Commodify What's Sacred; Sacralize the Profane

When the time came for Barry Shelley and me to lead our session at the Solidarity Economy Network Forum (2009), I told how I was coming to see that Spirit was inherent in economics. I elaborated by pointing out how economies continually propose to satisfy not only our material needs, but the yearnings of our souls. Economic activity brings meaning to much of what we do. Advertisements often speak to our anxieties and feelings of inadequacy, and then proclaim the good news that their commercial product will satisfy our needs and longings.

I also pointed out how economies can take what is ordinary and promote it into a cultural icon, elevating a widget no one needs to sacred status beyond its real value. This sacralizing of the ordinary gives economics a sacramental power exercised by religions. Such sacralizing adds a numinous quality to other material things, making them also more attractive to us.

Conversely, economies also have the power to de-sacralize. For example, an economy can take an ecosystem we appreciate for its beauty, inspiration, and soul-nourishing wonders, but then turn it into a landscape whose only meaning is the economic value of what can be extracted from it or built on it. Multi Earth economics prefers the sign “For Sale” to a sign reading “Mystic River Park.” To be able to commodify the sacred is an inverse and perverse form of religious power. 

David Loy: "The Market Is ... the First Truly World Religion"

My relationship with Barry Shelley has brought so many good things my way. Partly it’s because he’s a political economist with whom I’ve checked out many economic ideas. Even more it’s his desire to share with me anything he has or knows that can help me do better what he knows I love doing: working on a jubilee, One Earth economy and having it work on all of us. He’s colleagial and appreciative. He’s a good fit with his new job with Oxfam America and their work on the interface of agriculture and economies worldwide.

In addition to the article by Harvey Cox I quoted in the previous blog, Barry copied me an article by David Loy,“The Religion of the Market,” in which Loy says that it is “apparent that the Market is becoming the first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe more and more tightly into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as ‘secular.’” (Note: Scholars may be interested to know that Loy’s essay appears also in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, but it is available in totality only to subscribers.)

This article, and others Loy has written, add valuable perspective for me because he writes as a practicing Zen Buddhist interested in showing the social implications of Buddhist teachings. He perceives Market Religion to have surpassed, not only Buddhism, but all the world religions in its religious impact on the world.

Now that you’ve heard from both Harvey Cox and David Loy on The Market as religion, and I’ve acknowledged how much they help me see how the grip in which the Multi Earth worldview holds us is religious, what are your thoughts? Or perhaps you’ve thought of our daily economic choices as religious ones for a long time.

Harvey Cox: The Religion of the Market

My dive into jubilee economics took me into many other important waters of change. In 2004, I heard Barry Shelley, a political economist with theological training, give a presentation to the Sabbath Economics Collaborative on economics as religion. Barry explained that approaching economics as religion was not just a quaint idea, but was being used by other economists, academics, and writers in their critiques of capitalism, markets, and consumer behavior. They use religion as a frame in which to view economics in order to better understand the powerful grip economic assumptions and practices have on people, governments, and business models. 

Then in 2009, Barry and I were invited to co-lead a session on “Economics and Spirituality” at the Solidarity Economy Network Forum in Amherst, MA. As we prepared for the session, Barry shared with me several articles on economic religion that fueled my interest. One, entitled “The Market as God,” written by Harvey Cox, who at the time was part of the Harvard Divinity School, had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (March, 1999). Cox describes his own discovery of “business theology,” and how “current thinking assigns to The Market a wisdom that in the past only the gods have known.” Cox’s surprise at how economics and theology tracked with one another was matched by his conviction that he had uncovered a huge, damaging religion. He wrote: 

Discovering the theology of The Market made me begin to think in a different way about the conflict among religions. Violence between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster or Hindus and Muslims in India may dominate the headlines. But I have come to wonder whether the real clash of religions (or even of civilizations) may be going on unnoticed. I am beginning to think that for all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is rarely recognized as a religion.

Jubilee — an Economic Model, Not Just Happier Ethics

Just what was it that changed my mind from thinking, “No, there is no such thing as God’s Economy,” to “maybe.” Foremost was the group of people in Chicago with whom Juanita and I had met around Ross and Gloria Kinsler’s book, The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life. It challenged my ideas that the bible was hands-off on economic models. They showed how the “biblical jubilee” is a model that got expressed through specific lifestyle choices then and still does. I was convinced and readily joined others in the group to form the nonprofit, Jubilee Economics Ministries, dedicated to explicating this economic model, not just as theory, but as a practical alternative to the prevailing economic system. 

By fall of 1999, after Juanita and I had both retired early from our careers, we moved into an intentional community in Chicago with three other households. We named our house and community “Peaceweavings.” There, Juanita and I devoted ourselves to living more fully this new economic model and to the new nonprofit. Though Juanita stopped working with Jubilee Economics after a year, we continued our efforts to live lives shaped by its economics. I continued as the organization’s director even when we moved to San Diego early in 2002.

Challenged repeatedly by the question, “What is a jubilee economy?” I have gradually come to answer, “It is an economy that shows us how to live interdependent with all species while using the resources of only one planet.” The name “jubilee” comes from the version of this economy that the Hebrew people adapted to fit their social structures and cycle of religious holidays. But the model’s origins lie with the First Peoples worldwide. Both First Peoples and Hebrew people held that their economic choices were spiritual choices. The same holds true for me today. I believe that my economic choices show whether I practice the spirituality of Multi Earth or One Earth ways.

Which Title Would You Choose?

