What hope do we have in a world where extreme poverty and war are again on the rise, where trust in democracy is waning and greenhouse gas emissions are climbing relentlessly? How can you stay positive when images of genocide flood your phone each day, when anxiety and loneliness are increasing, despite all our technologies, learning and unprecedented wealth? I can’t help worrying where it is all going to end up from here.
Last Tuesday, Dr Anna Rowland delivered a Trócaire Lenten lecture which gave me inspiration. She is a professor of theology in Durham University and an adviser to Pope Francis. She argued that hope is a gift that comes to the fore especially in dark times. It is not a presumption or optimism, but a habitual practice, a way of doing and being, not merely a feeling or sentiment. Having hope correlates with engagement in civil society, voting and nurturing health and friendships. As she says, “Hope takes us through a path of difficulty, struggle, loss, failure and sometimes suffering. Yet it remains hope because although it is difficult to attain, it is still possible to attain.”
Her lecture entitled A Politics of Hope and Catholic Social Teaching as a Guiding Light started with a counter to the rival political theology promoted by the US vice-president JD Vance on Fox News. His conviction that we should return to his interpretation of a medieval “ordo amoris”, where love can be ranked and rationed in order of proximity to ourselves, goes against the social teaching of the Catholic Church.
As Rowland argues, “we cannot be naive about the political deployment of faith, nor risk countering it with a cheap hope. We live in a moment when the choice is not [whether] to have a political theology or not, but between rival political theologies whose accounts of love, hope and justice differ widely and sometimes violently.”
A new Manchester United stadium isn’t about regeneration and never will be
‘We have planned everything:’ Inside the new national children’s hospital
Joe Humphreys: Grind schools create an injustice at the heart of Ireland’s education system
Fintan O’Toole: Donald Trump is right about Ireland’s relationship with Big Pharma
The rise in support for this alternative political theology is born from genuine fears. People want to be able to raise a family in a loving environment, have a secure home and meaningful work. However, populist politics feeds off anger and resentment and promotes a “narcissistic localism”, rather than compassion and engagement with the wider world. Rowland says it cannot be used to justify the cuts to humanitarian aid that are now taking place.
Transforming a new wave of support for action will require respectful dialogue. We will not make the necessary leap if we just feed on division between left and right, between urban and rural or between those of different beliefs
In this new ordering of love, care for creation comes last. That runs counter to what every major religion has to say. It was Bartholomew, the head of the Orthodox Church who in part inspired Francis to write his encyclical Laudato Si in 2015, which articulated a new ecological spirituality for our day. The Hindu declaration on climate change asserted: “Humanity’s very survival depends upon our capacity to make a major transition of consciousness, equal in significance to earlier transitions from nomadic to agriculture, agriculture to industrial, and industrial to contemporary technology. We must transit to complementarity in place of competition, convergence in place of conflict, holism in place of hedonism, optimisation in place of maximation.”
There have been similar declarations from the Buddhist, Rabbinic, Islamic and other Christian traditions. They share an understanding of the need for us to live in harmony with the natural world and with each other.
When you meet people involved in climate action you realise they are often informed by deep motivations from within their own religious and philosophical traditions. While climate is a wicked problem, people of all faiths, and many of none, are motivated in a similar way and start from a common position, recognising that everyone is at risk.
Why, then, are we seeing such low public engagement about the ongoing destruction of our natural world and a backlash against what we need to do? In part, it is because of populist politics that wants to depict environmental issues as part of a cultural war, where they can blame the elites while sowing disinformation and distrust.
Laurence Tubiana, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, countered this when she spoke in Dublin last November, also giving a message of hope to those who may despair. She pointed out that a vast majority of people in all our countries still see the issue as an existential threat that they want addressed. The tide of public opinion will turn when people fully realise that the destruction of our children’s future is at hand and that the political system is failing to act decisively today.
Transforming a new wave of support for action will require respectful dialogue. We will not make the necessary leap if we just feed on division between left and right, between urban and rural or between those of different beliefs. It is by taking action, particularly at community level, that we can best find this hopefulness and the common ground to guide our way.
