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Christian Animism

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Part 1: Introducing Christian Animism

Definitions

So what exactly is "Christian animism"? It's a valid question, as these two words are rarely held together, and more often placed in stark opposition to each other. It may be helpful to begin with a working definition of the term "animism". The Shorter Oxford claims that animism is "the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena." The term emerged during the early stages of nineteenth-century cultural anthropology, as a way to describe "primitive" peoples' understanding of religion. In many ways, it was a subtly derogatory term, implicitly suggesting that animism was a stage in the evolution of religion, which would "grow up" into polytheism, then henotheism, and finally culminate in a "mature" monotheism. There are other problems with the term as well, one of which is the misunderstanding that animism describes essentially "disembodied" spirits which inhabit or possess otherwise "inanimate" things, such as rocks or trees. This view is a product of a mechanistic and dualistic understanding of the universe, and as such distorts the actual beliefs and practices of the various animist traditions in question.

Furthermore, animism is often confused with other concepts such as ancestral reverence and polytheism. Certainly, all of these phenomena are related to each other, and often coexist in a given religious worldview; in this work however, we will concentrate primarily on the nature spirits, or "spirits of the land".

These weaknesses aside, I still find that animism is a useful term. Set in the context of a worldview which sees spirit as the "interiority" of matter, rather than its dualistic opposite, animism can be reclaimed as a concept which sees the natural world as sentient, personable, and very much alive. It helps us to experience and understand each created entity, from a prairie gopher to a Rocky Mountain range, as a person, someone to whom we are related. That is basically what I mean when I use the word animism. Later in this essay I will develop more fully the cosmological worldview which enables and supports this type of understanding.

Christian animism, then, is simply what happens when a committed Christian engages the world and each creature as alive, sentient, and related, rather than soul-less and ontologically inferior. However, that's not really "simple", is it? This type of stance vis-à-vis the natural world would have enormous implications for all aspects of Christian belief and practice. What would liturgy look like, for instance, if we knew that plants, animals, and whole ecosystems were co-worshippers with us? How would our eschatologies change if we had to "make room" in heaven for the entire created order? Would our ethical processes morph if "love your neighbour" now included cows, plankton, and all manner of creepy-crawlies? And what does pastoral care look like for trees anyways? All of these, and more, are questions with which a Christian animist perspective must engage.

A few words are in order at this point about the relationship between Christian animism and various forms of theological cosmology. It is very easy to get these things mixed up: I consider Christian animism to be a type of spiritual cosmology (dealing with the nature of the spirit world, and all its various entities), whereas theological cosmology deals with the relationship between God and the universe. Of course, the two categories overlap, but it is important to note the difference. Many contemporary theologians are doing very good work in the area of theological cosmology, critiquing traditional forms of supernatural theism (which stresses the utter transcendence of God), and moving toward more of a trinitarian panentheism (a worldview which seeks a balance between divine immanence and transcendence, asserting that all things are in God and God is in all things). Sally McFague's model of the universe as the body of God is a prime example of this type of theological cosmology. This is good work and reflection that is extremely necessary for the church as we move into an ecological age, where our models of the God-world relationship must be able to uphold an eco-friendly praxis. But still, this is not the same as spiritual cosmology. In fact, throughout much of Christian history, various forms of theological cosmology and their attendant practices of piety and mysticism have functioned to subsume actual created entities into the human quest for God. In other words, even "Earth-friendly" forms of Christianity such as Franciscan spirituality or Meister Eckhart's Rhine Valley mysticism, have tended to see other created beings as a means to an end. Nature is contemplated in order to lead us to God, rather than to engage in relationship-building with our non-human neighbours. We have inherited from our neoplatonic heritage a distinct prejudice against "the many" in favour of "the One".

A spiritual cosmology such as Christian animism helps us to experience, understand, and relate to "the many" – that is, the actual created beings which constitute the universe. My sense is that while panentheism is the natural ally of Christian animism, it is not impossible to embrace Christian animism as a classical theist, or even as a pantheist or atheist (although there may be considerably more discussion about whether these worldviews are compatible with Christianity). The point is that Christian animism recognizes that there is ultimately more to our faith than God and the human soul. Christian animism is a perspective and a path that allows us to navigate the spirit world, the "interiority" and energy of Indra's Net, the vast web of beings with whom we share this fragile Earth, our island home, and to whom we are intimately related.

