One ordinary evening in March 2023, while serving spaghetti at the family dinner table, Timothy Morton experienced a road-to-Damascus moment. “I palpably ‘saw’ that my whole life had been a prodigal-son-style cosmic joke,” the Rice University English professor writes in Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, published earlier this year. “I thought I had been transcending Christianity in the most decisive ways possible, only to find that the last thirty-seven years had been training me to receive a massive (I mean, massive) dose of it.”
Morton, who is 56 and uses they/them pronouns, considered themself a Buddhist for much of their adult life. Between writing 25 books—on subjects ranging from Romantic poetry to ecological philosophy—they had been on a spiritual journey out of a childhood marked by psychological and sexual abuse. In Hell, Morton envisions a Christian ecology—an environmental awareness informed by Jesus’s moral precepts—as a way of finding heaven within the hell of global warming. They also address personal and historical traumas through a dense network of literary, philosophical, and pop culture references. William Blake, the eighteenth-century English poet, printmaker, and heterodox Christian, serves as Morton’s guide through the theological thicket.
I interviewed Morton last week in their book-filled office on the Rice campus. A “White Dudes for Kamala” trucker hat sat on a table nearby. Having spent their life in academia, Morton knows how odd their born-again Christianity seems to left-leaning colleagues and friends. But a series of recent health challenges served as a reminder of personal vulnerability for which Christianity provided the only answer. Acknowledging their own traumas meant slowing down and learning to accept imperfection as the basic condition of life, politics, and religion. “There is a whole kind of amazing, abject, hitting-the-dirt level, the vomit level, about Christianity,” they said, “which seems to me to be incredibly good.”
Texas Monthly: You were born and grew up in England. How do you feel about living in America now?
Timothy Morton: I love living in America, and furthermore, I love living in Texas. It’s an idea. It’s a wonderful idea about neighbors coexisting with each other for no good reason.
Texas Monthly: Is that really what Texas is about? You wouldn’t know it from our state politics.
Morton: I like to see the good in things. When I first arrived here, I was hit by the unspeakable aesthetic wildness of it. Anglos such as myself have actually, on a good day, decided to not just tolerate the other or appreciate the other—that’s more of a California thing—but actually be with the neighbor in some radical way. I’ve never eaten food as good as this in the USA. It’s like people allowed Mexicanness and Cajunness to get in their kitchen and in their tummy. But then there’s the paranoia about that, because this is where fascism lives. But this is where the antidote also lives.
Texas Monthly: That’s interesting, because I’m actually working on a story right now about how if Trump is reelected, Texas will provide a model for some of the authoritarian policies he’s likely to pursue. I mean, the leader of Project 2025 is a Texan. So say more about the antidote.
Morton: You can’t guilt or shame people. It’s too superficial. Fascism is working with the basic horror level of the world, the level which in psychoanalysis is called narcissism. The idea is that we have to exclude the horror. We have to get rid of it. We have to put it in a camp. We have to make it subhuman.
Texas Monthly: Fascism has to do with getting back to some perceived natural state of society, right? The natural order, the natural hierarchy, the organic nation-state.
Morton: The idea is to achieve a kind of purity. But of course this purity is fictional and can only be achieved in a simulated way by incredible acts of violence. You can sit there enjoying your fascist world, because you’re in the privileged class, knowing, or half knowing, that around the corner the people held to be responsible for the horror are being dragged into the street and shot to death in front of their kids. Unfortunately, this is the actual America. “Actual America” is a horror movie about possessing human beings as enslaved people. And the Civil War happened and slavery got abolished, but the legacy of it continues. On that subject, you know, a little bit of guilt and shame never hurt anybody.
Texas Monthly: It seems to hurt some people a lot. Look at the massive backlash to Black Lives Matter, or to the #MeToo movement.
Morton: There’s really only one kind of person who has no guilt or shame, and that person is called a psychopath. They don’t have any guilt. But just look in the mirror. The fact that I’m white is what we call structural racism—the thing I’m not allowed to say in school. But it’s not my fault directly. That’s the fun bit. “Structural” means it’s not your fault. As a Christian, it’s so liberating to admit that one is a sinner. In a way, original sin is the same idea as structural racism. It’s this baked-in, hardwired thing that isn’t your fault. It just is. Acknowledging that there’s something over which I have no power is an incredible relief.
Texas Monthly: What has Christianity brought you that Buddhism didn’t provide?
Morton: Maybe Buddhism really works for some people, but it wasn’t working for me. I was treating it like a gamer. Like, if you do this grind for x number of days, hours, whatever, you can level up into enlightenment. In Esoteric Buddhism, it’s about, “Say this mantra a hundred thousand times and then you can have this day off,” which is called realization. And it started to feel really, really bad. Buddhism is a kind of nontheism. It’s not about, “There is no God.” It’s about, “You don’t have to believe in God.” In a way, it’s more atheist than atheism, because it says it doesn’t matter whether God exists. When I had my born-again experience, I was serving these vegan meatballs to my fourteen-year-old son, Simon. I was thinking, “I’m so cool, I’m so Buddhist, I don’t even have to not believe in God.” And the logical implications of that suddenly clicked with me: “ ‘I don’t have to not believe in God.’ See what that means, Tim?” And suddenly God was there, going, “Hey, I’ve always been here.” Kind of cheekily, and with a huge sense of humor. Which is why I trusted it.
Texas Monthly: You write that it’s not very fashionable to call yourself born again in the circles you inhabit. What would you say to someone reading this interview and thinking, “What does Tim get from Christianity that I’m missing?”
Morton: I actually can’t advertise Christianity. I can’t evangelize anybody. I’ve gone through my whole life thinking, “Well, I may have had a horrible life, but at least I’m not that.” I was doing to other people what people like me see fascists doing. I was thinking of something [like evangelical Christianity] as nasty and abject and horrible, and thinking this abject, nasty thing couldn’t possibly be anything to do with me. “My religious beliefs are pure.” But a lot of atheism is actually a kind of unbelieving in God that is just exactly the thing it’s abjuring.
Texas Monthly: Given the title of your book, I wanted to ask whether we are in hell. I mean, it’s October and the highs have been in the nineties all week. What might a Christian ecology do to help us get out of hell, or at least address global warming?
Morton: I have this instinct to see the good in things. What if you found the best kind of ecological politics and poetics in the last place anybody would have thought to look, which would be in Texas? What if the last place you wanted to look was actually the best place—maybe the only place—you could really find it? This is how I work: “Let’s find the good in this really nasty-seeming thing.” When I left California, my friends were like, “You’re going to Houston? Well, you’re doing the Lord’s work.”
Texas Monthly: Little did they know!
Morton: The horror that they may now be feeling, given the kind of Lord’s work I now appear to be doing.
Texas Monthly: On a day-to-day basis, global warming seems like something we have very little power over. I’m just an individual in Houston, experiencing the extreme heat, wishing I lived somewhere cooler.
Morton: Lots of people like me talk in a way that makes people feel really powerless and evil and stupid. You look at page one of the newspaper, and it might as well be the Book of Revelation: “Giant dragon emerges from boiling ocean.” So immediately, you feel small and stupid. Then you open up the paper and read somebody like me in the editorial page going, “You’re a bad person. You’re not thinking about this; you’re not doing enough.” Did Martin Luther King Jr. stand up and say, “You have no idea how racist you all are”? He said, “I have a dream.” He let people enjoy the possibility of the future. Where is that in environmental speech? Instead, we’re acting like global warming—by trying to heat up people’s hearts and minds, trying to make people enraged and inflamed. We need to literally cool down.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
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