BACK in 2007, Brian McLaren wrote Everything Must Change, an urgent call to action in the face of global emergencies, particularly the environmental crisis. Life After Doom sets a strikingly different tone. The call to activism in the earlier book is replaced by a melancholy resignation that it may already be too late. Some scenario of doom seems inevitable. How, then, should we live — as our ecosystem dies, and as the culture around us collapses? What might be on the other side of doom?
As you might imagine, this does not make for jolly reading. The book outlines four possible future scenarios. The worst involves the near-extinction of all human and animal life in a bleak post-apocalyptic world. The most positive involves a narrow avoidance of complete collapse, but still entails a decades-long crisis afflicting the environment and civilisation. McLaren explains why he thinks that the optimism of climate sceptics is misplaced, and is scathing about Christian theologies that see destruction of the earth as part of a divine plan.
Is there no hope, then? Hope may be an unhelpful word, McLaren says, because we tie hope to outcomes — and even our best outcomes are looking grim. This is one of the book’s central and most powerful insights: we can still live lives of love and defiance in the present moment, even on a dying planet. We can still cultivate beauty in the face of impending doom.
At the roots of our crisis, he says, lie rapacious ideologies that have dominated Western culture — particularly capitalism and colonialism. In contrast, we should listen to the voices of indigenous wisdom so long marginalised. He retells the biblical story, reimagining the Ten Commandments as a manual for sustainable living, Jesus as “an indigenous prophet and contemplative activist”, and the Kingdom of God as “the regenerative ecosystem of God”. McLaren offers a lyrical vision of a wiser and chastened humanity, drawing on the wisdom of a range of spiritual traditions and indigenous communities.
The book is visceral in its reflections on faith and despair, and wistful about gentler paths not taken. That said, the book’s presentation of indigenous wisdom feels to me rather sentimental and Arcadian. McLaren cites Cherokee traditions, but doesn’t mention the historic violence between Native American tribes, or that the Cherokee themselves owned slaves (on the notorious “Trail of Tears”, they took nearly 1600 African slaves with them). Human sacrifice among the Aztecs and Maya continued right up to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores.
This is not, of course, to deny the wisdom of indigenous cultures, or defend colonialism. But it is to recognise, with Solzhenitsyn, that the line separating good and evil passes not between cultures, but through every human heart. Indigenous communities and anti-capitalist movements have their demons, too.
The Revd Mike Starkey is a London-based writer on issues of faith and culture. He blogs at: flaneurnotes.com
Life After Doom: Wisdom and courage for a world falling apart
Brian McLaren
Hodder & Stoughton £16.99
(978-1-3998-1417-1)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29