Binding The Wounds Of Mother Earth: Christian Animism, New Materialism And The Politics Of Nonhuman Personhood Today

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2023

Published In

Religion, Materialism And Ecology

Abstract

If Christianity's core teaching is that ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us' (John 1:14)—if divinity has enfleshed itself in all things—then the whole world is a living sacrament of God's presence, and thereby worthy of humans' affectionate concern. In this vein, I want to propose the idea of Christian animism in order to return ad fontes to the Johannine vision of a divinised material world. Though a contested term with academic roots in Anglo-American white supremacy, I propose a nuanced recovery of ‘animism', in dialogue with the Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, in order to set forth the affinity between biblical religion and Indigenous lifeways. After introducing the new animism by way of Hogan, I study the blind man's vision of people-trees in Mark 8 and suggest that the man's animist recognition of the personhood of woody plants is the necessary condition of the miracle of his full-sightedness. I follow this case study by tracking the affinities between Christian animism and the ‘material turn' within contemporary continental philosophy. I find especially helpful Jane Bennett's new materialist analysis of the agential capacities of nonhuman lifeforms across the divides that separate humankind and otherkind. Nevertheless, Bennett seeks to quarantine her project from becoming ‘infected by superstition, animism, vitalism, and other premodern attitudes'. By invoking the old canard of ‘superstition' as a put-down of first people's worldviews, the reek of Occidentalism permeates Bennett's polemic against traditional ways of knowing. Pace Bennett, I lift up the animist notion that all lifeforms—rock persons, river ancestors, mountain gods, wolf nations, thunder beings and, especially in this chapter, tree people in the manner of Mark 8—share common personhood and intrinsic value. Finally, I analyse how these diverse lifeforms (indeed, Earth itself) are bearers of natural rights per the contemporary enshrinement of such rights within the legal systems of Ecuador, Bolivia and New Zealand et alibi. I conclude with reference to Potawatomi scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer's idea that by caring for Earth (now Mother Earth) we are cultivating the vital life-force that brings all things together. My aim throughout is to make the case for Christian animism (in dialogue with new Indigenous, biblical and juridical scholarship) to empower the healing of Mother Earth as the essential and ennobling political work of our time.

Published By

Routledge

Editor(s)

S. Bergmann, K. Rigby, and P. M. Scott

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