Michael Northcott

BP, the Blowout and the Bible Belt: Why Conservative Christianity Does Not Conserve Creation

Advocates of the ‘post-secular’ propose that religion is returning as a world-shaping force in the present century. The growth of a dialogue between religion and ecological science is seen as strong evidence of this return. However religious responses to the catastrophic oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, and responses to long-standing oil pollution in the Niger Delta region, do not indicate a clear correlation between conservative Christianity and biological conservation. At the root of the ecological crisis - and of the oil industry’s continuing ecological destructiveness — is the late medieval cosmology of the earth as a secular mechanism. But the deistic tenor of conservative Christianity underwrites rather than resists this cosmology. So too does an instrumentalist and pragmatic project to colonise religion as ‘social capital’ in the scientific conservation project. A partnership between ecology and religion that does not resist the metaphysical and spiritual origins of the crisis will not constrain the ecologically destructive path of fossil-fuelled political economy.

‘An Angel Directs the Storm’: The Religious Politics of American Neoconservatism

Abstract In his inaugural speech, President George W. Bush suggested that the mission of America to spread freedom and democracy in the world is a divinely authored mission. The intention first announced in Bushs inaugural to globalize an American Christian vision of freedom and democracy, and of free market capitalism, reflects the theological underpinnings of the neo-conservativism of the Bush administration. In this article I trace the remarkable continuities between the neo-conservative political theology of Bush and his acolytes and more mainstream Niebuhrian approaches to democracy and the ‘manifest destiny’ of America. I then subject the emergence of an American imperium, and the political theology associated with it, to a critique in dialogue with early Christian critics of Roman Empire, and with the Christian pacifist tradition as recently retrieved by North American theological ethicists John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas.

Parochial Ecology on St Briavels Common: Rebalancing the Local and the Universal in Anglican Ecclesiology and Practice

The rise of the global market economy has advanced forms of centrist, corporatist and statist rule that are insensitive to local indicators that this novel social order is ecologically, and socially, unsustainable. For many political theologians, and for secular political ecologists, the related crises of species extinction and climate change, combined with structural economic crisis, require a fundamental relocalization of the global economy and of the harvesting of natural resources. The contest between the political economy of global ‘free’ trade and a relocalized economy and polity bears analogies with debates around the relation between the local and the universal in Christian ecclesiology. In the eucharistic body politics of Saint Paul Christian communion is focused in the eucharistic gathering. However, centrist tendencies in ecclesiastical polity emerged in fourth-century accounts of the universal church. The subsequent doctrine of the primacy of Peter gave a powerful push to centrist over localist accounts of the esse of the Church in the West, and the contest between local and universal in Anglican and Catholic ecclesiologies continues to this day. Orthodox theologians Zizioulas and Afanassieff, describe and fill out the doctrinal implications of a primitive ecclesiology in which ‘the eucharist makes the church’. 2 This recovery of a local eucharistic ecclesiology offers valuable resources for thinking about the nature of communion between Anglicans in a Communion increasingly riven by controversy, and for thinking about the nature of the parish in a Church of England prone in the last forty years to centrist and managerial conceptions of the Church, and to the denigration of the local parish church as the esse of the ministry and mission of the Church in England.

Artificial persons against nature: environmental governmentality, economic corporations, and ecological ethics

Despite the 194 nation‐state signatories to the global Convention on Biological Diversity, the conservation effort is failing to halt an ongoing spiral of decline in most habitats and ecological communities on land and ocean. Environmental ethicists argue that the failure to halt the unsustainable predation on the ecosystems that sustain industrial civilization is indicative of a moral as well as a scientific crisis. Principal ethical interventions in ecology include the ascription of value to species and ecosystems, wilderness ethics, and ecological virtue. Ecological virtue ethics identifies agency, character, institutions, and practices as crucial to moral formation and outcomes. However, the dominant role of the economic corporation in ecological destruction subverts a virtues approach. Corporations as fictive persons will not learn ecological virtue absent of legal and regulatory reform and the ecological education of business leaders and owners.

