The Violence of Climate Change

5 Dorothy Day and the Faith to Love

To work to increase our love for God and for our fellow man (and the two must go hand in hand), this is a lifetime job. We are never going to be finished. Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up.

—Dorothy Day, By Little and By Little

During the Great Depression, workers across the United States went on strike to demand fairer pay and shorter workweeks. Owners changed laws to make picketing illegal, and so strikers and their supporters were frequently taken to jail. One Saturday in 1935, Dorothy Day and a group of students from a local Catholic school protested in solidarity with striking workers at Ohrbach’s department store in New York City. Day and her companions waved signs that quoted Pope Pius XI’s emphatic statements in support of organized labor and workers’ rights. In her autobiography, Day describes the impact of this protest: “The police around Union Square were taken aback and did not know what to do. It was as though they were arresting the Holy Father himself, one of them said, were they to load our pickets and their signs into their patrol wagons.”1

This story is typical of Day’s public life and activism; she took a strong stand in a political cause but used her deep religious faith to disrupt the expectations of those on both sides of the protest. In the 1930s, most people assumed that strikers were atheist radicals, and most police assumed that they were doing their religious as well as their civic duty by arresting such disruptive rabble. But a proudly Catholic protester disarmed these assumptions.

Reflecting on how she sustained her political and religious commitments in tough times, Day credited her love for God and other people, insisting that “love and ever more love is the only solution” to every problem. For her, love was the common ground between radical politics and religious faith. She devoted her life to serving the poor, and her faith sustained her in the work that she knew was “never going to be finished”—the work of resisting violence in all its forms.2

The wicked problem of climate change raises deep questions about politics, economics, culture, technology, and lifestyle. Day offers a reminder that these questions also all have religious dimensions. Thus, religious people should resist climate change, and the movement for climate justice should identify the sources of faith and love that can sustain it. Using Day as a witness sheds light on the relationship between faith and activism and on how to help today’s diverse communities concerned about climate change reflect on what role religious traditions can play in a multicultural twenty-first-century movement.

Day also reveals a very personal reason to think about religious faith. Resisting climate change is a difficult, lifetime job, so contemporary activists need to ask what can empower them to continue the struggle. Some might be inspired to share the Christian ideal of love that strengthened Dorothy Day; others might seek a different motivation. Her witness suggests that all of us who are concerned about climate change need a faith in something.

HOSPITALITY AND PROTEST

Dorothy Day was a writer. She was the daughter of a journalist, and she wrote for newspapers her entire adult life. She saw journalism as a form of activism, and she hoped to inspire her readers to change their lives and their societies once they understood the realities of poverty and injustice that she wrote about.

For the first ten years of her professional life, Day wrote articles for a series of socialist publications, advocating and supporting a new economic system during this time before the Cold War, when socialism was a common commitment for progressive political activists. At the age of eighteen years, Day moved to New York City and applied to the daily socialist newspaper The Call. The editor was impressed by her application but could not afford to pay her a full salary. She offered to start for just $5 a week, the wage earned by many factory workers. The editor agreed, and some of her first published work was about the experience of living at a poverty wage.3 Never concerned with material wealth, Day felt driven to understand and to help readers to understand the plight of workers.

Two years later, in 1917, Day extended her activism beyond writing into civil disobedience. She joined a suffragist protest in Washington, picketing the White House to insist that women deserved the right to vote. She and her compatriots were trespassing illegally, and so they were arrested and sentenced to thirty days in prison. Twenty years later, she wrote about the dehumanization of imprisonment, but she also realized that she had the comfort of knowing that she would be there only a month and was supported by a movement outside the prison. She felt deep sympathy for the women she met who faced far longer sentences with far less external support and who in many cases had been imprisoned for crimes committed to meet the basic needs of their families. In prison, she learned to care less about her own rights and more about “those thousands of prisoners throughout the country, victims of a materialistic system.”4

In her prison cell, Day found comfort in reading the Bible. This continued an important but inconsistent thread of her young life, which was characterized by bouts of passionate faith, including a baptism that confused her nonreligious parents and siblings. However, as a teenager she had become steadily more interested in radical politics and less interested in religion. The socialist circles in which she traveled tended to be atheistic, dismissing religion as a comfort necessary only for the weak or a tool of oppression supporting unjust structures.

After leaving prison, Day continued to write for socialist papers and sustained her activism while she trained as a nurse, was briefly married, lived in Europe, and wrote a novel. With the proceeds from that book, she bought a small house on Staten Island in 1925. There she lived with Forster Batterham, a naturalist whom she called her “common-law husband” and with whom she had a baby, Tamar Teresa, in 1926. Day’s daughter led her back to organized religion—soon after giving birth, Day approached a nun about baptizing her daughter; and by the end of 1927, she herself had also become a Catholic.

Batterham was an atheist who believed that rational science should replace religion. He could never accept Day’s faith, and they separated soon after her conversion. For Day, this was somewhat ironic, because it was life with him and their daughter that had led her to believe in God. She writes: “It was human love that helped me to understand divine love. Human love at its best, unselfish, glowing, illuminating our days, gives us a glimpse of the love of God for man.” Having felt the affection of a partner in life opened Day to greater love. Having given birth, she was “awed by the stupendous fact of creation” and filled with love. She became convinced that love is the most powerful force in the universe, and she found resonance for this idea in the Catholic tradition, to which she then devoted herself.5

However, it was also important for Day to insist that her conversion to Catholicism did not mean a conversion away from radical social action or advocacy for the poor. Indeed, her first autobiography, From Union Square to Rome, is addressed to her brother, who shared her socialist politics but could not understand her religion. She insisted that her faith was an even fuller expression of concern for the poor than her past socialism. Although socialists aspire to help the poor by creating an international movement, she argues, her Church was already an international movement made up of poor people, motivated by love: “The Catholic Church is the church of the poor, no matter what you say about the wealth of her priests and bishops. [The people in church] were of all nationalities, of all classes, but most of all they were poor.”6

In 1933 Day met a fellow Catholic radical, Peter Maurin, who helped to set the course for the rest of her life. Maurin was a French peasant and a self-educated theologian who believed that Christians are called to radical witness and hard work on behalf of the poor.7 He inspired Day to create a newspaper, The Catholic Worker, in order to share their ideas. The paper developed a readership, and it soon became a weekly, with a circulation of more than 100,000 copies. It continues to be published from New York City to this day.

