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Abstract
Adults across the U.S. are having fewer or no biological children in part due to worries about climate change and population growth. This project investigates how progressive Christian adults are increasingly grappling with and responding to these “eco-reproductive” concerns and argues that both individual and collective moral interventions are needed. Within Christian contexts, individuals can challenge traditional notions of family by sustaining relationships of care and responsibility that extend beyond biological reproduction, namely by taking up creative vocations such as godparenting, youth mentoring, foster or adoptive parenting, and communal child-rearing. Yet collective agents like governments and corporations are also responsible for ensuring that reproductive conditions are sustainable – a possibility rendered more difficult by influential fossil fuel lobbies and massive government subsidies to oil and gas companies. In the face of unambitious and inconsistent governmental efforts to address climate change, Christian communities can work to hold collective agents accountable by leveraging their environmental values, intergenerational networks, and community organizing infrastructures. Taken together, these individual and collective interventions generate promising possibilities for human and nonhuman flourishing in the face of ongoing climate threats, namely by enhancing viable futures in familial, religious, and political contexts. As such, this research offers new contributions to both religious and secular environmental humanities disciplines. While religious ethicists often avoid difficult discussions about eco-reproductive concerns, this project addresses them by identifying innovative moral responses that emerge from within Christian contexts. In so doing, this research also contributes to secular environmental humanities literatures, as environmental philosophers and science and technology scholars often fail to account for the ways in which religious communities can be sites for moral creativity and political involvement in the face of accelerating climate threats.