Empire, Environment and Religion: God and the Natural World in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

Abstract

This article, using colonial New Zealand as a case-study, and integrating environment, empire and religion into a single analytic framework, contends that Christian and environmental discourses interpenetrated and interacted in irreducibly complex ways during the long nineteenth century. Many of the colonyʼs mostly Protestant settlers interpreted the book of Genesis as giving them responsibility to ʻsubdue and replenishʼ the natural world; dominion theology played an important role in legitimising the improvement projects integral to settler capitalism whose consequences have aroused ambivalence from many modern scholars. Yet some, perhaps many, colonists also believed that they had a duty to take care of the land and its creatures even while transforming it. A commitment to large-scale environmental change could and often did co-exist with interest in and respect for nature. When the unexpected and unwanted consequences of environmental transformation became apparent, as they did shortly after the beginning of organised settlement, concerned Protestant community leaders deployed Christian discourse, biblical images and Protestant ethics along with utilitarian and scientific arguments to mobilise environmental concern and a conservationist conscience.

Acts of God: Continuities and change in Christian responses to extreme weather events from early modernity to the present

“…Another result of this emphasis on human agency and the qualities of worshippers was the emergence of what Beattie and John Stenhouse, again writing on the New Zealand context, have called the “environmental sermon.” In such texts, colonial clergymen encouraged their hearers and readers to adopt more sensitive, responsible and conservationist relationships with the natural world (Beattie and Stenhouse, , p. 433). The task for researchers is to determine the extent to which climatic shocks did indeed prompt a sense of environmental crisis among settler communities, one that transcended gender, class and ethnic differences.…”

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