The Parable of the Talents and the Economy of the Gift

I was walking in Edinburghs Botanic Gardens, enjoying the rich colours of the trees in all their autumnal glory set off as they were by a wonderful crisp clear blue sky, when on a small hill studded with chestnut, beech, maple and oak trees I met the family of a colleague who is an economist and whose children had almost completely buried him in leaves. I found this an engaging sight and not just because of the joy of seeing friends so evidently enjoying each other out of doors. Resources are only really interesting to economists when they have the potential through monetary activity and market behaviour of becoming scarce, for only such resources are capable of generating surplus value. Now leaves of course are a resource, which in the autumn are by no means scarce. And yet here was an economist deriving one of the most valuable experiences that this life has to offer the bonding and intimacy of parent and child through the mediation of a resource which so long as there are trees is unlikely ever to be recognized as valuable to an economist.

Neoliberal (Mis)Management of Earth-Time and the Ethics of Climate Justice

In this chapter I will argue that present day forms of economic accounting and management are changing the public and private representation of costs and benefits of consumption and production activities, including those which impact on climate change and energy use. I These foster a culture focused on near-term quantitative targets instead of attending to the intrinsic goods of production and service activities. The resultant short-termist mentality has notable impacts on the ecological sustainability of public and private investments. In this study of faith-based climate activism I show that individuals and communities who commit to ecologically sustainable activities do so primarily not from an accounting frame of near term risks and benefits. Instead they act because of their knowledge of the impacts of climate change on already existing persons, including farmers in developing countries, or climate risks for their own children and grandchildren. This relational frame for responding to environmental risks arguably has more cultural power in fostering sustainability than the narrowly quantitative cost benefit frame fostered by economic neoliberalism.

Whose Danger, Which Climate? Mesopotamian versus Liberal Accounts of Climate Justice

Dangerous climate change was first defined as globally averaged warming of 2° above the pre-industrial average by an economist, not a natural scientist. A global average rise of 2° equates to significantly more climatological effects in some earth regions. Food and energy price rises sparked by rising temperatures and enduring drought in the Middle East and North Africa, combined with increased pumping of ground water, are implicated in the rise of civil conflict, revolution, and war in these regions since 2009. The inability of industrial civilisation to adapt to the climatological limits of the biosphere arises from the refusal of liberal economists and others to recognize that justice is contextual to the boundaried nature of political communities, and to the limits of the earth system. In the history of Western culture, discourses about justice first appear in association with the development of agriculture and irrigation systems in Mesopotamian cultures. Agriculture in the Levant made possible more densely populated societies, and the division of labour. It also permitted the emergence of great inequality and slavery. Hebrew discourses of government and justice evolved which sustained limits on the asymmetric distribution of land and its product in a bordered political community. These discourses also suggest that just land distribution not only makes for solidarity in self-sufficient communities, but for benign climates. Modern liberal theories of justice as procedural, and grounded in political rights and freedoms, miss the antique contextualisation of standards of justice in political and economic communities, and the role of restraints on power and wealth, and territorial limits, in the construction of justice.

Book Review: Biblical Perspectives On Environmental Issues Hilary Marlow, Biblical Prophets: Contemporary Environmental Ethics (Oxford: OUP, 2009. £65.00. pp. 329. ISBN: 978-0-19-956905-2)

It is common to hear British environmental scientists – such as Sir David Attenborough – and some Americans too, blame the Bible for the cavalier way in which Europeans treat the creation, and the creatures with whom they share it. In this book Hilary Marlow sets out to show that the Hebrew Prophets had a rich sense for the value of creation which does not permit of the modern argument – classically advanced by Lynn White Jr in an essay in Science – that the Bible’s account of human power over nature is the root ideological source of the modern ecological crisis. In this book – which originated as a PhD under the direction of John Barton in Oxford – Marlow first sets out the general environmental case that there is an ecological crisis. She then surveys the history of the Christian doctrine of creation arguing – as I and others have done – that the Reformation was a critical moment in the loss of the richer symbolic account of creation that Christianity had sustained – and indeed taken over – from the Hebrew Bible for the first 1500 years of the Christian Era. Marlow then proceeds to an account of the emergent field – in Biblical studies – of ‘ecological hermeneutics’ which originated above all with the prophetic work of the Australian Old Testament scholar Norman Habel. She then gets down to detailed exegetical work in the books of Amos, Hosea and First Isaiah. Setting set aside the usual and tiresome historico-critical approaches to the text Marlow offers a biologically rich and morally sensitive account of the themes of the earth as means of judgement in Amos, the relationality of covenant in Hosea, and the vineyard as image of the people in the land in Isaiah. Drawing on the growing tradition of ecological re-readings of the Old Testament Marlow shows that far from presenting a view of creation in which humans harshly exploit the earth, the earth is treated by the prophets as a divine companion which responds to the divine voice, as a means of divine judgement of the people of God, and as the source of their restoration to salvation. Marlow argues that the range of themes she identifies in these three texts touch A CONCISE INTRODUCTION TO BONHOEFFER

