Christian Climate Action: Compassion & Community
Christian Climate Action is more than the name of an organization, it names something many believe is desperately needed. Quite literally, we need Christian climate action. We need action from Christians in partnership with others to address climate change and save lives. The climate crisis arrived decades ago, but the impacts are now being felt forcefully and widely. Christian Climate Action (CCA), the group, has stepped forward in this time to call people of faith to pay attention and take action, doing so prayerfully, compassionately, nonviolently, but also loudly, visibly and forthrightly.
What visible and forthright action in a Christian context could look like was the center of the conversation at a recent Climate Cafe Multifaith, as we spoke with Melanie Nazareth. Nazareth shared the efforts of CCA, and the hoped for impacts of the organization. She also addressed the partnership that CCA has forged alongside Extinction Rebellion in the UK, and the community being built by people of faith who are engaging this prophetic work.
“We will hold Eucharist in the midst of a protest, up against the police lines in the middle of a street… [we] will have prayer gatherings in the middle of a road. …our faith is there.”
—Melanie Nazareth, Christian Climate Action
Photo courtesy of Christian Climate Action, December 13, 2020. Used by permission.
Melanie Nazareth is an attorney in London, England. Her story begins one fateful day when she was living out her everyday life, walking to, then from, work. On this day, she passed by a street protest organized by the group Extinction Rebellion. Group members had caused enough of a visible disruption during the protest that police officers were now making arrests. Nazareth stopped. As she witnessed the arrests, she felt a profound Spirit-led experience.
Nazareth says of that day, “I watched these people being arrested, and it was extraordinary. There was this calm, amazing spirituality. There was this powerful sense that I needed to be on the other side of the police lines, and that was God telling me that my life needed to take a different direction. I walked through those police lines, and I've never looked back. My whole life changed.” It was a moment that called her to a new direction, new action, new community, and even new study. She has since completed a masters degree in theology, ecology, and ethics.
In the above video, Melanie Nazareth offers a presentation about the group Christian Climate Action and her own experience speaking out against climate change.
Christian Climate Action formed a decade ago, and found alignment with the group Extinction Rebellion over that time. Extinction Rebellion (XR) is an organization committed to public action and truth-telling about the the real consequences of human-caused destruction to the planet—from fossil fuels, especially. Nazareth explains that Christians who participate with Extinction Rebellion do so incorporating their own understanding of moral imperative and action from their tradition. Nazareth defines it this way, “Christian Climate Action is a community of Christians that supports each other to take meaningful action in the face of imminent and catastrophic anthropogenic climate breakdown. And for us, that means following the example of Jesus…”
Nazareth is also convinced that Jesus would approve. She explains, “I have never found people who embody the love and the compassion and the genuine interest in the welfare of others—that we as Christians should be exhibiting—as the people that I meet, many of whom are not people of faith, and not Christians. In fact, often they view us with great suspicion, but they embody something that I rarely see in the churches. So I think that's where Jesus would be.”
“I firmly believe that Jesus would be found within the ranks of people in movements like Extinction Rebellion.”
—Melanie Nazareth, Christian Climate Action
A vicar is about to be arrested for blocking Whitehall during the Extinction Rebellion protests, October 2019. Photo by John Cameron.
CCA also joins alongside other faith groups also responding to the crisis through visible, public action. The Extinction Rebellion community includes Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Pagans—all participating as siblings in faith-led protests in the streets. The effort then is both multifaith and interfaith with an understanding that intercommunity can “enrich each other’s practice.” Explains Nazareth, “We hold [overnight] vigils quite regularly outside our parliament…. Because that element of hardship, whether it was rain or cold—we've done it in some below temperatures, just sitting out there—makes people take you a bit more seriously. But we often do that with our Buddhist colleagues. They're exceptionally good at keeping our minds focused in meditation.”
CCA also engages study of the biblical work of social justice. They recognize the tremendous privilege western Christian groups enjoy compared to other groups, especially compared to people of color. This recognition is further convicting that as Christian worshipers experience fewer repercussions when engaging public witness, there is a heightened moral obligation to actually do so. Nazareth notes a “reluctance” on the part of police to arrest Christians in prayer, in worship, or serving Eucharist at a protest. She is aware of the contrast between the relative hands-off approach police officers in the US or UK might give to a Christian group, vs the violent arrests of Native peoples engaged in prayerful and sacred ceremonies, even in traditional regalia, on ancestral tribal land.
“Joining a movement like this, there are so many good and nourishing things. It's like many communities, it gives you connection. It gives you hope. Because you're with people. We're taking action and action always gives you hope.”
—Melanie Nazareth, Christian Climate Action
Photo courtesy Christian Climate Action, September 5 2021. Used with permission.
