Critique is an invaluable enterprise of the Christian left. We often define our prophetic aspirations against the seemingly permanent violence we are against. I am speaking here of the violence of racism, human-induced climate change, patriarchy, and economic exploitation. In response, our faith-rooted denunciations often come as “anti-slogans”: anti-capitalist, anti-fossil fuel, anti-racist. Though needed, these negations, especially in public commentary, can trap us in critique, delaying the work of imagining and building a different world.
So what would it look like to construct? It is in this spirit that I had the opportunity to interview Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, professor of theological and social ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union and advisory board member of the Institute for Christian Socialism. We talked about the Building a Moral Economy project (Fortress Press), a book series which brings together scholars and practitioners to imagine a morally-grounded economy for today. Moe-Lobeda has written the first volume, exploring what a just economy would look like when grounded in the conviction of God’s fundamental love for the world. Moe-Lobeda’s book (Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage) is the first in a series that fleshes out the implications of a moral economy for climate justice, water, housing, and food, and explores the religious roots of such a transition.
In our conversation we discuss the inspirations behind the project, the relationship between the local and global dimensions of the economy, and how capitalism damages even those who benefit materially from it. I asked her about the importance of religion to this vision and what a moral economy would look like in the concrete. “Though the obstacles are astoundingly huge to building moral economies,” says Moe-Lobeda, “it is utterly possible.” She and this series invite us all to engage creatively and collaboratively in bringing moral economies into being.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Bernasol: Cynthia, what was your inspiration behind Building a Moral Economy?
Moe-Lobeda: The Building a Moral Economy project was born about six or seven years ago. I had published a book called Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation. It brought me invitations to speak on every continent other than Antarctica. Among North American audiences, many recognized the economy as having terrible effects—from destroying ecosystems and people to creating the wealth gap. But these audiences believed nothing could be done about it. There was no hope for anything different. That reverberated with me because it’s not true.
I think the other inspiration for this whole initiative is decades of experience with people on the underside of the global economy as we know it, people who are suffering so much from it. For example: In a small meeting with about six people gathered in his office in San Salvador, the theologian and Jesuit priest, Jon Sobrino said, “In El Salvador, poverty means death, and people are not poor by chance. They’re poor because the economies that make you rich make them poor.” I also remember being with a group of twelve people convened by the World Council of Churches at the United Nations. There, Bishop Bernardino Mandlate from Mozambique introduced himself by saying, “I am a debt warrior,” and then he talked about the blood of African children being all over the food of North American people. The Bishop was referring to money being sucked out of his country into the economies of wealthy nations to pay off the illegitimate debt, when that money was desperately needed to support the wellbeing of his people. Many people like Sobrino and Mandlate made it real to me that we’re damaging people with our economic lives.
Bernasol: I’d like to hear you talk more about the international and global inspiration behind this series. Projects like these can often be rooted in the local—which is important. On the other hand, this framework can miss tracing the local connections to more global realities, for instance, the fact that my life here is dependent on many kinds of exploitation and environmental degradation that are forced on people around the globe.
Moe-Lobeda: One aim of the book is to make the connections between our lives here and the lives of people around the globe who are suffering at the hands of this economy. Building those connections is very much one intention of the book—connections between, say, the life of a white middle class person in the United States and other people in the United States who are suffering from the jaws of predatory capitalism—perhaps through terribly low wages, unaffordable health care, or toxified air in neighborhoods adjacent to coal or oil refineries. Although, I would argue that we all are damaged by predatory capitalism, in different ways.
Bernasol: So even those who benefit from some privileges that are bestowed to them through capitalism are alienated in a fundamental sense.
Moe Lobeda: I would say that’s true. I’m really struck by the idea of “moral damage”—the damage done to people when we are forced to live against our values. I think about many relatively economically secure people who realize that the people who grew their food or the people who made their shirts in a sweatshop in Bangladesh are tremendously exploited, or the people who receive low wages so that we can get cheap products and corporate executives can accumulate excessive wealth. But many people just don’t see an alternative, and just go on with it. There has got to be some degree of soul diminishing or soul searing in that—even on a subconscious level.
Bernasol: I think that language of moral damage is really helpful. Could you also share about the decision to include the books that touch upon issues such as food, water, housing and climate change?
Moe Lobeda: It’s important to identify and work with the things that hit people in the heart and are related to their lives. I chose food because we all eat and because industrial agriculture is endangering earth’s capacity to continue producing food. It’s damaging soil. It’s damaging the climate. The very mechanisms that produce our food are part of destroying the earth’s life-generating capacity. We can do so much to heal our production and consumption of food, such as moving to primarily local and regional agriculture. I believe this is possible.
