Sacred Resistance – Book Review
Sacred Resistance: Eco-Activism and the Rise of New Spiritual Communities. Mark Clatterbuck (editor), April 2025. Orbis Books, ISBN 9781626985988, 272 pages. RRP £26.99
The foreword to this collection of stories of eco-activism in America is provided by Winona LaDuke, a Native American of the Anishinaabe people. She points out that although Indigenous peoples make up only 4% of the world’s population they care for 75% of its biodiversity. She explains that we are in a time of deep conflict between worldviews: a land- and water-based worldview versus the greed of a Wiindigo industrial society where technology has replaced creation at the centre of the paradigm.
Mark Clatterbuck’s introduction explains that this is a book about spiritual communities engaged in creative, impactful, non-violent campaigns of environmental activism. He details his own involvement in Lancaster Against Pipelines (LAP) and Indigenous protests at Standing Rock. The primary concern of the book is eco-activism, not ecotheology. The book outlines five resistance movements and five themes. The campaigns are the Anishinaabe-led #Stop Line 3; the Adorers of the Blood of Christ and LAP, a fracked gas pipeline in Pennsylvania; the Manual Kea Thirty Meter Telescope Blockade in Hawai’i; Interspiritual Resistance to the Atlantic Coast Pipeline in Virginia and the Earth Quaker Action Team and mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. The themes are: the Sacred; Rituals of Resistance; Intersectionality; New Spiritual Communities and Nonviolence. These campaigns demonstrate spiritually, ethnically and regionally diverse eco-activism that has reached a critical mass of participants and succeeded in stopping or delaying the threats.
The Anishinaabe campaign was a women-led movement of resistance based on traditional beliefs and ritual honouring the Earth, with other faith communities joining them. Although the campaign did not succeed, the activists were acquitted of criminal offences, with the judge citing previous wrongs against Indigenous people. The Catholic order, the Adorers, built a Chapel of Resistance in a cornfield belonging to them. They were unsupported by the male Catholic hierarchy, but other people, including LAP members, saw the resistance to the pipeline as a spiritual work, Although they did not win, the Chapel still acts as a place of pilgrimage. Native Hawai’ins, motivated by beliefs and rituals rooted in the natural world, sought to protect a sacred mountain from a huge telescope. Though the situation is still ongoing, campaigners believe that they are taking back the culture which was stolen from them by Americans. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was resisted by an alliance of Yogis (the Yogaville Community) an African-American Baptist congregation and those describing themselves as interspiritual. These unlikely collaborators were able to work effectively together and delay the pipeline’s construction for six years, connecting ecological disaster with other social wrongs including wealth disparity, poverty, genocide, racism and militarisation. The Earth Quaker Action Team targeted PNC Bank, itself with Quaker roots, which financed mountaintop removal in Appalachia. After a campaign employing Quaker practices and principles, including silent worship at protests, they succeeded in persuading PNC to stop financing the projects.
The epilogue is a call by Mark Clatterbuck to join the work of sacred resistance: to act boldly, to use joy as a superpower and to be disciplined in the principle of nonviolence and right conduct. At a time when peaceful protest and direct action are under threat as never before, this book is a timely and welcome reminder of what can be achieved if we come together in the work of sacred resistance. I would thoroughly recommend it to those contemplating action and for those who want to know more about why people are led to act.
Linda Wickham
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