Tom Hayden Finds Spiritual Roots for Green Message

Tom Hayden the theologian?

That may come as a surprise to many who still think of him as the 1960s student radical arrested at the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

But Hayden, now 56 and a veteran of the California state Senate--and rumored to be a mayoral aspirant in Los Angeles--has written a new book that looks into the Bible’s creation story for a spiritual imperative for safeguarding the environment.

Titled “The Lost Gospel of the Earth” and published by Sierra Club Books, the tome argues that the way in which Jews and Christians have traditionally interpreted Genesis has contributed to today’s environmental crisis.

He challenges organized religion to treat the Earth as sacred.

“What I believe is needed is the kind of passionate engagement in the environmental cause that the clergy of America gave civil rights in the 1950s,” Hayden writes. “Unfortunately, what we are seeing today instead is the Religious Right vigorously condemning environmentalists as pagans while defending the property rights of polluters as somehow protected by the mandates of Genesis. Meanwhile, the mainstream religious institutions have been largely silent and little engaged in the environmental debate of the past 25 years.”

Placing undue emphasis on the Genesis account in which God gives humans “dominion” over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air--and indeed over all the Earth--has become a license to pillage the planet, Hayden says.

“Religion is about defining what we should consider sacred and treat accordingly,” Hayden elaborated in an interview this week. “For the most part Western religion excluded the environment from what was considered sacred and the drama became centered on the human and how to live a good life according to good values. . . . The universe and rocks, trees and the Earth were the background. . . . Once [it is] outside the realm of what’s considered deserving respect, reverence [and] being held sacred [it is] constantly at risk of extreme abuse.”

Hayden is not the first to link environment abuse and the scriptural account of creation. As the environmental movement grew during the 1960s and ‘70s, adherents often held up the holistic worldview of Eastern religions, or Native American sacred teachings, as better models.

Of course, many take issue with such interpretations and offer other theological reasons why the environment is such a mess. One is an “idolatry” that places trust in things instead of God, leading to, among other consequences, conspicuous consumption--or what the Bible itself decries as materialism. Scientists and environmentalists have long pointed out that over-consumption in the West places as much of a burden on the global commons as does the “population bomb” in the Third World.

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Hayden says that his four years of research and teaching college courses in “ecotheology” did find an undercurrent of environmentalism in sacred writings, what he calls the “lost gospel of the Earth.”

God, he says, declares at each step of creation that it is “good,” a starting point for revering the Earth as holy.

Hayden says his interaction with students at Santa Monica City College and Cal State Sacramento helped him hone his analysis and arguments.

As a politician, he sees power in the greening of religion, viewing it as providing an enduring rationale for walking gently on the Earth.

“I don’t think you get it from science. I don’t think you get it from politics. I don’t think you get it from business. I can’t see businessmen waking up in the morning and saying, ‘I’m enthusiastic about working 18 hours a day to green my company so that I can make profit off conservation.’ They might. But what’s at work there is a greed, and if things don’t go well you burn out and you say, ‘the hell with it--I’ll lapse into my old ways,’ [without] the framework of religion or spirituality to try to keep you moving down a positive path.”

In short, there’s nothing like the fervor of a convert.

But is Hayden on a search for meaning or a means to an end? Does he view religion as another tool to be used in the protection of the environment, like the federal Clean Air Act? Others before him, like author and naturalist E.O. Wilson, have said that one does not have to believe in myth to appreciate its power to persuade.

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‘No, you can’t think of it in terms like what conception of God would be useful to us,” Hayden answered. “There’s either a God or there’s not. My personal view is that there is one God, or what the native people would call one sacred creator.”

A Catholic, Hayden says he’s a sometime churchgoer who, not surprisingly, has difficulty with the Vatican’s orthodoxy on such matters as ordination of women.

How Scripture is interpreted, he says, can have profound consequences on public policy. He recalls Interior Secretary James Watt’s 1981 explanation for opening up public lands to development and mining.

“My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures, which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns,” Watt testified before the House Interior Committee. “I don’t know how many generations we can count on before the Lord returns,” Watt said.

When his remarks generated criticism, Watt later elaborated, “We don’t know when He is coming, so we have a stewardship responsibility . . . to see that people are provided for until He does come and a new order is put in place. So we cannot waste or despoil that which we’ve been given in the Earth because we don’t know our tenure here.”

Nevertheless, Hayden still views Watt as “the perfect example of using the Second Coming as some kind of twisted rationale for destroying the Earth as we know it, or helping ourselves to its benefits.”

Hayden rejects the accusation that environmentalists, in wanting to revere all the Earth, are akin to pagans who hold polytheistic beliefs.

“The paganism smear has almost replaced the communism smear. They consider this total heresy,” Hayden said.

It isn’t just the Religious Right that needs to look anew at Scriptures, he says. His book rebukes mainstream Judaism, Christianity and Islam for standing on the sidelines too long on environmental issues.

Hayden is encouraged by growing recognition within the Roman Catholic Church, old-line Protestants and evangelicals in America of the importance of protecting the environment. Thinking in terms of “stewardship,” he said, is far better than the “Lord of the universe” mentality.

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What is needed, Hayden argues, is a third alternative, something he calls “kinship” with the universe--a recognition that humans are made of the same stuff as the rest of creation, and that all created things are interdependent.

“Even if you believe in one God or one sacred being it’s evident that that being manifests itself in multiple forms, multiple persons. Trees are not the same as mountains. Every single person that ever was and ever will be is unique and is different. But they’re all part of a whole. . . . There’s one creation with an infinite variety of forms and no two things are the same. Every single thing manifests itself uniquely and yet at the same time everything is related to everything else. It’s amazing!”