The Cost of Our Calories: the Environmental Toll of Industrial Agriculture

(I was heartened this weekend to see pictures of people from all over the world standing up for environmental justice on The International Day of Climate Action.  I was in the library basement at Duke researching this essay, which will be incorporated into a larger paper developing an ecofeminist response to industrial agriculture.)

Enter practically any supermarket in the United States and you will find a sea of fruits and vegetables, brightly colored and coming from all corners of the western hemisphere.  Tomatoes, lettuce, bananas, and oranges—just to name a few—are available year-round at prices most people can afford. Many of the aisles are filled with prepared foods derived from corn, soy, and wheat, and are minutes away from your convenient consumption.  Add a plastic-wrapped and pre-cut piece of meat from the back wall of coolers and dinner is set. The whole earth’s bounty, it seems, lies before you.  As short as fifty years ago, such wide selection and low prices would have been impossible.  This epicurean miracle is achievable due to the rise of industrial agriculture, a highly mechanized mode of food production characterized by an economy of scale.  Increasingly, though, its gifts are being called into question as the disastrous environmental, economic, cultural, and health effects of the rapid transformation of the human food system become clear.  This essay will focus on the widespread and interconnected environmental devastation caused by the modernization of plant agriculture.  It will seek to explain how the dream of eating whatever we want whenever we want has become the nightmare of degraded and eroded topsoil, water scarcity and contamination, seed loss and manipulation, and global warming.

Traditionally, different crops are grown together and rotated frequently to preserve the health of the soil and ward off pests, weeds, and disease.  This method of farming, polyculture, seeks to imitate natural diversity and often integrates animal husbandry with crop production.  It can be fairly labor intensive, as hand cultivation is often required due to the presence of multiple crops.  A chief ‘innovation’ of industrial agriculture is the widespread use of monoculture, the growing of a single crop over a wide area of land.  Proponents argue that it can produce greater crop yields with less effort through the standardization of planting, maintenance, and harvesting.  Pests are killed through the application of pesticides, and weeds kept at bay through herbicides.  Synthetic fertilizers encourage plant growth in the absence of compost or manure.  A single crop can often be easily harvested mechanically, enabling farmers to greatly increase their scale and sell to a large buyer. This mechanization also requires less people to be farmers, further lowering the price of food through decreased labor costs.[1]

Monoculture produces more than just one crop, though: it also produces degraded and easily eroded soil.  More than just ‘dirt’, soil is “a curious mix of organic matter and mineral granules…a bustling and highly interactive community of organisms…[and] a unique, complex matrix of pores and channels filled with air, nutrient soup, and aquatic life.”[2] Healthy soil is alive and active: “One teaspoon of rich grassland soil can contain 5 billion bacteria, 20 million fungi, and 1 million protests. More microbes live in a teaspoon of earth than people on the planet.”[3] Farming has always require cutting into the soil, and traditionally farmers sought to maintain cut soil’s vitality and prevent it from washing or blowing away through bumper crops, heavy rotation, allowing the land to lie fallow, and replenishing the soil’s nutrients with organic materials. Producing the same crop over and over or using only simple rotations (such as alternating between corn and soybeans) depletes the soil of its nutrients and makes it more susceptible to erosion. With monoculture, “it is difficult to view the soil as anything but an anchoring medium for plant roots and a receptacle for water and chemical fertilizers.  Those chemicals, as well as pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, effectively end the symbiotic relationship between soil and plant by killing soil organisms, thus transforming the soil into a dead, toxic substance.”[4] Bumper crops “are uprooted on industrial farms to make way for large machinery…[which] tends to compact the soil, reducing its ability to  absorb water.”[5] All this has led to the loss of topsoil at an alarming pace. As Peter Warshall writes: “even today, after many conservation efforts, American farmland still loses topsoil faster (averaging about 17 times faster) than it is formed.  Of the 375 million acres in crops, 112 (about 30 percent) have excessive soil loss. Since the measurement of erosion does not include gully losses, total soil losses could be twice that of topsoil alone.”[6] With the spread of industrial agriculture to the two-thirds world, the transformation of rich, dark soil teeming with life into devastated and largely dead dirt has become a global phenomenon.

