of visiting Assisi a few years ago, where we toured the basilica of St. Francis. It was in that church that I saw a small sculpture that conveyed Francis’s devotion to the life and teaching of Jesus: Francis is kneeling at the foot of the cross, and Jesus is reaching one hand down from the cross, in a gesture of mercy, solidarity, and blessing, toward Francis.
I’m not a believer in re-incarnation, so I wouldn’t claim that Pope Francis is the second coming of St. Francis. But I would claim that Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si’ - On Care for Our Common Home is the best contemporary expression of Franciscan Christianity, which stands in sharp contrast to imperial Christianity, and is the kind of Christianity that is desperately needed in 2025, the tenth anniversary of the publication of Laudato Si’.
During this inauguration week, we have witnessed the profound contrast between imperial Christianity, represented by the Rev. Franklin Graham, and what I’m calling Franciscan Christianity, so ably represented by the Rt Rev Mariann Budde, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC.
Imagine this: a Christian preacher, in the pulpit of her church, delivering a sermon calling for unity, honesty, and humility among all Americans, and at the end gently asking the newly inaugurated president to have mercy on the children of immigrant parents who fear that they will be separated from their parents by the draconian anti-immigrant policies of Project 2025. Is not mercy a foundational Christian value?
Not long after Bishop Budde delivered this simple yet profound, thoroughly Christian sermon, she was harshly attacked by the president’s supporters, and later by the president himself in a disrespectful rant on his social media platform. Franklin Graham, who has been called the poster child for white Christian nationalism, spoke of Bishop Budde as a “liar” who is “wrong” and who is “misleading people.” I seem to recall that Jesus might have said “blessed are the merciful” (Matthew 5:7).
Evidence of the climate crisis is everywhere: droughts in Africa, floods in western North Carolina, wildfires in Southern California, even changes in the polar vortex leading to accumulating snow in New Orleans. It’s what Dr. Katharine Hayhoe would call “weather weirding.”
Evidence of the democracy crisis is on full display in our nation’s capital. Never in my nearly eight decades of life could I have imagined the nightmare of the pluto- klepto- kakistrocacy that is now firmly entrenched in all three branches of the federal government.
The Christianity crisis has been brewing for a long time in the United States, and it may have reached a critical turning point. It may be the worst of times, it may be the best of times. The worst is symbolized for me in the saying I’ve seen on T-shirts and baseball caps and yard signs: Jesus Is My Savior - Trump Is My President. The best is symbolized from me in Bishop Budde’s pastoral and prophetic call for unity, honesty, humility, and mercy.