Reverend Karen Mann is a pastor with Sojourners United Church of Christ in Charlottesville. Her work in ministry has led her to participate in issues impacting her community, like immigration advocacy. With a background in farming, Mann’s work as a pastor has also included a focus on climate change. WMRA’s Calvin Pynn asked Mann how her faith informs her views on climate change.
Karen Mann: I believe that we are called by God to be caretakers of this world. I'm not a literalist when I read the Bible, so when I read those creation stories, I'm not reading a literal seven days or anything like that, but I am reading that God created a world that is beautiful and diverse and life-giving and life-sustaining, and that we are part of that creation and that in that creation we are given responsibility to care for and preserve that world. There's two words in there where God directs the first humans to keep until the earth is what we often translated in English. In Hebrew, it is we are to avad and shamar the earth, which might also mean to protect and preserve. And I find that to be a really beautiful way to think about what our role is. It's not to have dominion over or to destroy or to use at our will and exploit, but that we are to preserve and protect the earth. And so, I think that's really fundamental to what we were created to be and to do in this world is to preserve and protect and care for this earth. For me, that's an expression of my faith, living out my calling for God.
WMRA: Yeah. It's like the idea of stewardship. That's kind of how I'm hearing that.
Mann: Stewardship would be another word.
WMRA: Is this something that you have incorporated into your sermons and how do you do that?
Mann: Climate change is something that we talk about from time to time in my congregation. My congregation is totally on board with talking about that. Last year, I believe, we did a whole series on faith and climate change. We spent I think six weeks talking about it, working through various texts that help us think about our role in caring for creation. And my congregation was really open and receptive to that. Other than that time where we spent that focused six weeks talking about it regularly makes its way into my preaching. The Bible is such an agricultural text that there are way to incorporate it all the time. And because a lot of the Hebrew Testament talks about a relationship to the land, it's also an important theme that runs throughout a lot of those texts.
WMRA: It seems like there's an idea that science and faith kind of exist in two separate worlds. What do you think of that? And how would you relate the two?
Mann: I mean, I definitely don't think that they are mutually exclusive. Again, given that I don't rely on a literalist translation of the Bible, when I'm reading the scriptures, I'm reading them for what they are, which is pieces of literature that are tied to a specific time and place. And when I say it's a very agricultural book, that's because the people who were writing it were very tied to the land, to agriculture. And so, you see a lot of that showing up in the literature that they write. So, we're reading poetry, we're reading prose, we're reading the metaphors people are using to describe the world around them. And what we're reading is not people's exact accounting. They weren't writing history so much as they were writing how they were encountering God in the world around them. And that was often through the land. And we're reading their understanding of science as they understood it at the time, which is very different than how we understand things now. So, we certainly can't use it as a scientific text. I think it's totally valid to say that I believe in science, I believe in modern medicine, I believe in the advancements that we have encountered through research and study and experimentation and all of that kind of thing. And that doesn't negate the wonder and mystery and poetry and beauty that I also find in the scripture text. I think those things can live alongside one another.
WMRA: Do people in your life, say, church members, family, friends, et cetera, have they expressed anxiety over climate change too? And what do you tell them when they do?
Mann: Yeah, I mean, climate despair is a big problem. I certainly feel it myself. Last year I did a lifelong learning course through Duke Divinity School that was around climate change and preaching. During the course, we spent a long time about talking about how to hold the despair that we feel about the rate of climate change and the inevitability of climate change and all of that kind of thing alongside some hope that is grounded in reality, that climate change is real, the changes to our planet are real, things are going to get worse. We can hold those realities, right? And also say, and there is hope for changes to happen in the midst of that, hope that people can come to understand the dangers and work to make changes. that hope and despair don't have to be opposites, that they can sit alongside one another because we're complex beings who hold complex feelings about things. And that's what I try to hold with my congregation when I preach about it. It's like, yeah, this is scary and this is hard and we are going to have to make hard choices. And that we can also hold hope that God is with us in the midst of that and that humanity doesn't have the last word on these kinds of things. That God is working in ways in the world that we might not understand. And that there is a measure of hope left for us.
WMRA: Despair on its own can be an impediment to action, that's something that I see mostly in online spaces, and that seems to, in a lot of cases, dominate the discourse, but it does generally keep out the path to solutions, but that's where hope comes in.
Mann: Sure, yeah. And I want to clarify that by hope I don't mean, God's got it, I don't have to worry about it. Like that doesn't feel like hope to me. It's more like trying to balance the despair that I feel and hope that moves us towards action, not inaction.
WMRA: Talking about this approach to climate change, and the idea of the Bible as an agricultural text. And you're a farmer yourself?
Mann: I was. We moved off the farm, but that was just like a month ago.
WMRA: I'm curious, you know, in your experience working the land, how has how has climate change impacted that, in your life and in your former life now as a farmer?
Mann: Sure. So, the period of time where I was farming was about 11 years. So, it’s hard to say definitively that I saw significant changes in those 11 years into, you know, what I was able to do at the beginning versus towards the end of our time. I will say that I certainly noticed that the weather events are more extreme, which makes it difficult from a farming perspective. You know, farmers expect there to be variability in the weather, but also need there to be some stability in that in order to plan for watering and crop timing and all of that kind of thing. And when you have unexpected long periods of drought, very difficult for a farm. Conversely, unexpected long periods of rain can be very difficult for a farm. There was a farm near us that we had a rain event that was much larger than expected and completely drowned out some of their fields. And they lost significant amount of crop and they relied on that for their livelihood. You know, you see things like the Hurricane Helene that came through and while that can impact my area directly, I know a lot of farmers who were in the path of that who lost a whole year's worth of farming due to that. So, volatile weather is a huge impact for farmers and as climate change creates more of that volatile weather whether it's stronger or hurricanes or hurricanes in the mountains where you don't ever expect it like yeah flooding or significant drought, all of that stuff can devastate a small farm. So, I didn't experience those directly, but in my relationships with other farmers I have seen people who have had to go out of business because of the volatile weather, and they just haven't been able to sustain their farms in the midst of that. So, I would say that's a huge one. I think also our food economy is so interconnected that a wildfire on the west coast or a drought in the Mideast or hurricanes that devastate certain regions, the bird flu, all of those things don't just impact where the wildfire was or where the drought was because I raised pigs for a while and I'm dependent upon grain from the Midwest in order to feed my animals. So, if there is a drought and we don't have as much feed going in, that impacts my ability on the East Coast to raise my hogs or oil prices. Because our food system is so interconnected like that. Anywhere there's volatility in the weather, volatility in oil prices, volatility in any kind of thing or significant disease that wipes out flocks, that impacts anyone who's farming.
WMRA: The farmers that you know in your community there, has this approach with faith helped come to terms and cope with the loss of crops? And have you had conversations like that with fellow farmers?
Mann: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I've had a number of friends who have gotten out of farming following these kinds of events that have been devastating to them. And they don't have the personal finances to weather such a loss. And so instead they have to get out of farming and go do an off-farm job. There are people who just decide this is too hard. because things are so volatile, whether they've experienced those dramatic losses yet or not, they see the writing on the wall and they say, you know, it's time to do something else because I'm not going to be able to make a go of this. I joke with a friend of mine who raises cattle every January. We sit down and we have coffee and both of us are like, we're getting out of farming. And now I have. And she just texted me to say she's put an offer on a house that's not on her farm. So, I think maybe she's headed out too. But there's a level of despair among those who are raising this country's food that it's hard and without significant protections, a lot of people do have to get out of it.
WMRA: Pastor Mann, thank you for taking the time today and I hope we keep in touch.
Mann: Sounds great.