Another ecological victim of industrial agriculture is water. Agrochemicals are often absorbed into underwater aquifers or washed into rivers, lakes, and streams through the runoff of eroded soil.  An assessment conducted by the federal government in 1998 “found pesticide contamination in all of its river and stream samples and in more than half of its samples taken from shallow ground wells. Altogether, the program detected 83 different pesticides…some 66 percent of the stream samples contained five or more pesticides.”[7] Synthetic nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers also end up in aquifers and streams, making the water unsafe for human consumption and inhabitable for fish and other aquatic life. The presence of these chemicals in lakes and rivers has been linked to the mutations of intersex fish and frogs with extra legs.  Not only is water being contaminated, it is also being consumed at radically unsustainable rates in the production of food.  As the editors of Fatal Harvest write: “Water covers two-thirds of the earth, yet a mere 3 percent of this total is in the form of freshwater, suitable for drinking and agricultural use. Much of this 3 percent is inaccessible… Nonetheless, the greatest portion of the water used by people goes into woefully inefficient irrigation for agricultural production.”[8] At present, over 40 percent of the world’s food supply is produced through such methods.[9] Throughout the U.S., aquifers are being depleted as California and the states stretching from the Great Plains to the Southwest consume groundwater at nonrenewable rates, much for irrigated farming.  Because nature’s needs are typically seen as a distant third to those of urban dwellers and farmers in the eyes of policymakers, such water scarcity threatens natural ecosystems and further endangers wildlife.  The highly inefficient use of water in industrial agriculture can be seen clearly in the production of corn, a relatively ‘un-thirsty’ crop: “A corn crop that produces 118 bushels/acre/year requires more than 500,000 gallons/acre of water during the growing season. The production of 1 pound of maize requires 1,400 pounds (or 175 gallons) of water.”[10] Through monoculture, we are eating the planet dry.

Industrial agriculture also destroys seed biodiversity, as local crop varieties are left behind for the few hybrids which are distributed widely to supermarkets and meat producers.  The wide variety of choices offered by supermarket shelves is largely an illusion; “most of the vastly diverse foods available to humanity since the beginning of agricultural history have been virtually eradicated.”[11] A study conducted by the Rural Advancement Foundation found that in the United States “75 types of vegetables, or approximately 97 percent of the varieties available in 1900, are now extinct.”[12] In the last hundred years, “we have lost nearly 93 percent of lettuce, over 96 percent of sweet corn, about 91 percent of field corn, more than 95 percent of tomato, and almost 98 percent of asparagus varieties.”[13] Such a loss of diversity is tragic not only for cultural reasons.  It also demonstrates how wide the rift between industrial agriculture and the natural environment has become, and the drastic steps agribusiness must take to continue to practice monoculture. As crop varieties shrunk, vulnerabilities to pests and disease increased. This can be seen in the US corn blight crisis of 1970, when the crop was decimated with yields reduced by up to 50 percent and financial losses of over $1 billion.[14] Initially, agribusiness turned to more chemicals as the solution, but pests and diseases proved resistant.  Since the early 1990’s, biotechnology—the genetic modification of the seed itself—has been touted as the solution to the vulnerabilities of monoculture.  Plants are now being genetically engineered to be herbicide resistant (so they can withstand the spraying of even stronger weed killers) and pest resistant (so each plant can produce its own pesticide).[15] This has led to led to the “appearance of herbicide-resistant ‘super-weeds’—the result of genetic pollution from transgenic crops.”[16] Such genetic pollution has the potential to devastate organic farming if pests become resistant to the non-chemical pesticide Bt, which biotech companies have bred into corn and cotton seeds.[17] The long-term effects of GM crops on the environment remain to be seen. By attempting to bulwark monoculture through biotechnology, industrial agriculture further alienates food production from the ecological context in which it takes place and raises frightening questions which have yet to be answered.

This brief study has sought to demonstrate that industrialized food is finally not all that cheap, but rather comes at great cost to the natural environment.  Neither is it efficient, as the present system “uses 10 nonrenewable fossil fuel calories to produce only one food calorie.”[18] The primary components of industrial agriculture—from fertilizers to machinery to irrigation and pesticides—all rely on oil, a nonrenewable resource which has already peaked and causes global warming.  In addition to devastating soil, water, and seed, industrial agriculture heats up the planet.  It is time to move beyond it, or before it, or perhaps both.

