Answers in Genesis?

This article first appeared in the May 2023 edition of the St John with St Mary, Devizes Parish Magazine.

Recently, the Rector put me onto a conversation on YouTube between Tom Holland, the popular historian, and Paul Kingsnorth, the environmentalist and former Newbury Bypass protestor who converted to Christianity two years ago. Kingsnorth was raised in Buckinghamshire without any particular faith, while Holland grew up attending a village church in South Wiltshire with his devoutly Anglican mother, and recently returned to churchgoing after a gap of decades. 

John H. Coates, Eve, and the Serpent, in the Garden, of Eden; REAL PEN WORK (1916). Kept in the Smithsonian Museum, Washington.

One exchange between them struck me powerfully. Both aged in their fifties, they recalled growing up with a sense that the Church was telling stories about God that nobody much believed in anymore — including the Church itself. The Church was attempting to tell a different story, a “post-Enlightenment myth” presenting itself primarily as a doer of good works and intended to appeal to the sensibilities of a rationalist age. The net result, in a memorable phrase by Holland, was “simultaneously rebarbative and dull”. 

Kingsnorth felt the Churches had produced a “version [of Christianity] designed to appeal to the masses, that didn’t really appeal to anyone.” In contrast, as he became overwhelmed by the scale of the environmental crisis and the possibility that humans had already permanently damaged the planet’s capacity to sustain them, it was some of the more visionary and mystical parts of the Bible that began drawing him, to his own initial reluctance, towards Christianity. Firstly, the visions of the end times in the Revelation seemed frighteningly plausible to him, but then he found himself particularly drawn to the creation myths in Genesis. 

Now, at the risk of digressing, there is an American fundamentalist organisation called ‘Answers in Genesis’ which promotes the idea that the Bible’s first book should be read literally. It has some presence in Northern Ireland and whenever I encountered them as an undergraduate, as a very cocky liberal Christian, Of course, the creation account shouldn’t be read like a science textbook and there wasn’t a literal first human couple called Adam and Eve, but these are stories about our moral evolution, rather than our biological evolution. 

One of the great unanswered questions of human origins is how we changed from being creatures of instinct like other animals, to creatures of reason, and creatures with a moral sense. Where does the sense of right and wrong come from and why do we human beings seem fated to do things that we know to be wrong and which cause us much misery in the long run?  

The ecological crisis, for example, chimes with the deepest patterns of human behaviour: mass extinctions followed human beings in every place we expanded into, soon after we arrived, ever since we had the spear and the ability to create fire. We drove the mammoth to extinction before we even had rudimentary agriculture. 

The Garden of Eden is a myth about what humans were before we seized the means to dominate the rest of God’s creation and exterminate other forms of life at our convenience. In the Garden, every part of creation, including humans, was in harmony with everything else and with God. God was so close that you could hear Him breathing when He walked through the garden in the cool of the evening. 

The Fall is all about the gap between what we were created by God to be and what we in fact are — how we became alienated from our true nature. 

The Church has tried to be as clever as the secular world around it liked to pretend it was. So we disowned these myths and left them to fundamentalists. But we live in a world where the growing gap between our technological cleverness and our wisdom is creating multiple threats – climate change, nuclear weapons, mistakes in the application of gene editing or artificial intelligence – that threaten our very existence as a species.  

Kingsnorth came to Christianity not because we had some practical solution to the environmental crisis, but because he found his fellow secular environmentalists castigated the sins of the modern humanity but offered no possibility of redemption. He found in these ancient biblical myths both and wisdom and a hope that the secular world seemed bereft of. Perhaps we should be a little less shy in telling them.