If you read this blog regularly, you already know that for the past couple of years, Michael Johnson and I have been working on a joint project, the One Earth Project. We now have a book manuscript completed and a blogsite, as well as projected plans for film. The manuscript is even with a second publisher, awaiting their thoughts. But we are still settling on a title for the book — that despite that one title was previously announced on this blog. You can see that we’re still mulling it over. So we thought it would be both fun and enormously helpful if you would help us pick a title. 

Of the following three titles and subtitles, would you rank them in order of which appeal most, hook you most, make you most curious, or whatever criteria you wish to use? Please mix and match the titles and subtitles if that helps you vote. Please rank the 3 from first to last and leave your comment soon.

Know that your reply will help Michael and me proceed on self-publishing as well as in our conversations with conventional publishers. Thanks for your participation in the One Earth Project. And now, to the voting! Here are the titles/subtitles waiting for your action.

1. Blinded by Progress: Five Earth-Destroying Practices We Can Change
2. The Frogs Are Drinking Up Their Pond: Five Earth-Destroying Practices We Can Change
3. The Eden We Can Choose: Correcting Five Choices Keeping Us Out of Earth’s Renewable Garden

Our Religious Devotion to a Multi Earth Economic Model

One of the big, Earth-destroying practices going on that we can change has us treating a particularly destructive economic model with religious devotion. Economics as religion is a highly fertile way to think about economies, all the more so because an economy’s religious function is largely overlooked. It’s not covered on many blogs, so that’s the topic I want to treat for awhile here. I’ll begin with a couple of quotes.

More than religion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. — Gordon Bigelow

Current thinking assigns to The Market a wisdom that in the past only the gods have known…. The Market offers the religious benefits that once required prayer and fasting, without the awkwardness of denominational commitment. — Harvey Cox 

Of all the times that I have remixed how I understand the relationship between economics and religion, one of the most important ones happened while I was preparing a paper that I gave in 2010 at a conference on “Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination.” It was co-sponsored by the Center for Justice and Reconciliation and other groups on the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego. Among the many questions that the “Call for Papers” put out to potential presenters was, “Is there such a thing as God’s economy?” For many years I would have answered with an emphatic “No!” I had taken the position that religion did not advocate for a particular economic model. Instead, one’s faith, I argued, provides a guide to function ethically and morally within whatever economic system we are part of. But now I wasn’t so sure. I seemed to be changing my mind. So, I decided to submit a paper on “God’s Economy,” figuring it would force me to wrestle anew with the question.

But before I get to my answer in future blogs, what do you think? Is there such a thing as God’s economy?

Earth's Wildness Heals Us of "The Illusion of the Central Position"

Chris Morales, regular reader of this blog, recently sent me this One Earth experience during three days of backpacking at 6,800 feet in the Sierra’s Emigrant Wilderness, north of Yosemite National Park. It’s excellent commentary on the earlier blogging I did here on “the illusion of the central position” and also brings Barry Lopez, nature writer, to this blog. Here are Chris’ own words:

As I sat by a lake one early morning, watching the sun rise over ridges in the east, feeling the heat of its reflection on the placid water as it warmed my bones from the night before, and casting about the depths for rainbow trout, I read an essay from an author I am growing to love, Barry Lopez.  During parts of the passage, I thought of you and your blog, specifically, your September 8 post on the ‘illusion of the central position.’  

In the book I had brought with me, Crossing Open Ground, Lopez reflects on different interactions with humans and nature alike that he has had over the years, which has increased his understanding of his own essential nature and given him some perspective on his place in the world and relationship with nature.   In one essay, titled Yukon-Charley, he reflects on a canoe trip he took into the heart of Alaska along the Charley river, a feeder into the mighty Yukon, an area which the Wilderness Act of 1964 declared as wilderness. He talks about the controversy over wilderness, in which industry and civil society fought over the meaning and value of wilderness. During the time of his writing, the Reagan administration was at seat in the White House, and they sided with industry, simplifying wilderness as something that could only be measured in economic terms: lumber, land for grazing, mining, etc.  

Aside from pointing out the other side of the argument, of the value of recreation, a source of clean water, a diversity of biological relationships, and aesthetic and spiritual dimensions among others, he describes another dimension that raises the value of wilderness in immeasurable, unquantifiable ways. “Wilderness travel can be extremely taxing and dangerous. You can fall into a crevasse, flip your kayak, lose your way, become hypothermic, run out of food, or be killed by a bear. Far less violent events, however, are the common experience of most people who travel in wild landscapes. A sublime encounter with perhaps the most essential attribute of wilderness — falling into resonance with a system of unmanaged, non-human-centered relationships — can be as fulfilling as running a huge and difficult rapid. Sometimes they prove, indeed, to be the same thing” (82). 

While reflecting on my beautiful hike to that lake the day before and the absolutely peaceful morning that I had spent sitting on a granite outcropping that stretched far into the liquid mirror, I absolutely knew what Lopez was saying. I could feel my body harmonizing with my surroundings. It was as if I shed all of the excess thoughts and stresses and baggage that living our civilized life attaches to us and simply be, as humans and animals have simply been, part of nature for thousands of years - and suddenly the energy inside of me started resonating at the same frequency as the trees, birds, water, rocks and sky around me. Instead of being me, with my ego and plans and concerns, I had suddenly become just a part of it all. I realized that if we all cast away this illusion of our own central position, and came to the wilderness, falling into resonance with it, there is no way that we could ever live a Multi Earth narrative. There would be no need for wilderness acts, which ban civilized humans from our own nature.  

When I came back and read your latest blog, and the line that more and more you are turning to nature for her teaching, I knew that this reflection was also for you in some way. If you haven’t yet read any of Barry Lopez, I suggest you do. The book Crossing Open Ground is a great introduction to his simple yet powerful writing.