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[1] For background on the rise of monocultures, see Miguel A. Altieri, “Ecological Impacts of Industrial Agriculture ad the Possibilities for Truly Sustainable Farming,”  in Fred Magdoff and others, eds., Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 77-92.

 

[2] Peter Warshall, “Tilth and Technology: The Industrial Redesign of Our Nation’s Soils,” in Andrew Kimbrell, ed., Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 221.

[3] Ibid., 222.

[4] Helena Norberg-Hodge, Todd Merrifield, and Steven Gorelick, Bringing the Food Economy Home: Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2002), 42.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Peter Warshall, “Titlth and Technology,” 224.

[7] “Water: The Overtapped Resource,” in Andrew Kimbrell, ed., Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 233.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 229.

[10] Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and The Coming Crisis in Agriculture (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2006)

[11] “Myth Five: Industrial Food Offers More Choices,” in Andrew Kimbrell, ed., Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 59.

[12] “Monoculture versus Diversity: The Illusion of Choice,” in Andrew Kimbrell, ed., Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 71.

[13] “Myth Five,” 59.

[14] See “Corn; The Illusion of Choice,” in Andrew Kimbrell, ed., Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 77.

[15] See “Myth Seven: Biotechnology Will Solve the Problems of Industrial Agriculture,” in Andrew Kimbrell, ed., Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 63.

[16] Bringing the Food Economy Home, 16.

[17] “Myth Seven,” 63.

[18] Food and Water Watch, “Fossil Fuels and Green House Emissions from Industrial Agriculture,” p. 1 [cited 25 October 2009]. Online: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/factoryfarms/dairy-and-meat-factories/climate-change/GreenhouseGasIndustrialAg.pdf.

Biblical Seeds of Resistance to Ecological Devastation

In my Ecofeminist Theology and Philosophy Class, we were asked to write a short essay on the following question: what resources exist in your religious and/or spiritual tradition for thinking about ecological crises like climate change, pollution, scarce resources like water and food, and species loss?  There are obviously a multitude of ways this could be answered, but here is how I worked with it:

I come from the Christian faith tradition, whose dominant stream partnered with Greek philosophy to devalue the material world and later industrial capitalism to destroy it. Christianity has often supplied the ideological cover for economic interests, arguing that ‘man’ has been given dominion over nature and is thus free to exploit it, or the eschaton will soon come and therefore there is no need for conservation. Such Christian collusion with the forces of empire and industry to plunder the earth is not simply an unfortunate byproduct of the faith’s proper historical development but a failure of theological imagination and ultimately a denial of its originating impulses.

Although the present scale of ecological destruction and overshoot is unprecedented and its effects unavoidable, our era is not the first in which earth-keeping questions have been raised by representatives of the Jewish and Christian faith traditions. Both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament contain seeds of resistance to the destructive ecological and economic practices of their time. Biblical scholar Ched Myers suggests that the Fall story of Genesis 1-11 is not only a story of origins but a reflection on the rupture of tradition clan-based hunter-gatherer culture through the rise of agriculture, city-states, and violence.[1] For another example of this we can turn to Exodus 16.  When the Israelites were wandering in the desert grumbling about their hunger, Yahweh gave them the gift of Manna.  It came to them as a sign of the earth’s abundance; sustenance for which they didn’t have to strive and toil as slaves of empire. And if they took more than their fair share, the manna began to rot; they were given only enough for the time being. The necessities of rest for both land and humans and for the leveling of inequality illustrated in this story were codified in the Sabbath and Jubilee traditions of early Israel.[2] Later, Hebrew prophets decried the spoliation of the land and the exploitation of those who worked it.[3]

Turning to the New Testament, Jesus’ ministry was fundamentally concerned with a renewal and radicalization of these aforementioned covenantal and prophetic streams within Judaism.  The coming Reign of God which he announced was a this-worldly reality whose marks would have included ecological balance. His reflection that even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed in the lilies’ splendor was not a romanticization of nature but a contention that economic wealth and political power have less intrinsic worth than the natural world.[4] The Apostle Paul wrote of the creation which groans in decay yearning to be free and urged his communities to practice economic redistribution with one another in direct contrast to the Roman Empire’s top-down extractive economics.