One of Maurin’s ideas was that the Church should run “houses of hospitality” for all who needed food and shelter, and he wrote about this in the newspaper. Hungry and homeless readers began to come to the paper’s office to ask where they could find such hospitality. For a few months, Day told them she could not help, that she was focused on writing and publishing; but this changed in December 1933. After hearing the story of a homeless woman who, overcome by hopelessness, committed suicide, Day immediately rented a second apartment and opened it to anyone in need.8 This house of hospitality soon expanded to increasingly larger properties in New York City, helping more and more people.

This combination of journalistic advocacy for the poor and open hospitality to meet their immediate needs became a movement, the Catholic Worker, which took its name from that of Day’s newspaper. This movement spread as the paper’s readers started new houses of hospitality in other cities. By the 1940s there were thirty Catholic Worker houses in the United States and one in England.9

One of the most radical things about Day and Maurin’s movement was its financing. The newspaper’s first issue was funded by a few donations, was published from Day’s kitchen table, and sold for a penny a copy. She later explained that she needed to charge for the paper in order to get a second-class mailing permit, but she “put the least possible price on it to indicate what [I] feel about money.” After writing the second issue, she sold her typewriter to pay for its printing.10 Slowly, donations came in, but she never changed the price and never sought profits. Day, and those who wrote and edited with her, became “workers” motivated by faith and love rather than money: “We choose to spend the salaries we might be making if we were business-like on feeding and sharing our home with the homeless and hungry. . . . We are willing to clothe ourselves in the donations of clothes that come in, we are willing to eat the plainest and most meager of meals and to endure cold rooms and lack of privacy.”11

Day’s life was shaped by the fact that Jesus Christ—whom she believed to be God incarnate and the founder of her Church—lived in poverty. This pivotal figure in the history of the world, the key signal of God’s love for the world, was born into a family of laborers who could not find shelter on the night of his birth. For Day, this signaled that Jesus’s followers should refuse the world’s standards of success: “Let us rejoice in poverty, because Christ was poor. Let us love to live with the poor because they are specially loved by Christ. Even the lowest, most depraved, we must see Christ in them, and love them to folly. When we suffer from dirt, lack of privacy, heat and cold, coarse food, let us rejoice.”12 Day viewed the depravation of involuntary poverty as an inevitable consequence of an economic system based upon greed, and she resisted it by embracing the virtue of voluntary poverty. She dismissed worldly standards of success in order to live with and understand those victimized by the world.

Day’s Catholic Worker movement became widely known not only for voluntary poverty, hospitality for all in need, and journalism on behalf of justice but also for nonviolence. In 1938 Day’s column in The Catholic Worker clarified the movement’s stance: “We are opposed to the use of force as a means of settling personal, national, or international disputes.” She argued that there is no way to use violence without becoming destructively violent oneself: “As long as men trust to the use of force—only a superior, a more savage and brutal force will overcome the enemy.”13 This was always a controversial stance, and it became far more controversial during World War II, when most everyone in the United States—including most of Day’s fellow radicals and fellow Catholics—supported military action. In 1942 she wrote, “We are still pacifists. Our motto is still the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers.”14 This position shrank the movement, as many Catholic Worker houses closed or changed their names so as not to affiliate with pacifism. The paper’s circulation dropped from a prewar peak of 190,000 to 50,000.15

After the war ended, the Catholic Workers continued their pacifism, and one of the movement’s most sustained actions was a refusal to participate in Cold War–era air-raid drills. During such drills, the law required everyone in New York City to stay indoors, taking shelter to practice for a nuclear attack. Day and other workers refused and instead remained in public squares picketing and insisting that the only true defense against a nuclear attack is to prevent it by reducing the violence in the world. After being imprisoned for this civil disobedience, she wrote in 1957 that she could not “consent to the militarization of our country without protest. Since we believe that the air-raid drills are part of a calculated plan to inspire fear of the enemy instead of the love which Jesus Christ told us we should feel toward him, we must protest these drills.”16

Day continued protesting for her whole life. She was sentenced to prison at least a dozen times, but considered this a worthy sacrifice for her witness against violence, on behalf of the poor.17 She traveled around the country and spoke widely about the Christian call to actively love the poor. She became an inspiration for hundreds of Catholic Worker houses and thousands of people who devoted months, years, and entire lifetimes to the movement. She also remained steadfastly Catholic her entire life, attending mass virtually every day. She died in 1980, and her supporters quickly began efforts to have her declared an official Catholic saint, a campaign boosted in 2015 when Pope Francis mentioned her as a “great American” in his speech to Congress.18

“LOVE AND EVER MORE LOVE”

In many ways, Day is more like John Woolman than Jane Addams. Although Addams was pragmatically willing to work with political systems for incremental change, Day and Woolman separated themselves from the violence of the world. Echoing Woolman’s desire to be “a fool for Christ,” Day wrote that Christian activists must “love to the point of folly, and we are indeed fools, as Our Lord Himself was who died for such a one as this.”19

Loving others “to the point of folly” kept Day writing about the plight of the poor, feeding the hungry, and protesting against war and oppression for her entire life. Against proposals for gradual reforms and compromises, she insisted that the only proper response to the profound structural violence of the world was “love and ever more love.” However, she was not naive. She knew that human beings are hard to love and that love requires sacrifices, and she was daily reminded of these facts by the desperation of her poor and suffering neighbors. She nevertheless committed to love them and everyone else. She was fond of quoting a line from The Brothers Karamazov: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. . . . Active love is labor and fortitude.”20

For Day, the labor and fortitude of love was an act of faith. She believed that “all other loves must be a sample of the love of God.” Thus, she sought to treat every person as she would treat Jesus because “God sees Christ, His Son, in us and loves us.”21 Religion and the sacrificial devotion of Jesus’s love are not polite topics of conversation in most circles, but Day talked about them constantly and told one biographer, “If I have accomplished anything in my life, it is because I wasn’t embarrassed to talk about God.”22

