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On a recent Monday evening, at an event called “Doing Theology: Jesus and Carbon Neutrality,” I sat in a circle around a large bowl of Cheez-Its with twelve parishioners from Circle of Hope, a progressive Anabaptist church in South Philadelphia. The church occupies a former Italian funeral home that was featured on the show “Mob Wives,” and the room was hung with black netting to symbolize Lent, the Christian liturgical season that began on Ash Wednesday, in late February, and ends forty days later, on Easter. Lent is historically a period of atonement and reflection, and these people had come together to discuss the church’s carbon footprint and their own.
“I feel like I’ve woken up in the ocean, and I’m trying not to get wet,” Jeremy Avellino, a forty-four-year-old architect who was leading the discussion, said. In 2010, Avellino had learned that buildings were responsible for thirty-nine percent of global carbon emissions, and considered leaving architecture completely, but God had told him not to. “I didn’t hear God audibly say, ‘Hey, man, you’ve got to stay in this and make it better,’ ” he clarified, but he had had a brush with the Holy Spirit. In 2011, Avellino created Bright Common, an architecture studio that practices high-concept, low-carbon design. (Recently, during the panic shopping brought on by the coronavirus outbreak, he bought a Tushy, a seventy-nine-dollar bidet, to reduce his use of toilet paper.) Avellino finds solace in the energy-efficient houses and apartment buildings he builds. “But sometimes, when I zoom out on Google Earth and see the millions of other homes built, I sometimes slip into despair,” he said.
Sara Robbins, a thirty-three-year-old social worker who grew up in a conservative church, talked about trying to unlearn the idea that stories about humans damaging the planet, including through overpopulation, were fake news. “I grew up thinking that we had to have more children so that there were more Christians on the planet,” she said. She has started composting and using fewer single-use plastics. “I’m trying in the day to be more aware of how my actions have larger positive and negative impacts,” she said.
Many Christians observe the period of Lent by giving something up, often in the name of self-improvement. (Carbohydrates, say, or alcohol.) Over the past several years, however, some left-leaning Christians have made the commitment to limit their consumption in service of the Earth, rather than themselves. Last year, a group of nuns in Pennsylvania sent out a newsletter advising people on how to cut back on electricity usage during Lent. This year, the young adults of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, across the country, are fasting from single-use plastics, and other local sustainability practices. “It’s just way harder than I thought,” Savanna Sullivan, the twenty-seven-year-old national director of young-adult ministries, told me. “Yogurt, for instance: it’s healthy, but it’s in plastic, so I’ve given it up.” In St. Louis, the members of the University United Methodist Church are fasting from carbon. They recently shared a forty-day calendar that offers directives for each day, advising followers, for example, to collect their food waste to see how much they create and to keep it out of the garbage, where it produces greenhouse gases. The Church of England has devoted its annual #livelent campaign to “care for Creation,” and has advised practitioners to, among other things, plant a tree, turn their thermostats down, and eat less meat. “The individual actions are easy,” Jo Chamberlain, the national environmental officer for the Church, told me. “The ones that involve other people, like having my family eat more vegetables, are trickier.”
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Monika Jurczyk via Adobe Images
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