These themes of resistance to dominant ecological and economic practices within the Bible must be brought into the mix as Christians begin to reflect on our contemporary many-headed ecological crisis.  Listening deeply to these stories and paying attention to the dynamics in which they were formed I think we will find more radical conversation partners than we might have first imagined.  Our present lives in the first world are supported by structures of empire similar to those which our foremothers and fathers in the faith strove to leave or subvert from within. The rapacious practices of consumer capitalism need to be stopped; Sabbath can point towards alternatives which honor the earth and workers through the recognition of natural limits. A whole-earth Jubilee is necessary now more than ever, one which not only brings greater equality between humans but recognizes the inherent worth, beauty, and necessity of non-human species and the ecosystem.  This is perhaps the most important thing which the Christian (and Jewish) tradition at its best can bring to the table: an uncompromising moral vision which can go beneath green washing and eco-capitalist hype to re-present to us the truth which we already know: our lives in the first world need to change drastically for life on this planet to be sustained.

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[1] Ched Myers, “The Fall”, in Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London: Continuum, 2005), 634–36.

[2] See chapter three of Ross and Gloria Kinsler, The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999).

[3] See chapter 7 of Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, (New York: Cambridge, 2009).

[4] I heard Ched Myers offer this reading of Luke 12 at the Forum on Faith, Economy, and Ecology which was sponsored by the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns in Washington, DC and held on May 2-3, 2009.

Lessons Learned, Hopefully

Getting settled here in Durham these past few weeks I’ve been reminded of what a gift the Church of the Saviour community really is. We’ve sure got our issues but the Spirit is present there in a powerful way. Following is the reflection (it’s not really a sermon in any proper sense) which I gave last month at Friends of Jesus Church as I prepared to leave.

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

I share this passage with you not because I intend to do an exegesis of Paul’s greeting to the Corinthian assembly, but because it sums up my feeling about you all as I prepare to leave.

For the past three years, I have been worshipping, working, or both with the wider Church of the Saviour community. Sitting in that corner over a cup of soup on Monday, Gordon asked me what I am taking away from the time I’ve spent here. I told him that my understanding of the church and what the Christian life is about has been completely transformed. To borrow the informal motto of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, this community has “ruined me for life;” I can no longer back to church as usual or casual Christianity. In the brief time we have together now, I want to share some snippets on the Church of the Saviour vision and how it has been transformative in my own life.

The first and most obvious thing is that friendship with the marginalized and participation in their struggles is central to Christian faith. I’ve become convinced that we can’t know Jesus or really understand his message about the Reign of God coming in its fullness outside of close proximity to the poor.  The numerous organizations which line Columbia Rd. and dot the rest of the neighborhood bear witness to this.  I’ve been fortunate to be part of several things which have convinced of this deep down in my bones. The first is the spiritual support groups, and particularly the one I’ve been part of down at the jail.  With the willingness of these folks to share of their lives authentically and openly name their struggles and doubts it is no wonder this is who Jesus first brought the word to and called blessed. The second is the trip I took to Haiti through Faith and Money Network.  Without romanticizing the desperate situation many of the people we met face, it is clear that life in the mountain community of Lazil is more attune to the rhythms of the Kingdom than most of ours are here in the States.

Closely related to this is the need for diversity in the church. The story of the early church was one of two peoples, Gentiles and Jews, coming together to form one family. Paul hammered away at the Corinthian assembly for replicating the dominant society’s divisions and called the poor and privileged to equality. If the church is to be a new creation, a Spirit-empowered alternative, it must be a place where opposites can meet, begin to deepen relationship with one another, and move towards mutuality. I am grateful that through the Spiritual Support Groups and our little storefront church here I’ve been able to participate in the new creation God would call all of us to.  As a member of the Starbucks and Target class, living in a neighborhood drunk off the influx of new capital, these relationships have been especially healing and empowering.  Also, as a member of the Twitter and Facebook generation, I’m glad to say that I have mentors and friends my grandparents’ age and older.  Hearing your wisdom and your stories has been enlightening, encouraging, and often quite fun. And the fact that you’re interested in mine despite the fact that I’m a twenty-something punk is pretty cool.