Talking about God and God’s love helped Day to avoid the sin of pride, to move outside her own desires and opinions and to empathize with others. Her nascent faith helped her to focus on others rather than herself when she was first sent to jail. Her maturing faith helped her to open her apartment to the homeless and to devote her life to unpaid work. She frequently missed the small pleasures that poverty made inaccessible—she listed “cigarettes, liquor, coffee, candy, sodas, soft drinks”—but noted that she could overcome these “unnecessary desires” when God helped her to see that her small sacrifices brought her closer to those who live in true need and desperation.23

Day’s faith helped her to change her life, responding to the structural violence of poverty by living among the poor. Just as she was energized by her ability to talk about God, she also insisted upon talking about the poor: “We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.” She believed that true social change could only come from those willing to sacrifice for others, and so she lived with and wrote about the hardships and institutional burdens placed upon the poor.24

Ever a radical, Day insisted throughout her life that the structural violence of poverty and inequality was so severe that it called for some kind of revolution. However, after her conversion to Catholicism, she distinguished her goal from communist revolution because she believed that no violent revolution could ever possibly heal the violence of injustice and poverty. She sought, instead, “a Christian revolution of our own, without the use of force,” which would truly transform the world and help people to better love one another.25

In an untransformed world, this commitment to Christian love regularly seemed foolish and impractical. The Catholic Worker house in New York City was constantly short of funds to publish its newspaper and feed the poor, but Day was never practical about money. A frequently recounted story tells of a supporter donating an expensive diamond ring to the movement. Day immediately re-gifted the ring to a homeless woman who had come to the house for a meal. When asked why she had not instead sold it to buy food or basic necessities, she responded, “Do you suppose God made diamonds only for the rich?”26 She seemed impractical again when the City of New York bought property from the Catholic Worker and, in addition to the price of the land, offered $3,500 in accrued interest on the sale. Day sent the $3,500 back with a letter explaining that Catholic Workers did not believe in collecting interest on money but that, instead, “we are commanded to lend gratuitously, to give freely.”27 A final impracticality was Day’s refusal to participate in political as well as economic life; in 1967, she wrote that despite her arrest fifty years earlier for the cause of women’s suffrage, she was a committed anarchist who had never voted.28

To those who criticized her impracticalities, Day clarified: “We are not here to prove that our technique of working with the poor is useful, or to prove that we are able to be effective humanitarians.” She dismissed “usefulness” and “effectiveness” as ideals of industrial society, which treated people as statistics rather than beloved children of God. She measured success based on her faithfulness to her ideals rather than any external measure of success: “We feed the hungry, yes; we try to shelter the homeless and give them clothes, if we have them, but there is a strong faith at work; we pray. If an outsider who comes to visit doesn’t pay attention to our praying and what that means, then he’ll miss the whole point of things.”29

Day did not feel called to solve the problem of poverty but instead to side with God against it by helping her poor neighbors in the most principled way possible. Although her work fell short of her ideals in many ways—Catholic Worker houses regularly closed, supporters regularly left in anger, and hungry people sometimes went unfed—her beliefs sustained her: “We admit that we may seem to fail, but we recall to our readers the ostensible failure of Christ when he died on the Cross, forsaken by all His followers. Out of this failure a new world sprang up.”30

Called to love God and her neighbors with every action, Day also believed that she should not judge others, and her profound witness always aimed at critiquing structural violence rather than the people caught within it. She knew that her way of life was not for everyone, and that her “foolish” resistance to the world benefited from the donations and advocacy of others who participated more fully in economic and political systems. She also knew that the Catholic Worker was never fully separated from the limitations of these systems, as she demonstrated when she returned the interest money to the City of New York. She assured city officials that “we are not judging individuals, but are trying to make a judgment on the system under which we live and with which we admit that we ourselves compromise daily in many small ways, but which we try and wish to withdraw from as much as possible.”31

Day’s allegiance was not to any political system and not, ultimately, to any institution. Instead, she sought to love God and to love the people God had made. She insisted that God created everyone with love and for love, and so she strived to love everyone. This made her confident that God’s love can be expressed outside of any church or faith tradition. In the 1950s, when much of the nation was afraid of communism and avowed communists were being accused of treason, she stood up for them, and she used her religious authority to insist that these atheists deserved respect. She thanked secular radicals who “helped me find God in His poor, in His abandoned ones, as I had not found Him in the Christian churches.”32 Late in her life, she began to question whether it was even useful to distinguish between religious and secular activists: “The longer I live, the more I see God at work in people who don’t have the slightest interest in religion and never read the Bible and wouldn’t know what to do if they were persuaded to go inside a church.”33

RELIGION, FAITH, AND CLIMATE CHANGE

The hard-working love of humanity that Dorothy Day advocated has much to teach the movement seeking climate justice. But it is worth considering whether the religious language Day used to advocate this love—indeed, whether any religious language—is appropriate to the challenge of climate change and worth the baggage it brings along. Should people who want to resist climate change in the twenty-first-century talk about God?

Climate Change as a Religious and an Economic Problem

Many people who are deeply concerned with climate justice are motivated by religious faith, and they argue that this faith is in fact a vital resource for the movement. One argument along these lines is that only religion can stand in opposition to the destructive economic systems that threaten the climate and human communities.34

For example, consider the Buddhist philosopher and activist David Loy, who follows in Dorothy Day’s footsteps by insisting on religious resistance to unchecked free markets. Loy argues that climate change is caused by a false faith in capitalism. The global market has come to fulfill a religious function for most of the world’s people; thus, its goal—wealth—has become the dominant form of salvation embraced by the world community, and its religious practice—consumerism—is believed to provide salvation from suffering and scarcity. Capitalism, as Loy interprets it, teaches that all problems can be solved by “its god, the Market,” and fine points of doctrine can be explained by its theology, “the discipline of economics.” Indeed, Loy calls free market capitalism “the most successful religion of all time” because of its global influence and unquestioned role in the lives of people in industrial and developed countries.35

The problem, for Loy, is that capitalism is a “false” religion, encouraging its followers to treat both people and the planet as commodities to be quantified and consumed rather than beings to be respected or loved. He believes that “the degradation of the earth and the degradation of our own societies must both be seen as results of the same market process of commodification” nurtured by the religion of capitalism.36 Capitalism fails as a religion, according to Loy, because it is based upon a delusion—that infinite economic growth is possible in a finite world—and a moral mistake—telling people that they should indulge their greed.