Most people in the United States who are distraught by the climate crises perhaps don’t recognize that millions are already dying from it. But we need to know that. And I also think it’s really important to make the links between the climate crisis and racism in the U.S., so the book on climate is written by an author team of a Black man and a White woman—both activists and ordained clergy who dialogue throughout the book. One focus of all of the books is looking at how white supremacy and racism intersect with the existential realities of people’s lives—housing, food, climate, water.
Bernasol: You frame the economy in primarily religious and ethical terms, even though we’re taught to think about the economy in terms of abstractions. People say, for instance, that the economy is good if GDP is high. Or, we think about the economy in terms of exchange and profit. But you bring your theory of the economy down to earth by thinking it through religion. Why is it important to not think about the economy in the abstract terms that have been traditionally passed down to us?
Moe-Lobeda: The abstract terms make it feel like the economy is on a different plane than our lives and our relationships. I think my movement to frame it in religious terms really comes from my ongoing fascination with a central moral teaching of major faith traditions, which has to do with how we treat other people.
In the monotheistic traditions, it’s God’s commandment—which is also an invitation and promise—to “love your neighbor as yourself.” What on earth does that mean in our context today? Let’s start with what it does not. It does not mean primarily a good feeling or kindness. It doesn’t pertain only to interpersonal relationships. This calling to love pertains also to the social structures in which our lives are entwined, especially the economic structures. And there’s a reason for that—economies shape our relationships with neighbors. My economic life determines and impacts so many more people than my interpersonal life impacts. I impact neighbors by what I buy, by where my savings are invested. If my savings are invested in a bank that is funding fossil fuels, and those fossil fuels are destroying neighbors through floods, droughts, raging wild fires and rising seas, then my life is impacting those people through my economic actions. That’s why the Hebrew Bible is so laden with material about economic life.
This structural implication of love and compassion doesn’t apply only to the monotheistic traditions. Dharmic traditions also are based on the call to compassion, and some—such as engaged Buddhism—live out that calling through both personal relationships and social structures.
So, for example, under chattel slavery in the U.S., if one’s neighbor was being beaten and abused as a slave, love and compassion did not just mean binding up the wounds of the enslaved person. It meant working to abolish slavery. Systems impact neighbors. For this reason, economic systems are, in a very deep sense, matters of religion and spirituality. Spirituality involves heeding God’s Spirit of life giving-love. If I’m betraying that by my economic life, then my spirituality is messed up. That is some of why I frame the economy as a religious and spiritual matter.
Bernasol: Progressives and leftists can often be critical of the role that religion plays in trying to build a more just world, often for good reason. But you understand religion as a powerful moral force for social transformation. What do you think about these ambiguous dimensions of religion, especially where religion sustains the immoral structures that guide our lives?
Moe Lobeda: Anyone who’s drawing upon religion for progressive ends, must also acknowledge that religion—and particularly Christianity because it’s been so aligned with intense power structures—has served the causes of death and destruction. It’s been a tool to support chattel slavery, fascism, the Inquisition, the genocide of Indigenous peoples on many continents through colonialism, and other atrocities.
There was a time when that was all I saw about religion. I left Christianity for some years because I was so infuriated by that trajectory. One important part of my journey back to the faith was a feminist, New Testament scholar. She pointed out that the word “tradition” in the New Testament is first used as a verb, and it means “to pass on,” as to pass on the gospel, to witness to. But it has another meaning: “to betray.” When Judas betrayed Jesus into the hands of the Romans, the verb was “traditioned” him. I thought that made so much sense. The faith tradition is going to pass on the good news and betray it. This helped me to recognize that both exist together. And I realized that the last thing I wanted to do is just be caught up in critiquing the betrayals and forget the beautiful, subversive, life-giving power of religion, including Christianity.
Some scholars—Karen Armstrong is one—argue that the enduring faith traditions that were born in the Axial age of about the 8th to 3rd centuries BCE, were actually born of an impulse to generate more compassionate forms of human life together in response to exploitative economies that were arising. Religions called forth an allegiance to a greater good than just the self. Judaism, of course, was one of those. And then Judaism’s offspring, Christianity and Islam, took that up also. Many voices in Christianity have cried out against the wealthy exploiting poor people. St. Basil and St. Ambrose of the 4th century, for instance. Ambrose says that the rich man is a thief. Martin Luther fiercely critiqued the rising economy that would later become capitalism because it damaged impoverished people. He said, in fact, that a Christian must not buy up a good when the price is low and sell when it’s high because this hurts the poor who then can’t afford it. Whew, compare that to the current global economy! And the history of Christian socialism is strong in Europe and in the U.S., and of course, in Latin America also. It’s just become so real to me that while religion has betrayed the astounding, radiant, life-giving good that it is meant to communicate, it also has supported that good. If the Spirit of the living God lives within us, and the Spirit of the living God is one of justice-seeking earth-honoring love, then we better drink from that Spirit.
