The story of ecology and Christianities in the land that became known as North America begins long before Christianity was born and long before the term ‘ecology’ or North America existed. The story goes back to the biblical creation stories, their anthropocentric interpretation throughout time and the platonic hierarchical dualism that informed Christianity as it arose from Judaism. The saga continues with the beliefs and practices of Christian communities as those unfolded and changed throughout two millennia in relationship to the Earth. Those beliefs and practices were highly varied. However, by the time Christianity landed on the shores of Turtle Island (as North America was known to many Indigenous peoples), dominant streams of Christianity – including those that arrived as part of the colonisation of the continent – saw the other-than-human aspects of creation as far below humans in the dualistic hierarchy of being that Christianity inherited from platonic philosophy.

Dualism aligned spirit and reason with good and saw matter (including the Earth) as either evil or relatively insignificant compared with humans, as well as having value primarily as resources for human use. The hierarchy placed Earth farthest from God and male human beings of dominant classes at the top and closest to God. Many scholars have argued (beginning with the famous essay by historian of medieval science Lynn White, published in Science) that these assumptions helped lay the groundwork for modernity's relentless onslaught against the other-than-human parts of creation. Eco-feminist scholars have uncovered the extent to which this hierarchy, linking women more closely to the Earth, also linked the domination of woman with the domination of the Earth, sanctifying both.

With the advent of European colonisation and conquest, ‘race’ emerged both as a social construct and as another dimension of the hierarchy. Non-European people ranked lower than Europeans in their inherent worth and rights. Kelly Brown Douglas, in a brilliant essay on American exceptionalism, demonstrates the origins of white supremacy in the first-century tract Germania, penned by the Roman historian Tacitus. This trajectory is integral to the ecology and Christianities story because, as demonstrated by Willie James Jennings and others, the divine mandate to subdue and use the ‘natural world’ was theologically linked to a divine mandate to subdue and conquer dark-skinned people.