The answer to such false religion is truth, and so Loy calls “all genuine religions” to distance themselves from market systems and market beliefs. He seeks a coalition of diverse faiths united to defend the natural world and the poor. In his view, true religions teach generosity and emphasize the interconnectedness of all things, and these ideas will nurture healthier practices and more just and sustainable ways of life. He demonstrates that his own religious tradition, Buddhism, has tools to teach this healthier path and to resist market capitalism, and he is confident that other traditions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism can do the same.37

Loy is less likely to talk about “God” than Day, focusing more on the path and practices of Buddhism, a tradition that is often nontheistict. But this example demonstrates that activists like him are following in Day’s footsteps from other religious traditions. Like Day, Loy views capitalism with deep suspicion and seeks to replace it with the teachings of an ancient religious tradition. His call for people to separate themselves from market logic recalls Day’s refusal to focus on profits or follow pragmatic economic principles while running the Catholic Worker. Perhaps the best way to resist the changing climate is to resist the market with the resources of traditional religion.

Toward a New, Environmentalist Religion

An alternative view suggests that traditional religions do not have sufficient resources to combat climate change and that in fact those religions themselves must be overthrown if human beings are ever to live harmoniously with the surrounding world. One important contemporary voice in this discussion is that of Bron Taylor, a scholar of religion who expresses concern that the environmentalism of traditional religions is, at best, “indirect,” and is unlikely to motivate radical changes for the sake of the planet. Taylor is more interested in newer forms of religion that are emerging among radical environmentalists and outdoor enthusiasts, people who find spiritual connections separate from traditional religion. Their religious impulses come “from a deep sense of belonging to and connectedness in nature,” in which “nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care.” He calls this more direct spiritual relationship with the natural world “dark green religion.”38

Taylor’s primary scholarly interest in dark green religion is descriptive—he has observed a new religious movement with global reach and seeks to understand it. However, in “A Personal Coda” to his book on the subject, he explains the special concern that motivates his studies. He believes the most influential religions in the world are simply too outdated and “light green” to fully respond to contemporary challenges. They are founded in “ancient dreams, . . . for which there is no evidence and many reasons to doubt.” So Taylor turns his focus to new religions, which are founded in “the real world” of “an evolutionary-ecological worldview.”39 Presumably, then, he would see limits in Loy’s environmentalism insofar as it remains attached to the traditions of Buddhism and a cosmology that includes ancient elements.

Interestingly, Taylor’s focus on adaptability and worldliness in environmental religion leads him to be far less dismissive of market capitalism than Loy. Taylor notes “tantalizing possibilities” of corporations contributing to dark green religion, motivated by changing ideas among their customers to articulate environmental concerns and environmentally sensitive worldviews. As an example, he cites the Japanese electronics company Sanyo, which has a corporate philosophy that “sees the Earth as a single living organism” and therefore seeks “to create the products needed to help us live in harmony with the planet.”40 Taylor also identifies important dark green impulses in the cultural productions of the Walt Disney Corporation, which produces films like The Lion King and Pocahontas that nurture “reverence for nature and feelings of kinship with the natural world.”41

Loy appeals to the traditional religions that he calls “genuine” because he seeks deep traditions that can compete with the increasingly dominant forces of capitalism. By contrast, Taylor is open to the environmentalist impulses of corporations and the market because he is deeply worried about traditions that cannot adapt to contemporary problems and new understandings of reality. For Taylor, genuine resistance to the violence of climate change can and should be fueled by religion, but this religion should be fully devoted to the natural world rather than to outdated ideas and traditions. He might see much to admire in Dorothy Day’s commitment to social activism; but in the struggle against climate change, it seems, he would advise less explicit or devout attachment to ancient faiths.

Rationality Over Religion

Still a third approach separates religion entirely from climate justice. If religions have contributed to mistaken ways of thinking in the past and have a tense relationship with science in the present, then perhaps there is no reason to have religion in the discussion at all.

One version of this argument comes from the oceanographer and former White House science adviser Jeff Schweitzer. His premise is stated straightforwardly in a blog post: “We will not effectively address the issue of global warming if we appeal to religion.” Schweitzer particularly emphasizes conflicts between religion and science, and he worries that any attempt to include religious people in climate activism would compromise its scientific basis.42 Religion, as he understands it, is about unverified faith rather than concrete evidence, and a choice must be made between the two. Climate change, he insists, calls for “the most cogent, fact-based, scientifically sound arguments possible given the evidence in hand. Any deviation from that course is irresponsible.”43

For Schweitzer, as for many other environmentalists, religion is unnecessary at best and destructive at worst. Like Bron Taylor, he sees traditional religions as too archaic and otherworldly to respond to the contemporary challenge of climate change. Moving even further than Taylor, however, Schweitzer argues that religion in general is backward and, thus, that any spiritual or religious response to environmental problems would be counterproductive. For him, “religious morality has failed.” Key evidence for this is climate change itself; existing moral codes are indicted by the facts that people denied the evidence of changing climate and then failed to take meaningful action when they began to understand the problem. Human beings can and should develop a new moral system, “divorced from god and religion,” based upon science and reason.44 The answers to humanity’s biggest moral problems will come from those who think rationally rather than spiritually.

While refusing the label of “atheist,” Schweitzer emphasizes that he is constructing his life and developing moral principles based on reason: “I am a rationalist, and if others wish to believe in an invisible man in the sky with magical powers, we can label them arationalists.”45 For Schweitzer, any productive and organized action on climate change will need to be based on reason rather than religion, bringing people from different cultures together and overcoming simplistic prejudices to respond constructively to the perils faced by the global community in a time of atmospheric change.

Loy’s appeal to “genuine religion,” Taylor’s appeal to “dark green religion,” and Schweitzer’s appeal to “rationalism” offer three contrasting positions, and choices must be made between them. Does religion have a role in resisting climate change? And if it does, what kind of role and what kind of religion?

THE FAITH TO RESIST CLIMATE CHANGE

This book is not the place to objectively consider such questions. Readers already know I assume that religion should be part of the movement for climate justice, and my appeal to explicitly Christian witnesses suggests my appreciation for traditional religions. So it should come as no surprise that here I draw on Dorothy Day’s witness to argue that religion is an essential part of resisting the structural violence of climate change.

