In Rebellion We Trust: meet the Extinction Rebellion members motivated by their faith
“There’s something in the culture of XR, in its DNA, that’s got all the good things of religion…in the community, in the bond, in the ethics and the care and the compassion that is amazing,” says Mark Ovland, who has – since we met – gone viral as one of the two Extinction Rebels who sparked commuter backlash by mounting a Tube train at Canning Town. This wasn’t the first time Mark crossed swords with Transport for London, being among the first to glue himself to the DLR during Extinction Rebellion’s first weeks of direct action in April. The press have described him as a ‘Buddhist teacher’ though as I found out, this isn’t strictly true.
Although he has practiced Buddhism with great dedication for many years – even to the point of caring for his teacher when he fell ill, hardly leaving his side for three years – Mark has never considered himself a Buddhist. In common with many Westerners who adopt Eastern spiritual practice, he has drunk deeply from the cup of Buddhist wisdom and practice but stops short of full identification.
There is no such arms-lengthery from Melanie Nazareth, spokesperson for Christian Climate Action and “very much part” of her Anglican community in west London. Nor for Shulamit Morris-Evans, who co-founded XR Jews early this year. She wears a Star of David pendant, blushes as she tells of how even as a teenager she “always quite liked going to synagogue” and is unequivocal that scripture deigns environmentalist campaigning a specifically “Jewish act”. Even in this era of cafeteria religion, the labels ‘Christian’ and ‘Jew’ are still generally for life, not just for Christmas (or Hannukah). But while these believers have their differences, they are united by a conviction that we are facing a climate emergency, and that their faiths compel them to take radical action under the banner of the Holocene.
A militant atheist from prepubescence to early adulthood, Mark encountered Buddhism in a book gifted by an aunt, and a life-changing spiritual experience in India came hot on the heels. No-one can accuse Mark of the cafeteria approach; he embarked on what rather must constitute a theological Grand Tour, spending a year as a Hindu monk, and then choosing to spend a month in deep practice of each of the other major religions (and, yes, the month he investigated Islam just so happened to be Ramadan). In a full-circular swish of fate, it would be back in the UK that the Dharma of the Buddha would reveal themselves to Mark as the path for him.
In the teachings of Rob Burbea, Mark saw an interpretation of Buddhism that, in his words, “realised everything I wanted to realise”. Burbea offered a reorientation of Buddhist practice. Readers wondering how practitioners of a religion reputed for its internalised serenity – passivity even – find themselves atop Tube trains fighting for the planet are a step ahead, and Mark has no hesitation in acknowledging this:
“There’s really not a lot in the Buddhist teachings about engaging with the world”, he says. Classical Buddhism, Mark tells me, holds that human perception of the world is so partial as to be practically illusory. But it offers a balm to the perennial suffering of existence through an internalised revolution in one’s consciousness, not through a social or political one. The Pali Canon, the earliest Buddhist scripture, is “very clear that what the Buddha talks about is getting out of this world through transcendence”.
So Mark was lured by an updated, socially engaged Buddhism 2.0? Not just awakened, but a-wokened? Not quite. Drawing partly from the Tibetan Madhyamaka School and its dharma (teachings) on self-emptying, Burbea suggests that the relief of internal suffering might not be the only lens through which to set sights on spiritual attainment, but that there are infinite lenses, through which we can open whole new avenues of sacredness and beauty. Mark animatedly tells me of the value of viewing the universe through the eyes of, say, a psychotherapist or an Islamic mystic or anything that “may free things up in your heart and mind, and at the point where it stops working you can put it down again and pick up something else”. The lens of environmentalism became a spiritual bedrock for Burbea himself, even writing to the world’s foremost dharma teachers imploring them to stop flying.
It would eventually be this latter lens that Mark found the most “soulmaking” - the ultimate spiritual litmus test in Burbea’s dharma - but not for some years. When other followers formed the Dharma Action Network for Climate Engagement (DANCE…and yes, they do literally dance at meetings) in 2013, he joined them and went on a few marches. But it still appeared futile within the vast workings of Buddhist cosmology: “just making changes in samsara, the illusion" and ultimately "not what spiritual life’s about.” It was only last year that “the penny dropped” and he came to believe that Buddhist, or any other spiritual practice “can, could and should” involve engaging with the world, as illusory as it may be. “Even if this is all God’s dream – isn’t there something in us that would want it to be a beautiful dream?”
