An Apocalypse Converted: William Stringfellow and Catholic Social Teaching on Climate Breakdown

Introduction

We live in an age of environmental catastrophe. This reality warrants theological engagement because it names a changed relationship between the creatures called humans and the rest of God’s creation. The new time in which we live is one marked by widespread signals of climate and biodiversity collapse. ¹ Each creature lost in the mass extinction we have generated ought to be a cause for lament. Each temperature record surpassed has potentially lethal consequences, impacting disproportionately on the poorest and most marginalized. Prophets declare our house is on fire. ² But the response, either collectively or individually, has often lacked urgency. ³

With Laudato Si’, Pope Francis sought to make a decisive intervention into this new age of crisis. ⁴ This article seeks first to explore what Francis might mean by the idea at the core of that encyclical: ‘integral ecology’. By considering how integral ecology is bound up with the idea of ‘ecological conversion’ and dialogue, it becomes clear that the environmental crisis is a sort of threshold event where the appropriate response is necessarily radical action. ⁵ Second, the theological shape of that threshold event is revealed by engaging the conversation about ecology and conversion with the twentieth-century American Episcopalian theologian, William Stringfellow. His account of Christian faith as a battle against Death ⁶ —a power expressed in institutional and ideological forms—allows us to see, as Francis sees, that the environmental challenge is more than a set of technocratic challenges over carbon emissions and marine reserves. That some of the most influential voices in this conversation rely on technologies that have yet to be invented in order to address the crisis indicates the extent to which the mainstream conversation skirts the reality of the challenge. In his recent treatment of this topic, Bill Gates shares a list of twenty-one separate yet-to-be-invented technologies needed to address climate breakdown, before he even arrives at his discussion of geo-engineering. Theologically, this is significant not just because these lists, which are received with utmost seriousness by policy-makers, are literally things a rich man has imagined, but that the logic underlying this imagination is an intensification of the technological fetishism that was so significant in generating the crisis in the first place. ⁷ Our contemporary conversation reveals how we are in thrall to our own power.

In this context, I suggest there is a peculiar hope uncovered in Stringfellow’s stark attack on our collective endeavours, which he presents not as noble toil, but as fealty to a false god intent on consuming without restraint. ⁸ The scale of the crisis we face can overwhelm us and tempt us to lose ourselves imagining apocalyptic—in the sense of world-ending—outcomes. Apocalyptic in the theological sense, however, is much more constructive. Attentive to the in-breaking action of God, it can sustain a critical distance from the common-sense of the common culture, rejecting both incomplete diagnoses and exaggerated prognoses while proposing responses informed by an alternative logic. ⁹ This is the tradition which best situates Stringfellow’s unique body of writing. More than fifty years on from the first World Earth Day, it remains the case that the historically most effective means of cutting carbon is global recession. ¹⁰ Dwelling on this inertia can be maddening and engaging in a conversation that passes over that fact is likely a dead-end. Stringfellow serves as an essential dialogue partner to keep our talk of integral ecology and ecological conversion grounded, preserve our hope, and stave off despair. Although coming from very different perspectives, there are deep enough resonances between their work to allow Stringfellow to offer important correctives to Francis’s proposals. Both figures understand how humanity and the gospel are simultaneously unveiled when plagues and vast forest fires and Siberian heatwaves and bleaching coral and cities swept away by typhoons do not rouse us from our comfort. Our house is still on fire. What kind of conversion can save us? ¹¹

How Laudato Si’ Works

Spread over six chapters and stretching to 246 sections, Laudato Si’ is an extensive work relative to the broader encyclical tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. Francis positions it as a response to ‘the urgent challenge to protect our common home’ and frames it throughout as a contribution to dialogue. ¹² It opens with a comprehensive description of the many sides of the crisis. The second chapter explores biblical engagements with the environment. Chapters three and four examine the anthropogenic nature of the crisis and Francis’s concept of integral ecology as a response. Chapters five and six turn to action, considering the many avenues of dialogue necessary and then, finally, the spiritual perspective, emphasizing the need for an ecological conversion.