I’m also profoundly grateful for this community’s intentional cultivation of call. I knew pretty quickly when I came here that it was highly unlikely I would be called to work with one particular social issue. My skills tend towards arm chair theologizing…I guess the good way to say this is I feel called to things like radical church renewal, working with the whole, paradigm shift, etc. So it is really quite a gift that I was able to work with the Servant Leadership School this past year and a half; it is an organization with a mission just flexible and fuzzy enough for me to find a place to fit in. More than this, there are numerous people who have helped me to think through and explore the continuing shape of my call: Yolande, Gordon, Becca, Kayla, Mike, Kim, David, and Elizabeth and Joseph from the Festival Center just to name a few.

Another thing I will take with me is the move towards structures where the exercising of everyone’s gifts is celebrated. The shared leadership and missional funding practices of this and the other CoS churches are really quite old; they have been around since the early church and have been practiced by Anabaptists, Wesleyans, restorationists, and others. At the same time they are really quite new—there is increasing excitement for community forms which are simpler, more radical, and more flexible for mission. To say it plain, there is a hunger for church which doesn’t block the transformative power of the Gospel at the door. You all have been up to this for awhile, and I’ve enjoyed soaking it up.

There are numerous other things I could mention but suffice it to say that I’ve learned much during my short time here and will continue to be challenged and encouraged by your witness. As I’ve said before, your lives demonstrate that it is possible for my generation of the church to be faithful in the midst of all we’re up against.

There are several things I would commend to you as I go. One would be to read Scripture together more.  When read patiently and with attention to the context in which it was written, Scripture’s stories have the potential to transform our lives like nearly nothing else. A second is just that you would have openness to newness. I think there are people who share our same spirit but we don’t always realize it because they often speak a different faith language than we do.  Listening deeply across the differences, I think we’ll find others who share our same desire to be faithful.

Now I was asked to share where I’m headed and what I plan on doing when I get there.  This will be brief because I really don’t know! I know I’ll be studying to get a Master of Theological Studies degree over the next twenty months.  I hope to write a thesis concerning the shape of Christian mission for the first world church in our present age of economic and ecological crisis. Since teaching a class on the Apostle Paul’s Radical Message and Mission at the Servant Leadership School—which I was excited to have Dorothy and Terry be part of—I have also become deeply interested in the Pauline letters, and the sociopolitical context in which they were written. Perhaps I can find a way to yoke these two subjects together.

As far as church involvement goes, I’m not sure where God will plop me down. There are a number of good people down there who friends I love and trust have put me in contact with; I guess I’ll look those folks up and take it from there.  I am excited that as I begin this next journey I will be with a friend who has also been transformed by the CoS vision of church. Sarah Campbell, who is a Discipleship Year alum, intern member at 8^th Day, and part of a spiritual support group, is starting at Duke Divinity School as well. If we can’t find a faith community working with the Gospel in ways similar to here, perhaps we’ll just have to get something small going.

I am not really clear about what the future holds beyond these next two years; whatever I do I know my future has been completely changed by my brief time here with you. I promise to keep you informed as God clues me in. Selfishly, I will close by asking you to keep me in your prayers as I go. Thank you for sharing your life with me, and for the profound witness to the Gospel you are together.

Garbage!

My last week in DC, I finally made it to the city’s seedy (and stinky) underbelly of first-world consumerism: the Fort Totten Trash Transfer Station.  I was there to add some of my group house’s IKEA furniture which had outlived its oh-so-short life span.

The scene? Shit. Mountains and mountains of shit, as far as the eye can see. Great Everests of refuse, crushed together by plow trucks and  cranes.

As it turns out, the dystopian future so cutely rendered in WALL-E might not be as far off as I’d hoped. It’s already here; you just have to drive under a bridge  in Brookland to find it.

Here are some pictures I took on my cell phone, doing my best to channel an undercover PETA agent:

I don’t have anything profound to share (at least not when the stank is still fresh on my Chacos), but here are a couple thoughts:

1. There is no such thing as “disposable”.  We can bury/send to the two-thirds world/burn our trash, but it doesn’t actually go away.

2. One of the workers was wearing a surgical mask. I wonder how many DPW workers have experienced health problems as a result of long-term exposure to your and my garbage?

3.  Our American way of life is fundamentally unsustainable. Our production need to radically transformed and our consumption drastically reduced. (This one is kind of a duh, but it really hit me over the head again today.)