Oppositions

Frankly, however, not everyone is going to be convinced. I know that there will always be those who believe that Christianity and animism are utterly incompatible. Since people rarely shift worldviews through argument, I am not going to spill a lot of ink trying to convince anyone who does not want to be convinced. On the other hand, it is important to engage at some level with those who are opposed to the idea of Christian animism. The objections come primarily from two different perspectives: the scientific and the theological.

Many modern western people can relate to the poster which Agent Molder has hanging on the wall in his small dingy office in the popular '90s TV show, The X-Files. The poster shows a UFO in flight, and contains the caption "I want to believe ..." The problem is that the worldview into which we are sold has no room whatsoever for belief. It only has room for scientifically verifiable "knowledge". This is not a diatribe against science per se, but rather an acknowledgment that the reductionist model of scientific materialism is an ideology which has captured the collective imagination of the west, and will not allow us to believe in that which cannot be quantified. "Religious" people can sometimes manage to get some sort of "exemption" for God and the human soul, but then to relate these amorphous entities to the actual physical universe becomes a bit of a stretch, to say the least. Religion is reduced to the production of meaning, rather than the facilitation of a bodily encounter with the Living God and Her world full of wonderful creatures.

It seems to me that the Newtonian model of the universe is entirely adequate for the tasks of architectural design, billiards, and the like, but when it begins to function as an epistemological ideology, policing the borders of what we can know, it oversteps its bounds. While objectivity may be a laudable goal within scientific research, there comes a point when "objectivism" becomes an idol. There is no such thing as "value-free" science, even less so the more scientific research is hijacked by globalized industry.

The problem is not science, nor even scientific materialism. The problem is a phenomenon called reductionism – a philosophical tendency to subdivide an entity into its smallest components, cut it off from its inherent relation to a larger context, and "reduce" it to a quantifiable analysis. Whenever you hear yourself or someone else say "well, it's just some bad pizza I ate last night", or "it's just the wind in the trees", or "don't worry, it's just hormones", you are dealing with reductionism on its popular level. Whenever we seek to provide simple analysis of complex phenomena, we run the risk of falling into reductionism.

When it comes to our relationship with the world of nature, reductionism teams up with scientific materialism and industrial pragmatism to create a deadly ideology which not only cuts us off from any meaningful form of communion with the non-human world, but also sets the stage for a full-scale blitzkrieg of exploitation of "natural resources". In Unmasking the Powers, Walter Wink observes that:

the idea of living matter was simply economically inconvenient. In the participative worldview of Medieval Europe, one could certainly mine nature's ores, but only with care and devotion. Metallurgy was deliberately compared to obstetrics, and new mines were sunk, until the fifteenth century, accompanied by religious ceremonies in which the miners fasted, prayed, and observed a particular series of rites. But if nature is dead, then there are no restraints on exploiting it for profits (155).

The contribution of scientific materialism to ecological biocide is staggering and profound. This connection alone should make us step back and re-evaluate the prominence we give to science in determining our worldview. It is important to note that some of the strongest critiques of materialist reductionism are coming from within the scientific community itself: quantum mechanics, chaos theory, ecology – each of these disciplines are recognizing the limits of the Newtonian model for observing and describing reality. As theologians rediscover the word "energy" as a synonym for "spirit", scientists are simultaneously developing an openness to questions almost religious in nature. Is the war between religion and science coming to an end? Well, that might be a bit optimistic, but at least there are, here and there, small signs of ceasefire.

Of course, I am quite aware that none of this will change the mind of anyone ideologically committed to a worldview based on scientific reductionism. But for those who, like Agent Molder, "want to believe", I would simply suggest that belief is possible. Scientific scepticism need not cut us off completely from the chance to experience the world around us as alive, sentient, and "personable". In fact, a healthy dose of scepticism is absolutely necessary in all forms of spiritual exploration; let's just remember to be sceptical about our scepticism as well!