Melanie also took many a step through the motions of social and environmental activism before she felt led to truly throw herself into the cause. Although teenage boredom and doctrinal dissent in early adulthood drove her from the Catholic Church she was raised in, she inherited from Catholicism generally and her Goan father particularly a strong sense of social justice, largely expressed in voluntary work for Christian Aid. But there was always a disconnect between what she could do and what she could achieve: “none of it really seemed to do much… It was just something that you did because that’s what socially minded people did”.
Unlike Mark – who can recall sitting bolt upright among the bowed heads at assembly prayer at age 8 – Melanie is not a natural rebel. “I was very conformist” she smiles, when probed about her teenage years. She worked hard at school, studied economics at (where else?) LSE and went on to become a barrister, specialising in families & children law.
“Led by your social conscience?” I foolishly propose. No, she says smiling again, and explains it happened purely by accident, or rather by where she got tenancy which is how these things work, or at least did at that time.
Melanie’s route to embracing XR is a fittingly lawyerly one. Having first seen their now ubiquitous Holocene logo, at a People's Vote march and mistaken it for having anarchist associations (an instant turn-off, having always viewed a stateless society as “a recipe for disaster”), she was confronted as so many others were by the dedication of the Extinction Rebels in April on her way to work. Those of us who doubt the wisdom of XR’s strategy of getting large numbers of people arrested, are faced with at least one counter-argument in Melanie’s experience:
“As a lawyer you’re always curious about why people might be being arrested…it sounds so corny if I say it but I had this enormous sense that God was saying to me…that I shouldn’t be on that side of the line, I should be with those people. So I walked across the police line into there, wearing my suit which set me out from the rest of the crowd quite a lot and I’ve never stopped.”
It’s hard not be affected by the image of this suited legal eagle, faced with a choice between the forces of temporal order and the call of spiritual atonement, striding boldly past Caesar and toward God. Her conviction that this was indeed divine calling is matched only by her very British downplaying of it: “I’d just walked into a crowd of people, and I was just another person.”
This ability to pinpoint a eureka moment, raising environmentalism from simply part of the ideological furniture to sole rallying standard, is common to all those I’ve spoken to; the harried, trudging road to Emmaus obliterated by Damascene clarity. For Mark, like Melanie, it was an unambiguously metaphysical affair: it came at his first direct action at Ende Gelande, a coal mine in Germany.
“It just blew me away…there’s so much love and cooperation and goodness, I thought this is so much what I need to be doing and thanks to [Burbea's] soul-making teaching this is what I can be doing… yes, yes, yes, my whole being is saying yes!”
Shulamit too can identify hers, although perhaps fittingly for a Jew it is less of a conversion experience. It was simply watching an XR video in October 2018 that brought home the convulsive gravity of climate change. That spurred her into attending the XR Declaration of Rebellion on Hallowe’en where she was surprised to see many faith leaders among the speakers. This prompted an impromptu delivery of a Hebrew song to the assembled Rebels – a moment she now thinks of as “the seed” of XR Jews. If so, the flowering came in spring; around eighty people attended a ‘climate Seder’ in Parliament Square during the April Rebellion (which coinciding both with Pesach and Holy Week), organised by Shulamit and her fellow founders. It featured a reading of ‘Ten Climate Plagues’ and a symbolic red hot chilli added to the traditional “bitter herbs” (Exodus 12:8).
Faith and activism have always gone hand in hand for Shulamit. “I see my ethical self and my Jewish self as being very closely intertwined,” she says, toying with her Magen David. Raised in the North Finchley Reform Synagogue, she invokes the Jewish concept of tikkun olam – used broadly by Progressive Jews like Shulamit to mean ‘social action’ – in an impassioned justification of climate rebellion as “a Jewish act… we have the weight of our tradition behind us as we experience it and understand it and live it that compels us to act in this way”. She supports this with an outline of the essentially agrarian nature of the Jewish festival calendar, notably Shmita and Sukkot.
There are legitimate disagreements between Orthodox and Reform Jews over the pre-eminence given by the latter to tikkun olam, but it’s hard to deny there is a coherent scriptural logic to their environmentalism. If, as some sceptics claim, XR constitutes a new millenarian cult, where does the variety of religious literacy of much of its faith-based contingent fit in? My meeting with Melanie commenced in the shadowy courtyard of the London Jesuit Centre, where she is studying for an MA in Theology. She has a well-developed personal creed that no doubt would be considered heretical for much of Christian history, but if so she’d be in the company of Marcus Borg and Fr Richard Rohr, just two of the prominent theologians that inform her beliefs. Christ is “the paradigm rebel” for Melanie but also only the second earthly incarnation of God, the first being creation itself: “because nothing existed before, the world must be made of God”.