The concept of integral ecology is at the heart of the message of Laudato Si’. There is no attempt at a clear, distinct, complete definition of this concept. ¹³ Rather, the reader is repeatedly introduced to how the concept looks in different contexts: as a contrast to scientific reductionism, as a method to approach life joyfully and authentically, and as an aspect of the common good. ¹⁴ But it is most directly used as part of a vision of the crises of the Anthropocene which ‘clearly respects its human and social dimensions’. ¹⁵ Francis summarizes the concept when he teaches that ‘we are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental’. ¹⁶

It would be a mistake to read Francis’s environmental focus as an innovation within the Christian tradition. Dendritic connections can be drawn between much that Francis has written and earlier Catholic documents and practices. ¹⁷ Indeed, the phrase ‘ecological conversion’ itself first originated with John Paul II. ¹⁸ Benedict XVI used a similar phrase in his encyclicals—‘human ecology’—in order to indicate the same idea Francis seems to be describing with the term integral ecology. ¹⁹ Francis is thus building upon a trajectory that is already well-established. ²⁰

In addition, it is important to situate the encyclical within the broader sweep of Francis’s papacy and earlier (Jesuit) ministry. ²¹ In this direction, Daniel Castillo’s careful comparison of Francis’s ‘integral ecology’ with Gustavo Gutiérrez’s concept of ‘integral liberation’ is illuminating. ²² Castillo identifies a formal mirroring between the aspects of integral liberation and integral ecology. So, integral liberation works on the socio-political level, the cultural/psychological level, and the theological level, ²³ whereas integral ecology operates with a concern for ‘the right ordering of eco-social networks of the world’, ‘a personal and societal embrace of limitation, restraint, and humility’, and ‘a total conversion’ towards a new understanding of reality which make up integral ecology. ²⁴

Reading Laudato Si’ within the tradition of liberation theology also illuminates the specific language of ecological conversion. ²⁵ Conversion is obviously a fertile (and often fraught) concept within Christianity. ²⁶ Its use is appropriate in this context because of the scale of the transformation required to respond to the environmental crisis and because some kind of fundamental epistemic break appears to be required, that is, considering the inertia that marks so much of our reaction to the crisis. ²⁷ By positioning Laudato Si’ within this radical tradition, Castillo draws attention to the thoroughgoing nature of Francis’s judgement against prevailing wisdom. When Francis critiques the ‘technocratic paradigm’ ²⁸ or ‘false ecology’, ²⁹ he is attacking much of what is presented as the best thinking and practice that has been amassed in response to the crisis. For Castillo, Francis’s call is ‘for a radical conversion away from “sustainable development” and the paradigm that it functions to maintain’. ³⁰

One of the ways we can understand Francis’s intention with integral ecology is by recognizing how it functions within Laudato Si’. The moving parts with which it interacts are the case for intensive and widespread dialogue (evident in chapter five that follows the discussion of integral ecology) and for what Francis calls ‘ecological conversion’ (in the final chapter). Integral ecology, then, works in two directions—it offers both analysis and remedy simultaneously. ³¹ It is a valuable concept because it is a shorthand for saying complex things—that the environmental crises we face are anthropogenic and that the social crises we face are bound up with the rest of creation.

Laudato Si’ has been rightly recognized as offering a mandate to Christian environmental activists ³² and integral ecology has significant worth as a ground-clearing term for policy creation. ³³ These instrumental benefits of public square activism and policy formation flow from the theological aspects of integral ecology. Resting on and pointing towards a vision of creation bound up with the mystery of Christ, ³⁴ integral ecology resists reductionisms and undermines the dualisms we construct between ourselves and nature. It weakens the boundaries we erect between faith here and politics over there, between public and private, and between creature and creation. ³⁵ And central to its operation on all these levels is a concern to establish dialogue.

Dialogue is More than Talk

Francis ‘would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home’. ³⁶ Yet, given the extent of the current climate crises, it may seem surprising that his primary response is a call for dialogue. For Francis, speaking and listening, with collaborators and with opponents, is the method through which a process of repair and renewal of our environmental and social crises can begin. The fifth chapter of Laudato Si’ sketches how dialogue might be pursued across borders, disciplines, and religions.