However, this does not mean a simplistic support for all religion, nor an utter dismissal of new religious developments and rationalist approaches to climate activism. Instead, I seek a movement for climate justice that could welcome all, whatever their approach to religion might be. Day’s legacy must be translated for a movement that includes not only religious activists like David Loy but also more skeptical thinkers like Bron Taylor and Jeff Schweitzer.

Day had the zeal of a convert from the day her daughter was baptized until her death fifty-three years later. However, despite her deep personal devotion, she spent little time trying to convince others to believe in God or become Catholic. Instead, she urged people to love one another enough to ensure that their neighbors had enough to eat, warm clothes, and a place to sleep. Her sternest critiques were not directed at nonbelievers but at people who claimed to be Christian but did not feed the hungry or care for the poor. As she wrote, “When we meet people who deny Christ in His poor, we feel, ‘Here are atheists indeed.’ ”46

The most important lesson to draw from Day, then, is not that resistance to climate change will require affiliation with any particular religious community but rather that climate activists must have enough faith in something to take the problem of climate change seriously, to oppose the forces causing the problem, and to truly love their suffering neighbors. Some activists may well deny the existence of God, but what truly matters is that they never deny the suffering of others. That would make them what Day called “atheists indeed.”

An Earthly Faith

Bron Taylor is wary of traditional religions because of their tendency to be otherworldly, to focus on a paradise imagined centuries ago—“ancient dreams”—rather than the real world, here and now. Jeff Schweitzer is critical of religion because he sees faith too often used as an excuse to avoid the problem of climate change or deny scientific truths. These are real challenges, and any serious climate activists should agree with Taylor and Schweitzer that religiously informed responses to climate change can be dangerous.

For example, during a 2010 congressional hearing, Illinois representative John Shimkus argued against regulating carbon emissions by appealling to his faith. He said, “I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God, . . . and I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood.”47 In the book of Genesis, after Noah’s ark lands on dry ground, God makes a covenant never again to flood the Earth. Shimkus interprets this to mean that God would never again allow humanity to be harmed by the weather. Trusting in a text written more than two thousand years ago to interpret the twenty-first-century climate system, Shimkus believes that the climate will not change on God’s Earth. So he dismisses reports of sea level rise as necessarily inaccurate, and he has worked against any activist response to climate change.

If this were indicative of how all people of faith thought about climate change, it would be a profound indictment of religion. But it is not. Many Christians and people of other faiths take scientific evidence very seriously, and thus they are prepared to view scripture and faith traditions in the context of the best available evidence about what is happening to the world. Human activity is changing the atmosphere, and sea levels are rising. These are scientific facts, and religion need not dispute them.

Dorothy Day had very little to say about the relationship between faith and science, but her witness does offer some insight into how Shimkus’s faith could be seen as bad theology. His thinking is not grounded in the realities of God’s world, not responsive to current events, and not invested in earthly truths. Day believed in an almighty God in heaven, but this belief drove her to pay more attention to the world around her, not less. She profoundly critiqued believers who responded to “spiritual hunger” with prayers and good intentions but ignored material hunger, poverty, and the social forces and structures that made them worse.

In 1940 Day articulated the core vision of the Catholic Worker movement this way: “We are working for ‘a new heaven and a new earth, wherein justice dwelleth.’ We are trying to say with action, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ ” (emphasis in the original).48 The way to follow the Christian God is “to prostrate oneself upon the earth, that noble earth, that beloved soil which Christ made sacred and significant for us by His Blood with which He watered it.”49 Rationalists and advocates of new religions could certainly question Day’s faith that the blood of Christ makes the Earth sacred. But one must admit that, at least in her case, this faith led to further engagement in earthly realities rather than a departure from them.50

Day’s conversion to Christianity occurred after she moved to the seaside and lived with a naturalist who taught her about the intricacies of aquatic ecosystems. Later in life, she told a biographer how important it was to occasionally return to the ocean, because it helped her to quiet her mind: “When I look at the sea I know that we are meant to stop our intellect dead in its tracks every once in a while or we’ll torture ourselves to death with it. Jesus didn’t carry big reference books with Him, and He wasn’t a college graduate. He spoke to those poor fishermen and to the sick and the poor and the people who were ostracized and thrown in jail.”51 Day’s faith, which was fundamental to her life, was based in the real world of the majestic ocean and the concrete realities of poor people. It is hard to imagine that her kind of faith would turn attention away from rising seas, particularly as those seas began to harm human beings.

Faith to Face Suffering

For Dorothy Day, the Bible provided little insight into atmospheric conditions, but it offered profound instruction on how to treat others. A particularly formative biblical text for her was a discussion of judgment in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus describes God separating the blessed from the wicked. The blessed are told, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” The wicked, conversely, are those who did not feed, welcome, or visit Jesus. In the Gospel, both groups ask when this happened, unaware that they had fed or failed to feed Jesus. He answers, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”52 Day believed in this story at a deep level—she believed that whenever she met a person in need, she was meeting Jesus Christ.

Faith, for Day, required her to pay attention to other human beings and their struggles. She wrote: “It has often seemed to me that most people instinctively protect themselves from being touched too closely by the suffering of others. They turn from it, and they make this a habit.”53 She was concerned about how this “habit” of ignoring suffering allowed so many people in New York City and throughout the world to go about their days not doing anything for—indeed, not even noticing—the desperately hungry poor around them. This problem is still very real, and contemporary Catholic Workers continue to help others see and respond to the suffering of the poor.

Anyone who denies the reality of climate change is refusing to pay attention to human suffering. To insist that the oceans are not rising allows one to ignore the sufferings of the people in Bangladesh and Kivalina who are threatened by encroaching waters. To deny that human activity could possibly change the climate is to ignore the suffering of drought-stricken communities in the Sudan, future generations impoverished by a more difficult world, and other species dwindling as ecosystems change. Day’s witness suggests that perhaps John Shimkus is not only appealing to the story of Noah to make an argument about sea levels but also is ignoring the deeply troubling realities of this violent world.