4. Have you seen The Story of Stuff yet? Here is another great video based on Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers.

5. My immediate reaction was to think about how much I can “de-garbage” myself through living more simply. Certainly this is good, and I should begin that process in earnest, but I can’t mistake personal eco-piety for social change. See Derrick Jensen’s Forget Short Showers in this month’s Orion.

6. The willful blindness our society maintains that we can seriously confront climate change and continue to practice consumer capitalism has got to end.  Naomi Klein makes this point in her recent article Capitalism, Sarah Palin-Style.

Off to Duke…

Today is my last day at the Servant Leadership School and I’m moving down to Durham this weekend in preparation for school. Here are the short essays I wrote as part of the admissions process last fall. I’m interested to see how my research interests evolve (I’ve become much more interested in NT work since these were written) and hope to find good people who can help me keep my feet on the ground and engaged in justice work.

a) What goals do you hope to achieve by enrolling in the Master of Theological Studies degree program?

At Anderson University, Duke graduate Dr. James W. Lewis taught me Christian ethics and served as a mentor. Due largely to his influence I’ve become convinced that you cannot practice the politics of Jesus without the church, a point which much mainstream Christian ethics ignores. Time spent with Sojourners and the Church of the Saviour has deepened my belief that friendship with the poor and participation in their struggles is central to Christian faith and thus the task of theology. My interactions with students have demonstrated that Duke Divinity School shares these sentiments, and that is why I want to enroll in the MTS program. In this sense, the first thing I hope to achieve is simply to be part of an academic community which shares and encourages my ecclesial convictions and commitment to the marginalized.

I am currently preparing a paper on Christology, the Creeds, and Christianity’s present relationship to Judaism for the Wesleyan Theological Society’s meeting in March. I am eager to return to academic writing, as much of my essays and presentations in the past three years have been activist-oriented. I am realizing quickly, though, how much I need partners to thrive in this work. Therefore, I desire to be in an environment of academic excellence with faculty and students who share my research interests: political and postliberal theologies, Biblical hermeneutics, and theological ethics. At Duke, I would have the opportunity to interact and study with scholars whose work informs my own: theology with Drs. Carter and McClintock Fulkerson, Scripture with Drs. Hays and Davis, and ethics with Drs. Wells and Wirzba.

My vocation is to help the church embody a faithful political witness in an age of economic crisis and ecological disaster, and I am prayerfully discerning what shape this call will take. Whether I pursue further graduate studies, or return to grassroots theological education or faith-based peace and justice work, Duke Divinity School would prepare me for the work God has called me to do in the world.

b) Reflect on a theological book, issue, or idea that has recently engaged your attention, highlighting its connection to your own theological development in relation to the church, academy, and world.

Over the past four years I’ve become convinced that free market capitalism and authentic Christian practice cannot be reconciled and have sought to address this dissonance in my work. My senior research paper examined responses to economic globalization within the field of Christian ethics, paying particular attention to feminist and liberationist voices. During the time I spent with Sojourners, one of our major campaigns was “Budgets are Moral Documents,” in which we rallied Christians to protest the decreased funding and increased privatization of healthcare and education. At the Servant Leadership School, I coordinated “Another World is Possible: Living into God’s Jubilee Economy,” an event in which 70 people gathered to learn about how their economic relationships can more reflect God’s Reign.

Through these and other experiences, I’ve realized the depth to which the U.S. church’s imagination is captive to the market and the state which serves it. Many evangelical churches operate indispensable charitable ministries while supporting an economic ideology which increases their necessity. Mainline churches recognize free market capitalism’s problems in their social statements but turn almost exclusively to the state for solutions. The concept of “the paradigmatic people of God” (Yoder), who change society through living an alternative and pointing others towards it, is largely absent from the conversation. One book which seeks to recover this is Duke graduate Dan Bell’s Liberation Theology After the End of History. Among other things, he argues the crisis in liberation theology is due largely to its reliance on “the false and futile politics of statecraft” and instead offers the church “as a social, political, economic formation in its own right.” While I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, Bell’s work left me with lingering questions, like what shape should resistance to capitalism take for those who follow a crucified Lord? This question, in particular, is one I would seek to answer as a student at Duke Divinity School.