This call to dialogue is an implicit recognition that the church does not arrive with all the answers. ³⁷ Indeed, the need for dialogue within and beyond religious communities is given a decisive word in the encyclical’s fifth chapter. ³⁸ Here Francis proposes a spiralling trajectory of dialogue, beginning with international agreements which will bind us to changed practices. ³⁹ That process continues through national and regional conversations intending to ‘to promote best practice, to stimulate creativity in seeking new solutions and to encourage individual or group initiatives’. ⁴⁰ To be clear, Francis’s call to dialogue is not simply intended as a sort of pastoral intervention, like a parent encouraging children to communicate with each other as a means to compromise. Rather, it is explicitly presented as a method for making hard decisions, a politics intended to counteract the fact that ‘particular interests or ideologies’ will resist and obstruct changes that hamper their success. ⁴¹

Nonetheless, there is an evident risk in such calls to dialogue. Recognizing that powerful forces are arrayed against significant environmental mitigation measures, commitments to dialogue could easily become mere talking shops. ⁴²

Francis recognizes that this is a real threat to his project. The global consensus is that limiting global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius is prudent. The political reality is that satisfying that key aim of the Paris Accords would require a transformation of practically every sector of our society and would affect practically every part of our life. Between the Scylla of climate catastrophe and the Charybdis of political inertia, therefore, lies a vast expanse for dialogue that lacks ethical seriousness. To the extent that the Catholic Social Teaching tradition is committed to interaction with voices in wider society, it runs the risk of sustaining conversations that are ultimately unsustainable. ⁴³ Indeed, Francis himself warns against ‘false or superficial ecology which bolsters complacency and a cheerful recklessness’. ⁴⁴ Unlike others, his concern is not so much that environmental action would be railroaded by conspiracy movements that deny anthropogenic climate change. Indeed, one of the subtle successes of Laudato Si’ is how effortlessly it sweeps past such positions. Rather, he is highlighting the ways in which voices pitched as moderate and mature contribute to the conversation in a fashion that dilutes the resolve of nations or groups to act decisively.

This threat does not just arise from mass-market paperbacks profiting from soft climate scepticism. ⁴⁵ An argument could be made that the discourse of mainstream neoclassical economics produces a similar effect. To take a representative example, William Nordhaus is a Yale economist who was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize in 2018. His work on the climate implications for long-run macroeconomic analysis has been hugely influential. He is no crypto-climate denialist. ⁴⁶ Prolific in a number of fields, his climate modelling work has been highly significant. He has developed approaches that integrate ‘natural capital’ into the calculations for long-run projections within neoclassical economic growth theory. ⁴⁷ This allows economists to factor in what had been previously left out of their models: externalities of environmental extraction, processing, and emissions. After Nordhaus, an economist can think about an economic question in more realistic terms because an increase in emissions can be construed as negative natural capital, or a reduction in emissions as an investment. A price can then be established that allows a cost-benefit analysis to be calculated for any proposed environmental intervention. Nordhaus’s work has significant value within his field and warrants engagement from Christian thinkers seeking to understand the environmental problems we face. ⁴⁸ Christian thinkers like Ottmar Edenhofer, for example, recognize much of worth in Nordhaus’s agitating concern for human wellbeing, stating that without Nordhaus ‘there wouldn’t be such a subject of climate economics’. ⁴⁹

And yet, there are reasons to pause and reflect before we establish the terms of the conversation in terms inherited from prestigious voices, even those with Nobel Memorials to their name. As it stands, Nordhaus’s models anticipate, on average, a temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. ⁵⁰ To engage with Nordhaus, therefore, would be to engage with a thinker whose proposals bypass the global consensus of the Paris Accords and therefore whose work exhibits a lack of concern for the research of environmental and climate scientists, which underpins those Accords. ⁵¹ The temperature rise that is predicted under Nordhaus’s projections runs the risk of triggering civilizational collapse and calls the viability of the survival of the human species into question. ⁵² Nordhaus, acclaimed for his work which advocates business as usual, may be a good example of the ‘cheerful recklessness’ to which Francis alerts us. ⁵³ This is before we even factor in the philosophical tensions between a cost-benefit approach, which trains us to think in terms of competing demands and integral ecology, whose ‘logic of receptivity’ insists everything is connected and therefore nothing can be discarded. ⁵⁴

