Last year an agnostic friend of mine attended a citywide, interdenominational gathering of progressive Christians in Nashville to talk strategy concerning climate change and how to relay a message of environmental stewardship to the attendees’ respective congregations.
As part of an exercise, participants were split into smaller groups to brainstorm ideas. After a few minutes, my friend asked how their congregations might react to a critique of capitalism and its relation to climate change, to which, she was greeted with silence.
Finally, someone spoke up and said that he thought this would be too far off the subject. The rest of the group showed signs of agreement. Indeed, one person objected on the grounds that criticizing capitalism would be on par with criticizing democracy.
Keep in mind that these were some of the more progressive folks in town. Nevertheless, any solution that involved challenging our current economic institutions was simply out of the question.
Upon being told about this the following day, I was struck by a few things.
Demonization of the left is still tremendously effective. Here you had a group of people who cared enough about environmental justice that they were willing to stand out in front of their friends and family, but not enough to risk being labeled anti-capitalist.
Moreover, in the context of climate change, human activity most certainly translates into human economy. The absence of capitalism from any discussion related to global warming is like addressing teen pregnancy and not wanting to bring up sex.
It seemed to me that the protocol was to talk about the symptoms but not the disease, all of which is not too surprising, considering that religion and economics have both suffered from the same illness.
Any honest critique of capitalism would require an honest critique of hierarchy within our mainstream institutions. For obvious reasons, this is unacceptable within many religious circles.
Yet if we really care about avoiding environmental disaster, it’s going to require expanding our realm of what is considered acceptable discourse. It’s going to require looking at the problem through a different lens.
This means talking about more than just religion. It means talking about big business. I personally believe our environmental problem is a simple one of putting profits over people. In other words, Satan is not the enemy. No-holds-barred capitalism is the enemy.
If we can only talk about climate change in terms of the Bible, the job is just not going to get done.
Furthermore, when indoctrination is so strong that progressive Christians are afraid to be associated with the left, there’s more to fight against than just global warming.
Lonnie Ray Atkinson runs the blog projectquestion.org.