Day believed in a God of peace, an almighty being who created the Earth with love and treated it with mercy. But she held this belief in tension with a full awareness that the world is full of violence and pain, that God’s creatures suffer and die with no apparent justice. Her faith did not protect her from these facts or explain them away but rather called her to wrestle with a world that would crucify her God and a faith that love could ultimately conquer such evil. Thus, her faith gave her reasons to face the truth as she resisted the violence of her world. And her belief in God helped her to try to bring comfort to those who suffered.

In the years leading up to World War II, when many were denying the realities of anti-Semitism and racism across the world, Day’s faith helped her to see these realities of structural violence. She criticized “Christians who affront Christ in the Negro, in the poor Mexican, the Italian, yes and the Jew.” God is present in all people, she insisted, and so Christians are called to extend “love and compassion” to everyone, especially those who are marginalized or oppressed.54 True faith is about noticing the suffering of others and responding to it. I extend this lesson to suggest that, in our own time, Christians who deny or ignore climate change are rejecting “the least of these” and are therefore rejecting Jesus. Christians should see Christ in the poor Bangladeshi driven from her home by flooding, the poor Sudanese refugee who can no longer grow food on his ancestral land, the people of Kivalina whose homes are disappearing, and even polar bears who are losing their habitat and struggling to feed their cubs.

Most privileged people have learned to ignore the suffering of others. We develop deeply ingrained habits that help us block out the pain of those who are not like ourselves. A faith like Day’s is one way to overcome these bad habits. Christians should learn to see Jesus, the incarnation of God and the center of all holiness, in every person who suffers from the violence of climate change. Yet this is, of course, not the only religious tool that helps one to see suffering—Buddhist meditations on universal compassion, Islamic laws dictating care for widows and orphans, and Jewish commandments to repair the world similarly seek to move people away from bad habits. This is the power of traditional religions’ “ancient dreams.” They offer a longstanding commitment to the care of others. One value of religion is that it helps to shape the commitments and habits through which people can learn to see the sufferings of their neighbors, both nearby and around the world.

Of course, people need not be religious to take suffering seriously. As Day’s deep respect for her atheist friends demonstrates, many who practice no religion and hold no traditional faith do incredible work on behalf of others. Some climate activists are motivated by faith in the human spirit or in the interconnected systems of nature. Such faith, too, can be a powerful motivation. Day’s witness need not be understood to require any particular faith tradition or even traditional faith. Instead, she suggests that one must have faith in something in order to do the hard work of resisting the violence of the world. A foundation in some deep value, a love for something, is vital for developing the courage needed to face the world’s suffering and to maintain hope despite the depths of this suffering.

Faith to Protest

Dorothy Day’s witness is evidence of David Loy’s argument that “genuine religion” can offer meaningful resistance to structural violence. More specifically, Day, like Loy, believed that religious traditions should stand up against the dominant economic structures and assumptions of our time. Her commitment to voluntary poverty was not just about self-discipline but also about resisting the systems that force others into poverty. For example, selling her newspaper for a penny a copy was a way to reject the profit motive that she saw warping the souls of so many middle- and upper-class people around her. Thus, her faith can help contemporary climate justice activists reflect not only on the place of religion in the movement but also on the place of existing economic systems.

Bron Taylor’s interest in dark green religion opens him to the idea that corporations like Sanyo and Disney can be a constructive part of environmental solutions. A profit motive might encourage these corporations to produce and market their products to people who have a spiritual relationship with nature. But, as Loy suggests, such efforts do not stop corporations from seeking quarterly profits, using up resources, and filling their customers with insatiable desires for ever more gadgets.55 This difference between Taylor and Loy suggests yet another question: Should the climate movement resist capitalism?

The Christian theologian Sallie McFague draws upon the witness of Dorothy Day to say that it should. McFague argues that religion calls for resistance to the dominant economic system in the world today: “The current model of market capitalism has been tried and failed. It is failing in a spectacular fashion,” as demonstrated by economic and atmospheric turmoil. The best way to resist is to forgo the trappings of wealth and comfort, to follow Day’s example and embrace voluntary poverty. This choice “will cause us to use all our considerable assets, at personal, professional, and public levels, to seriously reduce energy use and bring about a new way of being in the world, a way that moves . . . to a wide-open, inclusive view of who we are, a view that has no limits.”56 The structural violence of climate change was caused by well-off people inflicting their desires and wishes upon the world. The solution, McFague argues, is to resist this temptation, to humbly pull back and have less impact on the planet. Those who seek to resist climate change are called to resist the economic system by embracing voluntary poverty.

The logic of this argument is sound. If climate change is disproportionately caused by the rich rather than the poor, then one way to stop contributing to the problem is to stop being rich. This has the added virtue of putting one into community with the victims of climate change, of empathizing with them by sharing their reality.

In some ways, this harkens back to the purification taught by John Woolman. But Day lived in the twentieth century rather than the eighteenth and so was closer to today’s economic reality. She was also more interested in political and economic structures than Woolman and so was more strategic about how her voluntary poverty could develop into an organized movement resisting structural violence. A voluntary poverty inspired by Day would involve forming and joining intentional communities committed to resisting climate change, like the farms run by many contemporary Catholic Workers.57 It would involve using these communities to stage public resistance in ways that would attract notice.58

This is a big ask. To forgo all the trappings of financial success is profoundly countercultural. It means not only cutting out problematic behaviors like eating meat and flying on planes but also actually giving up the wealth that provides one the freedom to make such choices. Day’s witness asks concerned people to consider that we should not be ruled by what the culture around us considers normal or sensible.

To give up one’s wealth in the twenty-first century would be foolish and impractical. But, in Day’s view, that does not make it a bad idea. To give a diamond ring away to one woman when hundreds were hungry was not practical. To send the City of New York’s interest check back when bills were due was not practical. To fight for the right to vote and never use it was not practical. Yet Day sought to be a witness for an alternative way of living, and that meant rejecting practicality. If business as usual is fundamentally destructive, then one should at least consider a life that refuses to engage in business at all. Because Day believed herself to be utterly dependent upon God, she did not feel dependent on worldly approval or market systems. Her witness suggests that deep resistance to climate change will require a faith—whether Catholic or otherwise—that creates alternatives.