The point here is not to attack Nordhaus, ⁵⁵ but to demonstrate that integral ecology demands practical discernment about the kind of dialogue we sustain. There are theological reasons to avoid perspectives that centre GDP growth, which often tempt an over-reliance on concepts like stewardship. ⁵⁶ There are ethical reasons to distance ourselves from perspectives that commit to a temperature rise which would disproportionately affect the already impoverished. But I argue that these problems are representative of the broader risk of allowing our exploration of what integral ecology might mean to be determined by the limited perspectives of interlocutors who do not share our perception that we face what Francis has described in his apostolic constitution Veritatis Gaudium: ‘a true epochal shift, marked by wide-ranging anthropological and environmental crises’. ⁵⁷

By entering into dialogue with different voices on contemporary issues so as to better discern the signs of the time, we run the risk of being constrained by the limitations of the age. Integral ecology could become captive to the very cultural assumptions it is seeking to transform. Accordingly, in the post-synodal exhortation of 2020, Querida Amazonia, we find Francis warning that ‘integral ecology cannot be content simply with fine-tuning technical questions or political, juridical and social decisions’. ⁵⁸ What is intended through this concept is a call to a profound, theologically-grounded rehabilitation of how we view and act in the world, achieved through the method of transparent, inclusive dialogue. Such is the radical nature of the rehabilitation necessary that we might say that integral ecology requires something like conversion.

Ecologically Converted?

What Francis means by ecological conversion cannot be rightly understood without noting that at the very beginning of the discussion of the topic in Laudato Si’, the Pope makes clears that this discussion is intended particularly for his Christian audience. ⁵⁹ This is not an invitation to proselytism. Neither is Francis imagining some kind of ecological revivalism. Rather, ecological conversion is ‘a spirituality [that] can motivate us to a more passionate concern for the protection of our world’. ⁶⁰ Spirituality can be understood as the agitating force underlying integral ecology, although there are also hints that as the remedies of an integral ecology take hold, the conversion will be further deepened: ‘by developing our individual, God-given capacities, an ecological conversion can inspire us to greater creativity and enthusiasm in resolving the world’s problems and in offering ourselves to God “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable” (Rom 12:1)’. ⁶¹

While the core of ecological conversion is clearly rooted in a Christological encounter, ⁶² it remains somewhat unclear where the borders of the concept lie. Donal Dorr understands it primarily to be an affective experience, appropriately evoking joy, which is a recurrent motif in the encyclical. ⁶³ We might draw from Dorr’s discussion of the concept that the inertia experienced individually and collectively in relation to the crisis is clearly not cognitive. ⁶⁴ For example, we might be convinced of the necessity of granting assent to the accuracy of the reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without being moved at an affective level. ⁶⁵ Accordingly, Celia Deane-Drummond interprets ecological conversion as a continuation of Pope John Paul II’s ecological theology, such that ‘care for creation is an essential part of Christian faith and not simply an optional extra’. ⁶⁶ This formulation resonates with the classical Jesuit formulation about justice which marked Francis’s ministry before his papacy. ⁶⁷ Indeed, consonant with Daniel Castillo’s contention that Laudato Si’ is best read as part of the inheritance of liberation theology, María Teresa Dávila proposes that ecological conversion is a ‘conversion toward the poor’. ⁶⁸ This is helpful in that it illuminates the preferential bias embedded within integral ecology. Since environmental collapse disproportionately harms the poor (and disproportionally benefits the wealthy), the analysis of and reaction to the interwoven social and environmental crises must be ‘grounded on the encounter with the suffering of the poor and their hopes for a different world’. ⁶⁹

These are valuable explorations of what ecological conversion might indicate. But a question lingers about its meaning, which is especially pertinent considering the many diluted and false responses that are prevalent around the climate and biodiversity crisis. We have seen that ecological conversion emerges out of an encounter with Christ. It is a dynamic that functions at the individual and the corporate level; it informs—or even perhaps generates—the integral ecological response, and it is in turn informed by that process, especially in dialogue with others. But if this is what we are being converted to, what are we being converted from?

