Church and Climate Change in Counterpoint: An Ethnography of Environmental Engagements within the Danish People's Church

This thesis explores what was at stake for church actors as the demand and desire to respond to climate change travelled in and through the Danish People’s Church in the years 2020 to 2022. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis depicts a period in the life of this national church in which the problem of climate change became a shared matter of concern. What kind of matter it was, however, was disputed and the thesis lays out some of the efforts church actors made to define as well as respond to it. As such, the thesis describes the practices and perspectives of various actors in the church – pastors, deans, gardeners, project managers, and energy consultants – as they engage in “greening” the Church. It shows how grappling with the problem of climate crisis actualized other, already established problems within the Church – such as that of an unresolved state-church relation, a distant God, and an ambivalent Protestant relationship to the material. The thesis shows that engaging with climate change incites church actors to question, undo, but also retain some of the key distinctions that are understood to organize the Church and Christianity. Hence, in the thesis it is demonstrated how distinctions such as those between religion and politics, the material and the immaterial, the human and the non-human, and God and the world, are questioned, negotiated, and the relation between the terms potentially reconfigured in the course of church actors’ engagements with climate change. In order to describe the particular dynamics of relating and separating, retaining unity and difference within this process of reconfiguration - this undoing and redrawing of boundaries that it is argued takes place in the various greening efforts within the Church - the concept of counterpoint is evoked.