Description
This paper offers a reflection on how race, racialisation and racism operate as key terms for mobilising persons of Christian faith in North America, both those who deny climate change, as well as those actively involved in environmental justice movements. Empirically, the paper draws on a three year collaborative inquiry project that studied the aspect of climate and cross in Canada and the United States. Using the lens of liberation theology, this paper looks at the ‘progressive eschatologies’ present within both these movements, and how they lend themselves itself to racialized, imperialistic narratives, often transgressing and transforming and transmutating the rhetoric of discourse on the political left, specifically the transforming and silencing of narratives of historic suffering. Within these movements, there is a focus on the world that is to come, rather than the world that is, and this focus automatically rejects a hermeneutic of justice (Peiris 1988). This paper argues that a lack of a justice narrative reinforces and recreates racialized discourses that already structure the Christian Social Imagination (Karter 2016). In taking up this absence of justice, this paper also argues for the need for a political theology of race.