When we read voices of apparent moderation counselling us that the GDP-impact of climate breakdown will be absorbed quite easily by business as usual, with some adjustments here and there and the right set of technocratic nudges, we are encountering a very different imagination from one which insists that ‘love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world’. ⁷⁰ The reason why dialogue is such an essential element of the Christian response to the environmental crisis is that the vocation ‘to “till and keep” the garden of the world’ ⁷¹ is extended to all of humanity, not just Christians. The risk with dialogue is that we get caught up in conversations that actively obstruct mitigation, never mind conversion. Ecological conversion introduces us to a desire to incite change, and on a truly theological view we must recognize that change is essential. It is painful. It involves repentance. We typically resist such change. ⁷² In truth, it is Christians ourselves who are the first problematic dialogue partner. So often, we are the environmental sceptics. That we need to be converted to see the world as God’s good creation implies that we were (are) first in thrall to some other lord’s vision of the world. And to begin to understand such a conversion, therefore, we will need to develop an account of those powers from which we are being liberated. Here, I suggest, Catholic Social Teaching, most surprisingly, leaves space open for a fruitful correction from the perspective of apocalyptic theology.

Stringfellow and Ecological Theology

William Stringfellow (1928–1985) was an American lawyer, social activist, and theologian. He was a gay man who lived mostly before gay liberation in a relationship with the poet, Anthony Towne. ⁷³ He was a strident critic of the United States of America, but a well-connected figure within the Episcopalian church. ⁷⁴ Karl Barth confessed that on his visit to the USA, Stringfellow ‘caught my attention more than any other person’. ⁷⁵ And Rowan Williams has preached that he was ‘perhaps the greatest American theologian of the twentieth century’. ⁷⁶ His life’s work cannot be easily classified but one biographer suggests it is best understood as ‘a parable to be told and heard’. ⁷⁷

Although he was not in his time identified with a school of thought given such a name, Stringfellow can be accurately designated as an apocalyptic theologian. By that, of course, we mean something other than how it might be popularly understood. Stringfellow was not waiting for a charismatic ruler to take over the world, embed microchips in people, and have all the planes flown by Christians fall out of the sky as the believers are raptured to bliss. ⁷⁸ Instead, it locates him within a tradition that Ernst Käsemann famously declared as ‘the mother of all Christian theology’. ⁷⁹ Apocalyptic theology in this mode is alert to how God’s revelation is an in-breaking reality that disrupts our settled arrangements and is attentive to how the Scriptures describe our lives in the dramatic terms of a spiritual battle. Käsemann’s historical claim can be applied conceptually to Stringfellow’s work. Throughout his decades of writing, his underlying assumption was that Christianity was essentially a story about the death of Death. ⁸⁰

This is a challenging perceptual claim. We cannot make sense of Stringfellow without seeing what he sees—that there is an unbreakable bond between the power of a State that can extend privileges to me now but can incarcerate—or even execute—me later. The Nation, the Market, the State, the Military, these are not merely conceptual abstractions for Stringfellow, but are better understood as the ‘powers and principalities’ which incarnate the forces of Death to us. They are creaturely; originally good and capable still of doing a level of good, but now fallen and corrupted, associated with Death, until the end. To describe Stringfellow’s work as apocalyptic, then, is to recognize as Hauerwas and Powell do, that he is always:

reminding us of the intrinsically political character of salvation. Apocalyptic is not an unfortunate mythological excrescence on metaphysical and ethical truths; it is, instead, the truthful and unavoidable language in which one must talk about a world that is created but fallen, that has been redeemed but does not acknowledge its Redeemer. ⁸¹

My reading, in keeping with this analysis, locates Stringfellow directly within the categorization of apocalyptic recently offered by Philip Ziegler, who describes apocalyptic theology as a ‘three-agent drama’ whereby human redemption represents the triumph of a life-giving God over the death-dealing powers and principalities. ⁸²