The other main source of objection to the idea of Christian animism comes, not surprisingly, from the theological perspective. Christianity does not have a great track record when it comes to making room for dialogue with animist positions, and there are many reasons for this. My sense is that the root cause however has been a confusion in the relationship between animism, pantheism, and polytheism. This is not surprising, since in many of the cultures which Christianity has encountered, these three categories have been functionally interchangeable.

Let's define the terms as simply as possible. Animism is a belief that non-human creatures are alive, sentient, and "personable". Pantheism is the belief that God is the totality of all things, and that all things are God. Polytheism is the belief that there are many gods to be worshipped. Although each of these terms has a distinct meaning, in practice they have tended to overlap. So in any given pagan culture, there is a sophisticated and complex pattern of religious thinking that recognizes divinity spread throughout the universe. Divinity wears many "masks" and manifests itself in a multitude of gods and goddesses. These deities are to be respected and related to in various ways, and often worship or reverence is directed toward the deity through a living being such as a tree, or through a totem animal, or through an "inanimate" (by some definitions) entity such as a rock or a spring of water. Although this is a generalization, and the actual religious matrix would vary from culture to culture, we can see how the three categories of pantheism, polytheism, and animism overlap.

For Christians, it has been extremely difficult to tell the difference between these strands of thought; in fact, the church has been polemically conditioned to not see the difference. With unrelenting consistency, early Christian teachers employed the strategy, inherited from Jewish monotheism as well as Greek philosophy, of labelling any form of relation to a spiritual entity (other than God or an angel) as superstitious, idolatrous, or demonic. Pantheism, polytheism, and animism were three aspects of the same religious paradigm, and it was a paradigm attacked mercilessly by the church, sometimes with very little comprehension of the complexity of the religion involved.

While in no way trying to justify the religious bigotry and imperialistic violence unleashed by the church on pagan cultures throughout the Constantinian era (that is, from the fourth century CE to the present), I can understand why Christians have been wary of pantheism and polytheism (although there could have been other ways to interpret these categories more respectfully than the typical crude polemic against idolatry and demon-worship). But it seems to me that animism, separated from the other two strands of the paradigm, does not in and of itself pose a problem to basic Christian convictions. Let's take an example: the apple tree in my backyard. I believe this tree is alive, that it is conscious and sentient, and that I can relate to it, in some sense, as a "person". I can commune and even communicate with it. I believe it to be a fellow creature, a being both physical and spiritual, as I am. But I don't worship it, and I don't consider it a god. It is simply a neighbour. Now, while you may think me a bit off my rocker for holding this belief, you cannot accuse me of being a heretic. And in fact, this perspective on the world may be even more "biblical" than our modern scientific worldviews. The psalms are filled with references to the created world being alive and sentient, full of praise for the Creator. It is we who are deaf, not the world which is mute!

At some deep level, we know this to be true. In fact, I believe that one of the reasons why Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lewis' Narnia have been so wildly popular is that they both present fictionalized and narrative examples of Christian animism. Both worlds contain a multitude of beings, including elves, dwarves, talking trees, water spirits, river gods, talking animals, and a host of other creatures, each of whom breaks down our simplistic categories of "person" and "nature".

Ultimately, there need be no theological objections to Christian animism. It is no more pantheistic nor polytheistic than the Bible itself. Christian animism certainly accords to the non-human creation much more sentience, agency, and "soul" than has typically been the case within the Christian tradition, but it is well within the boundaries of doctrinal orthodoxy. More than that, Christian animism can even contribute to the authentic development of orthodoxy, as the church grows into the ecological challenges of a new millennium.

Implications

So what do we gain by adopting for ourselves the worldview of Christian animism? Does it further the mission of the church? Does it intensify our quest for justice? Does it deepen our spiritual discipleship? Or does it simply open us to fear and scorn from within our own tradition?

Christian animism, as perspective and practice, has many implications for the future of the church. There are three areas in particular which deserve attention as foci for discussion of the benefits of Christian animism: ecology, inter-faith dialogue, and personal spirituality. In each of these areas, Christian animism opens doors for the church which have been tightly closed in the past.

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Excerpted from Christian Animism by Shawn Sanford Beck. Copyright © 2014 Shawn Sanford Beck. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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