Nazareth believes nonviolent direct action is an essential role of groups like CCA and XR willing to be visible and vocal in order to drive change. Nazareth’s study of theology and ecology informs her understanding of the work with concepts such as the 8 Principles of Deep Ecology posited by Arne Naess and George Sessions, which Nazareth sums up in relationship to Christianity as: “we are not exceptional as human beings. We are part of a connected community and every part of it is really valuable. We have to remember that, and put aside our idea that we are entitled to everything on this earth because we're humans. And it's a particular problem for Christians because we have this idea that we are Imago Dei, that we are created in the image of God, and therefore we have a right to take what we want from creation because it's there to serve us.”
Direct action by the group, therefore, is undergirded by deep moral conviction. Actions include public prayer and vigil, Eucharist, occupying space such as churches or cathedrals, washing the feet of members of the clergy, and calling for cessation of fossil fuels, mitigation of climate impacts, and financial and spiritual divestment. They call for this with a deep urgency. Says Nazareth, “we believe that in the face of a crisis that's unleashing vast suffering, that's destroying the future of God's children, Jesus calls us to go to our own Jerusalems to turn over the tables of injustice, to speak out for justice and peace.”
“Bigger than rising temperatures is the biodiversity crisis that we face globally. …This isn't just about human beings. This is about all of creation. And so the crisis… is this ecological crisis for plants and for other species.”
—Melanie Nazareth, Christian Climate Action
Extinction Rebellion September 2020 Protests for the launch of the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill (CEE Bill) Across The City of London. Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.
Direct action often means employing tactics of disruption in church sanctuaries, on public walkways and roadways. CCA members recognize the risk of arrest, but most actions stay within the laws allowed for public protest. Recently, however, some CCA members have been arrested, especially those who have been working alongside the effort Just Stop Oil. After decades now of environmental alarm bells and activism, and CCA itself is a decade old, despite all that, fossil fuel emissions are still rising and tipping points are starting to tip.
While Nazareth herself does not break the law, there is real recognition of just how dire the situation is, and that something must be done. Explains Nazareth, “we've had to up the ante. There's a new movement in the UK called Just Stop Oil…which aims to try and stop things like oil tankers—again in a nonviolent way—to shut down the infrastructure. People in that movement are now going to prison.” Those arrested and sentenced to prison include people of faith and clergy from CCA. “There are people now who are hoping that by…having enough people in prison, we might begin to move this really urgent agenda along.”
“I left this bubble of people who are like me and I found people who are really dissimilar, who did all sorts of things, from all walks of life and from all economic levels. And yet we've been able to build community.”
—Melanie Nazareth, Christian Climate Action
Melanie Nazareth participates in a prayer and meditation vigil outside Parliament with Extinction Rebellion, September 7, 2020. Photo courtesy Christian Climate Action. Used with permission.
The weight of the urgency is at times hard to bear. This, too, is where faith makes a difference. For CCA faith and community are both essential parts of the effort. Community is where the grief of the catastrophic truth of climate destruction is processed, and where hope is shared. Nazareth says that building a “community of people” who engage together, sometimes for days at a time, or traveling together, is “hard work.” She explains, “to build community you have to open your heart, you have to be able to listen, [and] to work at it. It doesn't come naturally. We do a lot of emotional debriefs,” focusing on things that bring “connection.”
The community isn’t just important for the reality of building a movement for urgent action right now, but it is going to be essential in the world to come. Says Nazareth, “we have a high degree of global warming and destruction built in, it's unavoidable and we will see levels of societal breakdown whatever we do now. Part of the task is what we do about that because we can't stop parts of the world getting hotter. We will see migration crises coming to our door. All these things will challenge us politically alongside the problems that we have already.” Nazareth believes environmental movements need to build communities of “compassion” sturdy enough to “remain compassionate" when the hard stuff really hits.
In this video, Melanie Nazareth speaks to the hope she finds in climate activism and groups like Christian Climate Action.
By focusing on hope in community, and by steadfastness to the moral imperative of its task, Nazareth is hopeful that movements like CCA can bring meaningful societal action and change. CCA, says Nazareth, is doing “a lot of good work.” It functions perhaps as “the sharp end of the movement [as it] highlights issues and brings them to the fore.” This “necessary disruption to the current system” allows an opening and invites change.
Find Christian Climate Action online at christianclimateaction.org
For more articles, also news and information, see the Faiths4Future blog page.
Melanie Nazareth is a barrister and mother of four teenagers and young adults who are going to be living with consequences of the broken world we have created. She bumped into Extinction Rebellion and Christian Climate Action on her way to work in April last year, and was surprised to find that God had her down as an activist. The journey that followed has led her to take a break from the law to do an MA in Theology, Ecology and Ethics. She spent her childhood in the Solomon Islands in the Western Pacific where rising sea levels resulting from global heating have already caused islands to be abandoned, her own reminder that climate breakdown is not some future event.
Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is here for the friendship and conversations about climate, community, and connection. She organizes the Climate Cafe Multifaith as a co-leader of Faiths4Future. Find her in real life in Southern Oregon, working as Steward of Climate with the nonprofit Circle Faith Future.