Book Review: In Search of the Common GoodIn Search of the Common Good, ed. MillerPatrick D. and McCannDennis P. (T&T Clark2005), 368 pp, £24.95 hbk

The Africentric lens is a heuristic tool which views gospel truth as experienced in the cultural and socio-political contexts of enslaved people, hence presenting a vision different from Euro-American interpretations of history and ways of understanding God and faith. This implies personal involvement, not just studying and knowing the truth, but doing the truth. Two kinds of black theologies support one another: folk-theology, God-talk and action at the grassroots of a people, and academic Black theology, scholarship needed for research, systematizing concepts, and unmasking the defences of western theological and philosophical presuppositions. As all theologies are contextual, human ways of discovering God in particular situations, the book speaks of colour symbolism and the dichotomy of colour in terms of blackness and whiteness elevated to the status of an ontology in western societies. The concept of the Black Messiah as Suffering Servant turns this dichotomy on its head in inspiring black self-esteem, antiracism and a ‘Messianic vocation of redemptive suffering’. Thus pastoral ministry means with Martin Luther King a comprehensive cultural vocation to transcend negativity in overcoming the gap between black and white by the power of the Holy Spirit in one’s personal life as well as society’s transformation. It implies cooperation on all levels with other faiths around the globe – a mission of humanization in an era of dumbing down life and the gospel.

Book Review: The Global Trinity: Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007.

largely non-territorial, but yet remains implicated in an effort to assert American power and influence around the world. this is an expression of a history of American political thought that is punctuated with claims to world-civilizing service, claims to international mission backed up with the forceful western expansion, war with the philippines, and so on. is this really problematic, though? empires rarely operate without the belief that they are benevolent forces for good (the question of whose good remains critically important). Nelsonpallmeyer does not tackle the theological claims to the ‘good life’, or of the relation of oneness and difference in imperial politics, or the self-deluding and hubristically flattering assumptions inherent in the rather manichaean belief in the purity of ‘us’ who have a mission to civilize ‘them’. instead he pre-eminently provides a useful historical critique that identifies ambiguities in the ‘dangerous virtue’ (p. 21) of the American cause of peacemaking – it proves, in practice, to be recklessly destructive of so many. shocking to many American readers will be the important parallel drawn between Bush’s and Bin Laden’s theological positions. this is a richly suggestive book. however, to be more substantively critical it needs to penetrate deeper. Among other things, it should delve expansively into the cultural ideologies – the ‘myth of America’ especially as it is zealously formed through ‘American exceptionalism’, the ‘American dream’, and the ‘myth of the hero’, for instance, especially as and when these dove-tale into the so-called ‘myth of redemptive violence’. What generates and sustains imperialist instincts is a set of ideologies more comprehensive than the simple greedy quest for power and influence. moreover, the book does not ask penetrating questions of the nature and role of nationalism, even when it is disguised as patriotism. more could be done to critique the theologically foundational impulse that takes shape within a realized eschatology that comes to be expressed in a self-interested purity and manichaean projectionism. this is an impulse that handles complexity, fragility, provisionality, ambiguity and tragedy badly, and yet these are all features characteristic of theologies formed in and through discipleship of the self-giving God in the crucified one. finally, Nelson-pallmeyer should reflect more on michael ignatieff’s empire-lite thesis especially as it impinges on questions concerning the nature of American influence and power in contemporary globalized economic affairs.