Jim Antal’s Climate Church, Climate World is an interesting resource for all those concerned about the climate change crisis. He certainly feels strongly about it. I found it to be a book with great strengths and unfortunate flaws.

The book is organized into nine chapters dealing with various dimensions of the climate change issue in church context, an appendix containing preaching suggestions, and an epilogue that contains a retrospective letter imaginatively written by a teenager in the year 2100, describing her reaction to what the people in our own time did about climate change and the “bending of the moral arc” that was occurring in her lifetime. Each chapter ends with a series of questions that can be used by groups or individuals to provoke deeper thought about the issues raised in the chapter.

Antal’s worldview is driven by love and expressed right at the beginning of the book: “The world – each fragment as well as the whole – is a window into the love of God.” (p. 1, also cf. p. 112, p. 129 and especially p. 144 ff.). This emphasis on love found a home in my soul.

A new moral era needs to be proclaimed, Antal argues, that stands in opposition to the hedonistic positivism that is the mainstream worldview these days. As one might expect, there is considerable resistance to the emergence of such a new moral era by entrenched interests and the perennially greedy. He observes that “…when truth is compromised, only power prevails.” (p. 4).

He recognizes that it is a dangerous enterprise to propose fighting climate change. Antal had served as a teaching assistant to Henri Nouwen at Yale and quotes him in an arresting fashion, when he shares a letter Nouwen had written to him from Nicaragua: “You can only risk your life when you are in love” (p. 129). I suspect Jesus would’ve agreed.

Continuing to frame the problem in a way that vividly grabs our imagination, Antal quotes from Pope Fracis' encyclical Laudato si' and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who echoes Francis' thought:

“We have profaned the Word of God, and we have given the wealth of our land, the ingenuity of our minds and the dear lives of our youth to tragedy and perdition. There has never been more reason for man to be ashamed than now.

We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.

Let the blasphemy of our time not become an eternal scandal. Let future generations not loathe us for having failed to preserve what prophets and saints, martyrs and scholars have created in thousands of years” (p.51).

Antal’s claims that the climate crisis that began in the Industrial Revolution is unique: “Never has the earth and the climate changed so quickly” (p. 5). Unfortunately, this statement overlooks the major mass extinctions that have occurred in the earth’s history such as the K-Pg event, which destroyed three quarters of plant and animal species on Earth. Humans weren’t even around. Although he likely meant to refer only to man-made climate change events, such phrases diminish the credibility of his vision and witness.

Similar dilution occurs in statements such as “Let us begin a new story – a story that is not dependent on fossil fuel or on wealth for the few and misery for the many” (p. 7). The phrase needed to end after “fossil fuel.” The rest of it is polemical, it seems to me. Addressing climate change indeed grapples with the problems of human greed and narcissism, but the scope of those problems far exceeds what’s confronting us with climate change.

The quote from Gus Speth reflects my unease with Antal’s approach: “I used to think that if we threw enough good science at the environmental problems, we could solve them. I was wrong. The main threats to the environment are not biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change, as I once thought. They are selfishness and greed and pride. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation” (p. 9).

Speth’s thoughts demonstrate why churches need to be prophetic voices involved in bringing about climate change. That said, it’s one thing to sound the tocsin and another altogether to attempt to make people do something by shaming them into it.  

Antal asserts that all the solutions we need to accomplish our goals with respect to climate change are already at hand (p. 28). All that stands in the way are the short-term profit mentality, fear of change, ideology and vested interests.

Not everyone would agree that the solutions are at hand, and the roadblocks, write large, are roadblocks to much more than just climate change. They are part of human nature and need to be addressed as such, in situ. It’s one thing to ask God (or of each other) to turn us magically into something we’re not and quite another to pray for the grace of metanoia and the energy to do God’s will which, as Antal himself observed is love. Jim actually knows this and asks us to “imagine religious people the world over embracing a call that resides in every faith tradition – a moral call to resist greed in favor of sharing and even sacrifice” (p.33). The problem, many would assert, is that the folks who need to embrace this call are not “religious” in any meaningful sense of the word.

That being said, there’s value in keeping up the drumbeat. Any activist worth his salt knows, as I know from my own activist activities and as Antal does too, that “the single most important ingredient in social change is persistence” (p. 37). It’s all too easy to ignore what’s not continually in your face. What doesn’t help when you’re doing that is asking people to heed God’s call to “conscientization,” (p. 55). The term belongs to Karl Marx, not God, and is guaranteed to put off an enormous number of people who have no use for the communist lie. I wish he hadn’t used the term, for it’s all too easy to connect that dot to others in the book to other dots to which it was not intended to be connected.

Although Antal adverts to the expansion of horizons from quarterly profits to generations of human lives that many corporate leaders are taking (p. 40), additional profitable time could be spent by honest climate change activists studying ISO 14000, the environmental standard for manufacturing. Many of the problems we face are due to incomplete system thinking. Oversimplifying dramatically, we might assert that “Dig-build-sell-discard” systems need to be replaced by “dig and restore-build and keep clean-sell only what’s needed and recycle” systems in our industries and at home. Antal either doesn’t know about this or chooses to ignore it.

The book is weakened a bit by anachronisms and incomplete information. The suit by Our Children’s Trust (pp. 60-61) has been dismissed. Other important develoments in environmental law go unmentioned, such as efforts to declare natual resources as "persons." Rush Limbaugh is criticized, but he is dead and no longer (presumably) influences public opinion. What more can be demanded of him?

I would recommend this book for groups that wish to engage in climate change activism, with the caution that they not read it uncritically. 

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.