Christian perspectives on climate change. An eco-theological reading of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

The exploitation of the natural environment has been linked by many scholars to cultural and religious worldviews. Lynn White Jr. attributes the origins of nature’s abuse to medieval Western Christianity, arguing that the Biblical account of Creation is fundamentally anthropocentric and thereby facilitates the misuse of the natural world. Numerous scholars have sought to revisit Christian doctrine to demonstrate its compatibility with environmental concern. Furthermore, theologians across various Christian denominations have endeavoured to show that a proper, spiritual understanding of faith necessarily fosters a respectful attitude towards nature. The aim of this article is to further demonstrate that the Western mentality did not regard humanity as entitled to destroy nature for its own purposes, but rather recognised that human flourishing was closely linked to the nurturing of the environment. The starting point will be Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, in which human beings and nature are shown to thrive only in mutual harmony. A more complex relationship between humanity and the natural world is depicted in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, where nature becomes a mirror that reflects humanity’s savage inclinations, which can only be restrained by Christian moral order. The destruction of nature, therefore, is not merely the result of an anthropocentric pursuit of technological knowledge; rather, it arises from an estrangement from Christian civilisation, which leads to the rejection of reason and of any civilising purpose.