Fetishized nature or life-giving breath? Religion as Skill in Climate Change

Anthropogenic climate change and unsustainable modes of production, consumption and lifestyles represent one of the most demanding challenges facing Earth, our home and humanity. Therefore religious belief, faith communities and spiritual commitment are highly needed to prepare the ground for what has been described as the necessary “great transformation”. To achieve this transformation, we need a new climate narrative and iconography, supported by a broad alliance of local and trans-local social forces. Religion has a significant role to play in this mobilization. This article begins by depicting several reasons that religion is a crucial driving force in the needed great transformation. Secondly, it will offer a sketch of what Christian ecotheology of the Life-Giving Spirit, and resisting the powers of fetishization of money, technology and power, might have to offer in this context. Following the older paths of animism, fetishism and faith in the Spirit perform along contradictory logics. The challenge for an ecological pneumatology, which wants to drink from its own classical wells, is to resist the authority of life-threatening concepts of animation and overcome the power of fetishization