It is entirely possible that this particular form of resistance is a bad idea. Bron Taylor’s detection of genuinely dark green religion in profit-driven corporations suggests a reasonable hope that the market might create a sustainable future while people still profit from it. Many others have argued in far more detail that only capitalist markets can organize global efforts efficiently enough to solve the problem of climate change. These arguments should be taken seriously.59 But Day’s witness should also be taken seriously, and those who seek climate justice should consider the possibility that voluntary poverty is an important response to the violence of climate change.

Previous chapters have made it clear that I have not chosen voluntary poverty. I own a computer, fly on planes, live in a single-family house, and enjoy the trappings of middle-class life in the twenty-first-century United States. But Day’s voice helps me to question this lifestyle, asking how much the comforts of my life prevent me from fully resisting the economic structures that cause climate change. Living with these questions, learning from the witness of a radical who chose voluntary poverty, makes me more aware of my choices and more aware of others’ suffering. I hope that this makes me a little less likely to become one of the “atheists indeed” who does not resist the violence around me.

Dorothy Day knew that most people, even most who shared her faith, would not devote their lives to voluntary poverty. People who encountered her made many different choices about how to respond. Some committed the rest of their lives to the Catholic Worker, some spent a few months and then moved on, and some never lived with the poor but donated and supported those who did. Day had room for all these people in her movement. “Not all are called,” she wrote, “We do what we can.” She continued: “If you are a student, study, prepare, in order to give to others, and keep alive in yourself the vision of a new social order.”60 She insisted most strongly not on one way of life but on a vision of a life lived fully out of love for others. Those of us who seek climate justice should think about the ways of life that would express such a vision in the twenty-first century.

FAITH, LOVE, AND THE CLIMATE

As mentioned above, Dorothy Day told her biographer that the source of her accomplishments in life was the fact that she “wasn’t embarrassed to talk about God.” The argument of this chapter has been a bit broader than this, but it might be expressed by the idea that no one who seeks climate justice should be embarrassed to talk about faith. This faith may be in a God much like Day’s, or it may be in something else entirely. But we should be open to talking about the power of faith to inspire resistance, to help us and our neighbors to see the suffering of others, and to commit to life on Earth.

When Day showed up to picket Ohrbach’s department store, she was motivated by a deep faith that drove her to love the striking workers, the police arresting them, and the Church that she believed could unite them. Her faith drove her to love, and her love drove her to protest. Because this protest involved quoting the pope, it disrupted a simplistic narrative that many people had developed—that radicals were atheists calling for chaotic change, while the status quo reflected good and stable Christian values. As a resolute Christian who sided with radicals, Day forced people to question the relationship between their faith, their love, and the violence of the status quo.

A witness of resistance against the violence of climate change will only make sense if it is supported by a belief system. Those who resist the dominant social order with no coherent reasons are easily dismissed as crazy. Those who resist the dominant social order as an expression of a profound faith and a deep love are far harder to ignore. The tradition and calling that empowered Day was her deep Catholic faith. Others are empowered by other faiths—in Allah’s mercy, in Buddhist practice, in Krishna’s guidance, in Gaia’s interconnectedness, in the inventiveness of the human spirit, or in something else. But it takes faith in something to lovingly resist violence. Climate justice activists must be unembarrassed to act on such a faith.

NOTES

For biographies of Dorothy Day, see especially Miller, Dorothy Day; Coles, Dorothy Day; and Forest, All is Grace. For analyses of Day’s thought and importance, see especially O’Connor, Moral Vision of Dorothy Day; Thorn, Runkel, and Mountin, Day and the Catholic Worker Movement; and Klejment, “Spirituality of Day’s Pacifism.”

1.Day, Long Loneliness, 152.

2.Day, By Little and By Little, 87.

3.Forest, All Is Grace, 26–27.

4.Day, Union Square to Rome, 88.

5.Ibid., 155; also see 131.

6.Ibid., 17.

7.Throughout her life, Day referred to Peter Maurin as “the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement” and gave him a great deal of credit for both the newspaper and the houses of hospitality. There is no doubt that his ideas inspired her and many others. However, Day was far more responsible for the day-to-day organization, the leadership, and the realized ideals of the movement. As Mel Piehl puts it: “Dorothy Day herself promoted the fiction that the Catholic Worker was simply an attempt to realize Peter Maurin’s ‘Idea.’ But it was her common sense and awareness of American social and cultural realities that enabled her to distinguish between the kind of religious idealism that could inspire a viable social movement in this country and fantastic notions that would merely look ridiculous.” Piehl, Breaking Bread, 62.

8.Forest, All Is Grace, 124.

9.Miller, Dorothy Day, 284. A helpful oral history of the movement is given by Troester, Voices from the Catholic Worker. The number of Catholic Worker houses shrank during World War II, but it climbed again and, at the time of this writing, there are about two hundred. The anarchist character of the movement makes it difficult to keep such counts reliably, but a list of many current communities can be found at www.catholicworker.org/communities/volunteers.html.

10.Miller, Dorothy Day, 255; Roberts, Day and the Catholic Worker, 40.

11.Quoted by Forest, All Is Grace, 130. Robert Coles writes that this willingness of Catholic Workers to be poor for the sake of the poor is fundamental to the movement. Day and others who chose to be part of the movement become “workers” precisely so that they can develop solidarity with those who are struggling to stay alive, and so the volunteers “merge with those who, in the conventional sense, would be regarded as needing help.” Coles, Dorothy Day, 111.

12.Day, On Pilgrimage, 250.

13.Cornell, Ellsberg, and Forest, A Penny a Copy, 25.

14.Ibid., 38. For a compelling account of how Day’s pacifism synthesized her early radical beliefs with the Catholic tradition, see Klejment, “Spirituality of Day’s Pacifism.” For a discussion of the influence her ideas have had on the Roman Catholic peace tradition, see Klejment and Roberts, American Catholic Pacifism.

15.Miller, Dorothy Day, 377. For more on these changes, see Sicius, “Prophecy Faces Tradition,” 66–76.

16.Cornell, Ellsberg, and Forest, A Penny a Copy, 107.

17.O’Connor, Moral Vision of Dorothy Day, 68.

18.Pope Francis, “Visit to the Joint Session of the United States Congress,” September 24, 2015, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/september/
documents/papa-francesco_20150924_usa-us-congress.html.