The stakes are high, as God rescues humanity from the clutches of Death, Stringfellow’s third agent. This drama is not enacted in our lives (typically!) through stand-offs against Satan at crossroads in the middle of the night, but proceeds from the victory Christ sustained over Death ‘in the times and places in the daily lives of men when they are so gravely and relentlessly assailed by the claims of principalities for an idolatry which, in spite of all disguises, really surrenders to death as the reigning presence in the world’. ⁸³ We are speaking less of visions of Kings of the North in battle against Kings of the South, ⁸⁴ and more about how our eyes gloss over algorithmic advertisements while we consent to some invisible surveillance before accessing the latest celebrity gossip or sports results on our mobile devices. ⁸⁵ To be clear, Stringfellow was writing largely before the environmental crisis was fully grasped. Yet his references to the problem of pollution indicates he had a keen appreciation of the issue as it was then understood. There is a remarkable potency in applying his particular apocalyptic account of how Death works in our lives to the idea that we need an ecological conversion in the face of human-induced mass extinction. ⁸⁶ Arguments as bracing and unrepentantly theological as Stringfellow’s are essential lights as we navigate terrain where everyone insists they are hard-nosed realists following the science.

The gospel, as Stringfellow sees it, is not just about the relationship between God and humanity. Angelic powers are also involved. He defines principalities as ‘a living reality, distinguishable from human and other organic life’. ⁸⁷ Just as with humans living after the Fall, the principalities ‘exist in acute conflict with one another in their competition, as it were, for the loyalty and services of men’. ⁸⁸

The loyalty and service of humans discussed here is where we really see the spiritual dynamics of environmental collapse unveiled, because central in Stringfellow’s understanding of what it means for humans to serve these powers and principalities is the voracious sphere of activity we call work. For Stringfellow, unlike the encyclical tradition, work is not essentially a positive meaning-making activity. ⁸⁹ Reading work from the ‘painful toil’ passage in Genesis 3, he insists that it represents the ‘alienation of human life and the rest of creation’. ⁹⁰ This is a recurring theme across Stringfellow’s writing. ⁹¹ Work is the fallen relation between humanity and the rest of what we routinely under-describe as nature. ⁹² Our effort and toil ‘represents the lost dominion of men [sic] over the rest of creation’. ⁹³ We have broken that initial call to cultivate, interpreting it instead as a call to exploit. Remembering that the Catholic Social Teaching tradition began with an attempt to remedy ‘the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class’, ⁹⁴ it is significant that Stringfellow’s critique of work as the ally to Death goes beyond the shop floor and out to the very corners of the earth. The relationships broken by our exploitation are not just between the capital-holding class and the proletariat, but between all God’s creatures. Even—especially—when we think we are masters of the Cosmos we are in fact enslaved:

[We are] not engaged in the celebration of life, but in working to death. Thus, biblically, work is associated with burden, conflict, alienation, struggle, sweat, redundant effort, bondage to time, subsistence, fatigue, drudgery, waste, futility, the imminence of death. ⁹⁵

The irony of the industrial age, when harvests, profits, and efficiencies have escalated beyond our ancestors’ wildest imaginings, is that we are hurtling towards our own destruction. ⁹⁶ Paul teaches that the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23) and Stringfellow interprets our work under capitalism as the channel of that particular remuneration. This is the irony of work, brought to the fore by the fact that even as we created machines to toil on our behalf, we arranged them in such a fashion as to ever deepen our slavery. William Nordhaus is not alone in lacking the courage to imagine what life might be like if we were not serving the power of GDP growth. If Stringfellow is correct, we are all implicated in this idolatry. Our work feeds this demonic machine. We strike a deal with Death, compounding extinction, in exchange for more immediate comforts. ⁹⁷ This is what we need to be converted from. By daring to describe the pull of the powers and the reign of the principalities, Stringfellow allows us to unravel the mystery of why we can see an avoidable cataclysm approaching and yet we do nothing to avoid it. By our fruit, we know ourselves. Whether to Mammon, Mars, or Aphrodite, our loyalty and our service is owed to other Lords. We are in thrall to Death.