Bernasol: If I were to ask what a moral economy looks like today in your context, what would that look like? And what do you think it would take to get there?
Moe-Lobeda: To me, a moral economy has three defining features: it is ecologically sound, socially equitable, and democratic. Pragmatically, that translates into many shifts, and I’ll zoom in here on a few just to illustrate.
One is an energy transition. A moral economy will move away from fossil fuels and instead rely on renewable energies. And that transition must be guided by a firm lens of racial and economic equity using the model of “just transition.” I warn against and reject “green colonialism” and “blue colonialism” that recreate colonial patterns of extraction and exploitation—such as mining rare minerals for electric car batteries and solar panels under exploitative and ecologically degrading conditions, building large-scale dams on Indigenous lands and displacing communities, and offshore wind or wave-energy projects that disrupt local ecosystems or displace small-scale fishing communities. Moral economy cannot do that. This means that, for high consuming people and societies, our energy transition will be not just to renewables, but also to far less energy consumption.
Another shift will be in food systems. Agriculture will be primarily local and regional, and only secondarily global or cross-continental. So, to illustrate, instead of importing apples from Chile into Washington State (an apple producing state), or trucks hauling Florida oranges west while California oranges are hauled east, we would rely first on nearby production. The carbon footprint of our current agricultural system is absurd.
Yet another shift will be a re-orientation of business. Business has a vitally important role to play by shifting from an assumed single bottom line which is financial to a triple bottom line: financial, ecological, and social. And also by the movement into employee-owned business, and small-scale local and regional business. With a triple bottom line, a corporation would pay for the social and ecological costs of its impacts, including the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. This would vastly reduce ecological degradation and worker exploitation. And imagine if, as a society, we rejected the idea that vast wage differentials are okay! In Norway, people worry when the highest-paid worker earns fourteen times more than the lowest. In the U.S., the gap is often 700 to 1. That gap is absurd; nothing says we need to consider it acceptable. A moral economy would look more like Norway’s wage differential, or that of Spain’s Mondragón cooperatives where the largest wage differential is 14 to 1.
These are some features of a moral economy. Some global ecumenical networks call it a “life-giving” or “life-flourishing” economy, or “economies for life.”
How would this play out in people’s everyday lives? Transition to a moral economy requires and invites change in three terrains of our lives. One change is in our behaviors and lifestyles: what and where we buy things, what we eat, how we transport ourselves, etc. A second is change in social structures achieved through such things as public policy, legal action, and investment changes. And third, the transition requires wonderful worldview changes: rethinking, for example, what the earth actually is and who humans are. Is the earth what we have been taught to assume, a resource to use for maximizing profit? Or is it, as the biblical witness claims, a beloved creation of God, called to know and understand God, witness to God, praise God and even embody God’s steadfast justice-seeking love? I just about fell over backwards when I re-read Psalm 33:5 and Romans 1:20 about two years ago. The Psalmist insists that the earth, the land itself, actually is an abode of God’s steadfast love! And Romans tells us that creation has been knowing and understanding God since the beginning. Humans, we know, appeared very late in time, as if on the last word of the last page of the last volume of a ten-volume series. Creation has been in relationship with God all along, eons before we humans appeared on the scene, which means our first task is to listen, not to exploit. This recognition reshapes how we see the world. If the created order is not what we thought, then that shift in worldview is as essential as changes in our social structures and behaviors. Another worldview change is to understand economies as webs of relationship, rather than as abstractions or as means of maximizing wealth for a few.
I love seeing how changes in all three terrains—lifestyle practices, social systems, and worldviews—already are underway in so many venues around the globe, although not highly visible in the public eye. The Building a Moral Economy book series and digital resources build on all three terrains. And all of the authors then develop “ten fingers on the hands of healing change”—ten forms of action—for people to go about this life-giving transition to ecological, equitable, democratic economies. We invite anyone to visit https://buildingamoraleconomy.org/ to learn about the books and authors, and to access the toolkits of resources that accompany the books.
Bernasol: That is a beautiful vision.
Moe-Lobeda: Though the obstacles to building a moral economy are astoundingly huge, it is utterly possible. We have the current economy because of human actions and decisions. Anything done by human actions and decisions can be undone and redone better. All over the world, people are working toward economies that are ecological, equitable, and democratic. In this book series, we feature those people and introduce readers to them.
Colton Bernasol is the managing editor of The Bias.
Image Credit: Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
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