A thriving oxymoron; Ghana’s faith and her environment
Writing this article, I struggled to settle on one image that would best capture my thoughts on Ghana’s current environmental crisis and faith-based response.
Finally, I found that a stubborn backyard banana stalk which kept regenerating despite all efforts to displace it, was perfect. If you have ever grown bananas or plantains, then you could relate. Except thoroughly digging out the rhizomes, banana suckers that are cut off will incessantly grow back, and you would be perpetually frustrated.
Ascribing Ghana a ‘Faith Nation’ wouldn’t be too far off the mark as the 2021 census placed a whopping 98.9% of our population as religious. 71.3% Christian, 19.9% Muslim, 3.2% African Traditional Religious believers, and the remaining 4.5% of other religions. With our general population set to increase annually, the numbers might have already multiplied.
These statistics imply that our beliefs and values that define us as individuals, communities, and a nation are established on God, a higher power, or Creator. The question is if the different dogmas point to a common ground of stewardship.
As a Christian, I am aware that the Bible implicitly and explicitly calls for Creation Care. The scriptures Genesis 1:26-31, where Adam was tasked to ‘rule over’ creation and then Genesis 2:14-15, which summarised Adam’s rule as ‘working and taking care of’ the garden, clearly refer to stewardship of nature.
My exploration of other religious literature alludes to this as well. Taking elementary lessons in Religious and Moral Education (R.M.E) taught me at least, that the African Traditional Religion played a key role in safeguarding many of our natural resources in sacred enclaves and taboo days. Culturally, we were a people that respected the sanctity of nature and lived in tandem with it. Now, the generations preceding mine, have laid waste a land that was flowing with milk and honey.
Quite recently, a friend described one article where I posited that people of faith should reflect their confessions in environmental stewardship, as an ‘attack’ on believers. Perplexed, I sought to understand their reasoning.
According to them, the academic pathway in climate studies seeks to avoid individual accountability, and instead place responsibility on governments and industries, which have contributed massively to environmental degradation. There I found that their view was not different from mine. Are not the people in government also religious individuals? Well in Ghana, the majority claim to be. It is even evident in the dynamic prayers that begin and conclude most national events.
Unfortunately, we are neglecting this religious aspect of our lives. We have become desensitized to our impact on the environment, as repeated exposure to news about these challenges tends to numb us into normalization. The indifference this has bred is destructive.
Truly, just rehashing our issues has led to a reactive culture that sees short-term solutions, as in the deployment of river guards to ‘fight’ a menace that travels deeper than such a surface gesture, for instance. The roots we need to deracinate are the ruinous convictions of our minds.
We are aware by now that there is no magic bullet in addressing our environmental crisis. All sectors matter in churning out solutions and faith communities are no less vital. Lately, the power of Religion is usually denigrated to negative headlines, describing ‘religious violence’ scenarios, where members are influenced by their leaders to commit atrocities, sometimes against their own bodies. But I see faith as a double-glazed sword which swipes either to the wrong or the right. And we continuously neglect the right.
Historically, we have seen how faith communities changed the narratives for the better and just one example is Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement. Here in Ghana, imagine if we had a collective inter-faith network championing environmental stewardship, starting from the individual.
Thankfully, we see some faith leaders sensitizing and mobilizing their members toward stewardship and some organizations collaborating with faith communities. However, this is at a snail’s pace, which does not match the speed of the degradation.
Collectively, we need to accept that this war against nature is birthed in many ‘faithful minds’ before manifesting in actions. The questions that quantitative science, technology, and policy could never answer, have resolutions embedded in theology and human beliefs. Do we seek to find them?
I speak from the seat of Generation Z, whose ancestors afforded me the luxury of benefiting from thriving natural ecosystems, but whose progeny might have to travel far to witness such, and worse, import water that once flowed clear. What a shame it would be.