This devastating ‘No’ from Stringfellow is also at the same time a promising ‘Yes’ because it is only ‘where there is no equivocation or escape possible from the fullness of death’s vigor and brutality, when man is exposed in absolute vulnerability—that life can be beheld and welcomed as the gift which life is’. ⁹⁸ Here, we find Francis and Stringfellow stand together. The integrated crisis which is both environmental and social is answered only in conversion, which is always ‘a work of God’. ⁹⁹ Stringfellow’s apocalyptic account illuminates integral ecology, but it also shows how any response that is not an ecological conversion will be deficient. It is not that conversion is itself some magic act that disentangles fallen human creatures from a world stalked by Death. Conversion names that ‘event that shatters the categories of time and emancipates a person from bondage to time which is, after all, a sign of bondage to death’. ¹⁰⁰ By positing conversion as ‘death in Christ’, Stringfellow establishes space whereby the Christian is freed from the idolatrous devotion to the death-dealing logic of the powers and principalities. ¹⁰¹ In this light, conversion is not just a religious experience; it is also a rebellion, an uprising, a liberation from the death-dealing way of life represented by our era’s environmental crisis and its implicated institutions, images, and ideologies.

Conclusion: Converted from What?

The environmental crisis is often described in ‘apocalyptic’ terms, meaning that it makes us think of disaster movies. If we follow Stringfellow on this, our theological response demands engagement with a different apocalyptic, one that involves an unveiling of what it is we are escaping when we are liberated in the dramatic deliverance of an ecological conversion. Naming that which has held us captive protects us. Without the kind of clarity offered by Stringfellow, a response driven by dialogue—as wise as it is—runs the risk of being perverted.

Integral ecology is a concept with immense potential for impact. It is an insight with utility in concrete policy questions, wider cultural conversations, and in terms of the theological and ecclesial response to the environmental crisis. The centrality preserved for dialogue is to be welcomed, but it demands a faculty, like the one offered by apocalyptic theology, to identify when we are engaged with a false or superficial ecology. ¹⁰² Francis’s commitment to dialogue is not intended to result in us compromising with Death.

We live in an age of environmental catastrophe. It was created by the accumulation of all our individual commitments to comfort, efficiency, and luxury. The primary cause of climate instability is carbon emissions, which inextricably connects the crisis to capitalism. ¹⁰³ The individual entrepreneurs who sought to marshal the power of the steam engine to weave cotton or wool in Manchester or Wigan did not intend to induce a mass extinction. While the labourers who toiled in the giant industrial mills of early capitalist Europe could sensually discern the impact of this new way of life—they could see and smell and touch and taste the pollution, and the cacophonous mills themselves surely overwhelmed their hearing—they still could not identify the long-range impact, that which Andreas Malm calls ‘the revenge of time’. ¹⁰⁴ The apocalyptic unveiling that our modern prosperity has cost far more than we realized did not arrive until centuries later. ¹⁰⁵

It is increasingly recognized that we cannot grapple with the scale of the challenge we face by means of appeals to individual behavioural change. Integral ecology pushes beyond this by highlighting how approaching the environmental crisis as a sort of scientific puzzle is deficient. Contentious questions about economics and politics, about how we interpret history, and how the privileges of location or race or sex implicate us in the deeply uneven impacts of the crisis must be addressed. Stringfellow’s apocalyptic theology gives us a vocabulary to begin those dialogues.

No easy reconciliation can be made between Stringfellow’s apocalyptic approach and the Catholic Social Teaching tradition. They are radically different—perhaps even discordant—genres. But there is utility in hearing this minority report, this strange song which plays such different theological instruments and yet finds striking harmonies at important points in the strain. Vincent Miller describes the challenge of responding to the environmental crisis in terms of overcoming ‘the structures’ that train us to ignore our mutual interconnectedness and the interconnectedness of social and environmental crises. ¹⁰⁶ Stringfellow names those structures and explains how they function, win our allegiance, and encourage our inattention. He is representative of the apocalyptic tradition by boldly declaring that we live in a world populated by idols, created things that we abuse by treating them as if they are the creator. ¹⁰⁷ Behind that temple of many gods we call civilization lies the power of Death. Here, at the beginning of the sixth mass extinction—the only one initiated by a creature—this theological message should not be muted.