This leaves me wondering however, about Mark. His rich and complex understanding of Buddhism and Burbea’s emphasis on soul-making meant it was consistent for him to eventually drop the Buddhist lens altogether, make a “clean break” from the practice and his teacher and devote himself wholly to activism. This came only after many weeks of emotional deliberation, and with the (literal) blessing of the very ill Burbea, “with a cheeky glint in his eye”. From a Judeo-Christian perspective, the idea that you can gently lay down a religious commitment in order to fulfil the life lessons it has taught you is a staggeringly counterintuitive one. But it is probably part of the wider spiritual knowledge I suspect the East has to share with the West.
My query about Mark is, if the religious impulse – clearly strong in this one – is no longer being channelled into religion, then is it now being channelled into XR? Mark is relaxed, generous, funny and hugs rather than handshakes when I meet him. But am I wrong to see something else in this clip of him explaining his stance on the Jubilee line? Is there something of the unsmiling zeal of the convert about his demeanour as he justifies means with ends?
Even if that’s the case, we should be clear that both Mark and the movement he is part of remain bound to non-violent resistance. If XR is a religion, it isn’t one with a persecutory attitude toward the uninitiated. Melanie, despite being convinced into XR by the actions of the Met, tells me about Christian Climate Action’s decision to hold daily eucharist particularly in areas with heavy police presence, because “there was a sense that those were the spaces that God was needed on both sides.” It's also a broad church: both she and Shulamit are very keen for XR to bring more conservatives into the movement.
Environmentalist activists can be in tents.
It seems a more pertinent question to ask what the religious elements of XR can teach us about our religions. From Mark’s experience with Buddhism, and for that matter Hinduism, I draw yet more evidence for my growing awareness that Eastern faiths have a more expansive and inclusive window to God than traditional Christianity. In India he was affected – as I have been – by the inclusion of Jesus and Buddha as genuine avatars of divinity. But Rob Burbea’s dharma is something new to me: is it part of a wider trend toward a more socially engaged Buddhism?
Most of Melanie’s theology is fairly familiar to me, but still too few are aware of the option of her experiential and non-literal interpretation of Christianity. She doesn’t accept the orthodox doctrine of salvation: “I have a completely different view of the way that God works…it’s a redemptive view and redemption is completely different from salvation.” If the Resurrection symbolises something subtler than salvation then there is no imperative to steer souls away from the hellfires. In other words, a more all-encompassing Christianity is available, ergo more like Buddhism. Meanwhile Buddhism, in developing its socially engaging strands, is becoming more like Christianity.
It’s easy to overamplify these trends. For me more research is needed on Burbea’s ‘meditator as revolutionary’ type of Buddhism, and the general failure of modern liberalising churches in contrast to thriving traditionalist and evangelical ones is so well-documented as to be bordering cliché. But if Extinction Rebellion and other broad-based movements become new fora for the sharing of ideas, we could see a continuation of this merging toward a ‘religious centre’, and an era of theological cross-dressing might be dawning, as we leave the age of political cross-dressing defined by Blairism and Clintonism.
But does that golden mean already exist in Judaism? Blessed with the rich tradition of charity and righteousness that it would bequeath to Christianity but unburdened by the impulse to proselytise, progressive Jews seem to be sitting pretty. They avoid the navel-gazing of Buddhism and the curtain-twitching of Christianity.
“I’ve pretty much always felt lucky to be part of my community,” says Shulamit. But she means specifically Reform Judaism, specifically the North Finchley Synagogue, where she grew up led in service by an inspirational female rabbi, and in song by a female cantor. Part of why Shulamit did not rebel against her religious upbringing was she saw little to rebel against. There is of course the small matter of 613 commandments but we pass over this, and my understanding of how Reform Judaism approaches its 'problem passages' will have to wait for another (hopefully not so long) piece. In any case, this is something many Christians also wrestle with, not least Melanie.
But it could be Judaism's reputation as a non-proselytising faith as unfavourable as it is propitious toward it becoming the progressive faith du jour. Would new-comers feel truly welcome in a faith known as reserved for ‘the Chosen People’? If they come to Reform Judaism it seems, perhaps so. Shulamit’s father, a half-Welshman from Wolverhampton was a convert to Judaism. In light of that, maybe even a conservative could join XR.
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