19.Day, By Little and By Little, 99. For an insightful comparison of Day with Addams, see Hamington, “Two Leaders, Two Utopias.”

20.Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, book 2, chapter 4.

21.Day, On Pilgrimage, 192, 124.

22.Quoted by Riegle, Dorothy Day, 81.

23.Day, On Pilgrimage, 192.

24.Day, By Little and By Little, 242.

25.Day, Union Square to Rome, 150.

26.This story is frequently told, but Rosalie Riegle calls it “hard to pin down,” as she knows of no one who was present for the exchange. It is possible that the story is apocryphal, but many who worked with Day believe that it accurately reflects her character. Riegle, Dorothy Day, xv.

27.Day, By Little and By Little, 294.

28.“An anarchist then as I am now, I have never used the vote that the women won by their demonstrations before the White House during that period.” Day, On Pilgrimage: The Sixties, 304.

29.Coles, Dorothy Day, 97. For Day, this was consistent with a commitment to living with the poor because she believed “efficiency” and “organization” were often coded language used to blame and dismiss the poor for their personal failures rather than attending to institutional forces. When people called her movement impractical, she wrote, “What they are really criticizing is our poverty, the fact that we spend money for food instead of for paint and linoleum. We are crowded as the poor are, with people sleeping in every available corner. We have no separate room for the clothes that come in; they are packed in boxes around the dining-room and hung in one hall closet and in another closet off the dining-room. We are often dirty because so many thousands cross our thresholds. We are dirty ourselves sometimes because we have no hot water or bath, because we have not sufficient clothes for changes,—even because we are so busy with the poor and sick that it is hard to take time to journey to the public baths to wash.” Day, House of Hospitality, 130.

30.Ibid., 148.

31.Day, By Little and By Little, 295.

32.Ibid., 271.

33.Coles, Dorothy Day, 29.

34.See especially Gottlieb, Greener Faith; and Grim and Tucker, Ecology and Religion.

35.Loy, “Religion of the Market,” 275–76.

36.Ibid., 283.

37.Ibid., 289. See also Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma; and Stanley, Loy, and Gyurme, Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency.

38.Taylor, Dark Green Religion, 13, also see 10. See also Taylor, “From the Ground Up.”

39.Taylor, Dark Green Religion, 221. For more of Taylor’s argument that religion and a sense of the sacred remain important despite arguments for more purely rational and scientific perspectives, see Taylor, “Sacred or Secular Ground.”

40.Quoted by Taylor, Dark Green Religion, 215.

41.Ibid., 138.

42.In support of this claim, Schweitzer cites a famous essay by Lynn White Jr., “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” which argues that the Judeo-Christian religion justified environmental degradation by teaching people that humanity is not truly a part of nature and that all other creatures were created to serve human beings. White critiqued Christianity as “the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen.” However, he went on to argue that Christianity could be reformed and appealed—as the pope would more than fifty years later—to Saint Francis as a model for this reform. This conclusion has received far less attention than his critique, and many environmentalists—like Schweitzer—have since asserted that Christianity and other historic religions are simply too complicit in the current system to possibly fuel a meaningful resistance. White, “Historical Roots of Ecologic Crisis,” 1206.

43.Jeff Schweitzer, “Climate Change and Christian Values,” June 10, 2009, www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/climate-change-and-christ_b_198047.html.

44.Schweitzer and Sciar, New Moral Code, 17–19.

45.Jeff Schweitzer, “We Are All Atheists,” March 17, 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/we-are-all-atheists_b_6890056.html.

46.Day, House of Hospitality, 203.

47.Darren Samuelsohn, “John Shimkus Cites Genesis on Climate Change,” November 10, 2010, www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44958.html.

48.Day, By Little and By Little, 91.

49.Day, Union Square to Rome, 176.

50.This use of Christian faith to more fully invest in the Earth—including earthly tragedies—is perhaps best exemplified by Day’s contemporary, the German theologian Deitrich Bonhoeffer. For environmental interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s life and work, see especially James B. Martin-Schramm, “Lutheran Theology and the Environment: Bonhoeffer, the Church, and the Climate Question,” March 1, 2013, www.elca.org/JLE/Articles/101; and Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics, chap. 21.

51.Coles, Dorothy Day, 70–71.

52.Matthew 25:31–46.

53.Day, Union Square to Rome, 8. She also wrote: “Our greatest danger is not our sins but our indifference. We must be in love with God. It is not so much to change what we are doing, but our intention, our motive. It is not sufficient that we refrain from insulting a person; we must love.” Day, On Pilgrimage, 191.

54.Day, Union Square to Rome, 151–52. She went on to emphasize that this was a duty that extended to all humanity: “Catholics believe that man is the temple of the Holy Ghost, that he is made to the image and likeness of God. We believe that of Jew and Gentile. We believe that all men are members or potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ and since there is no time with God, we must so consider each man whether he is atheist, Jew or Christian.”

55.Bron Taylor is, of course, fully aware of these critiques. He notes, for example, that many have criticized Disney for the ways it “erodes global cultural diversity, destroys wildlands to build its parks, promotes consumerism, and celebrates a version of the United States that justifies the deracination of American Indians.” He argues that critics “fail to see that some of the company’s productions promote progressive politics and have affinities with dark green religion.” Taylor, Dark Green Religion, 132.

56.McFague, Blessed Are the Consumers, 213; also see 77.

57.For an account of life at one rural community inspired by the Catholic Worker and lessons learned from that life about peace and sustainability, see Shanley, Many Sides of Peace.

58.Perhaps the most famous such action, inspired by faith but not as far as I know by the Catholic Worker, was Tim DeChristopher’s bidding on an oil and gas lease with money he did not have to protest the destruction of land in Southern Utah. DeChristopher served two years in prison but gained considerable attention for his action and remains a leader among environmental activists. See especially Williams, “What Love Looks Like”; and Stephenson, What We’re Fighting for Now, chap. 6.

59.Kathryn Blanchard and I have attempted to do this in “Prophets Meet Profits: What Christian Ecological Ethics Can Learn from Free Market Environmentalism,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 33, no. 2 (2014). A well-made argument in favor of free market environmentalism is given by Scruton, Think Seriously About the Planet.

60.Day, By Little and By Little, 180.