ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I argue that one effective way of addressing race and ethnicity within the paradigm of ecology and religion is through the lens of religious naturalism. As mentioned in the opening chapter on religion in this volume, religious naturalism includes a variety of perspectives and ideas that often depart from traditional forms of religion, specifically in rejecting or reinterpreting traditional concepts (e.g., God or supernatural theism), and in using current developments in science to conceptualize humanity and our ethical orientations, aesthetic appreciations, and religious value. Religious naturalism shifts humans’ thinking back to ourselves as natural processes, encouraging us to question our values, behaviors, and resource uses as we conceive and enact new forms of relationality with each other and with the more-than-human worlds that are an integral part of our existence here.1 As such, religious naturalism offers a capacious ecological worldview that promotes justice for all of myriad nature. Specifically, religious naturalism deepens our awareness of the subtle, yet important, conceptual issues at stake in conjoining ecological initiatives with race and ethnicity. As an emerging religious discourse, it helps unmask a binary logic that has helped justify forms of environmental racism affecting communities of color, and it increases our awareness of subtle forms of anthropocentricism in our ecological discourses, which retain problematic views of the more-than-human worlds as “other.” In this chapter, I emphasize the potential of religious naturalism to help us move beyond this problematic binary logic. In the first section, I provide the necessary backdrop to my general argument.
I first introduce an influential, early modern binary construction (nature-culture) that divided reality into spheres of lesser-greater value, and then explore how it was further extended within the development and presence of white supremacy in the Euro-American context. I specifically describe dominant cultural norms and practices strengthened by this binary logic, which viewed the humanity of U.S. blacks and other ethnic and racial groups as closer to nature and not as important as that of white Euro-Americans. In this section,
I also draw on recent insights of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to support the claim that white supremacy is a further extension of this binary logic, and I provide fuller understandings of key terms, such as nature, race, ethnicity, racism, and the construction of whiteness. In the second section, I respond to these historical and conceptual problems
by introducing religious naturalism as an ecological religious framework that helps to address both white supremacy and problematic conceptions of the human-nature continuum. As an alternative model of conceiving nature, religious naturalism helps us reconfigure human animals’ relation to land, to animal others, and, indeed, to ourselves. Furthermore, its emphasis on deep relationality in biology and cosmology provides a viable model of ethical engagement with myriad nature. I also discuss race and ethnicity in recent ecological perspectives, specifically
examining religious naturalism’s response to what some environmental historians and activists have called the racialization of nature or the environment. While the specific examples I offer are primarily from African American history, I attempt to make important references and connections to other ethnic and racial groups. Following these conceptual explorations, I offer in the third section a brief
discussion of some ethical implications of religious naturalism as an ecological religious worldview. I suggest it can bring diverse groups together that share a common goal of both enriching human-human relationships and transforming humans’ relationality with the more-than-human worlds of which we are a part.
