The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs Environmental Religion in Contemporary America

Anyone familiar with the battles waged in land courts between developers and conservationists will immediately recognise the allusion to wars of religion in the title of this intriguing book. The vehemence which characterises such disputes stems from a clash of deeply held convictions about the world and the place of human beings in it – indeed, religious convictions. Readers will perhaps be surprised, however, to find the author describing modern economics and environmental science (or ecology) as religions. Yet this is one of the key arguments in the book and it is double‐barrelled.

Economics and environmental science are characterised as religions in (leading theologian) Paul Tillich's sense that they represent ways, “[…] of framing [a person's] basic perception of the world and its meaning” (p. x). Max Stackhouse, another distinguished theologian, defines a religion as:

[…] a comprehensive worldview or “metaphysical moral vision” that is accepted as binding because it is held to be, in itself, basically true and just, even if all dimensions of it cannot be finally confirmed or refuted.

Furthermore, in Stackhouse's view a religion, “[…] empowers believers to seek to transform the world in accordance with a normative ethic of what should be” (p. xi).

According to Robert Nelson, this description fits modern economics and environmental science far more snugly than epithets such as “value‐neutral” or “objectively scientific”. They are, in his view, “secular religions”, stripped of any reference to a transcendent god, it must be said, but no less religious in character for all that. Moreover, these ostensibly modern scientific disciplines are religious in another sense. They both owe a profound debt, albeit unacknowledged, to Jewish and Christian thought and, as a consequence, resonate strongly with different aspects of the moral outlook of Judeo‐Christianity:

Indeed, economic and environmental religion, like most of the secular religions of the modern age, to a significant extent rework in a new language the earlier messages of Jewish and Christian faiths. In many cases the greatest change is not the core religious truths being developed but rather the recasting of these traditional Jewish and Christian understandings in a new (ostensibly more modern and scientific) vocabulary – thus disguising the origins, lending them greater authority in an age that gives greater public legitimacy to scientific methods than the reading of the Christian Bible. (p. xxi)

As Nelson points out, this is deeply ironic since, in Grassie's words (quoted on p. xii):

[…] the social sciences […] were largely founded by thinkers who took for granted that there was no truth content or value to religions, that religions were irrational, superstitious, regressive and dysfunctional.

In light of his own characterisation of modern economics and environmental science as religions, Nelson explains their ongoing hostility towards and general ignorance of institutional religion (including theology, and perhaps especially Christian theology), as, “[…] the disdain of one faith […] toward a religious competitor” (p. xii).

Robert Nelson has written extensively on the subject of economics as religion, including an eponymously titled book published in 2001. Part 1 of this new book is mostly a reworking of his earlier material. The religious underpinnings and apparent theological confusions of environmental science are addressed at greater length – in fact, much more of the book is devoted to environmental science than economics – including four chapters that are wholly new.

Nelson juxtaposes economics and environmental science based on what he interprets as their diametrically opposed theologies. While the disciplines share Judeo‐Christian roots, their theologies emphasise very different dimensions of a Judeo‐Christian worldview. Indeed, from an orthodox perspective, economic theology and environmental theology are both heresies, that is, distortions of orthodox Christian doctrine, and their respective adherents would qualify as a sect. Nevertheless, concepts and categories redolent of Judeo‐Christianity are evident to the discerning eye – or, to use a biblical turn of phrase, to those “with ears to hear”.

For its part, economic religion buys into the linear view of history, portrayed in the Bible, in which the world progresses, albeit unsteadily and haltingly, towards an end‐state where evil has been banished and humanity is perfected. In contrast to the orthodox Christian perspective, in which the redemption of the world requires the active agency of Jesus Christ, economic religion regards the source of sin in the world as essentially material – specifically, material deprivation – and so economic science has the power to redeem the world via the agency of material progress. When poverty has been eradicated, so too will human imperfection and sinfulness. Heaven will have arrived on earth in an eschatological vision of a glorious future reminiscent in many respects of the Christian “New Jerusalem” but stripped of any reference to the Godhead.

Needless to say, environmental religion will have none of this. Nelson is at his most compelling when he draws clear parallels between environmental religion and Calvinist notions of “total human depravity”. Human beings are marked with sin in their very nature and it is indelible. No amount of human effort can overcome it and all our attempts to improve ourselves will come to nought or worse. John Calvin, of course, pointed to God's intervention in the person and work of Jesus Christ as the only and ultimate antidote to human sinfulness. This is not where environmental religion takes the argument. Instead, environmental religion seeks redemption from human sinfulness and its evil manifestations (including especially the depredations of economic progress on the environment) in attempts to recreate the Garden of Eden. Paradise regained is a world in which, “[…] human beings […] renounce their evil ways and […] live in a simpler harmony with their truer natures and with the divine order that governs the universe” (p. 114).

With such diametrically opposed interpretations of the human condition and possibilities for human flourishing, it is no surprise that economic religion and environmental religion are at war. Where the modern world thinks it has left behind such obscurantism, Nelson points out that the warring parties have just changed standards and are far from laying down their weapons. In a curious turn of events, where historical wars of religion may never actually have been about religion, modern disputes between these two putatively scientific disciplines may have far more to do with religion than either side would comprehend let alone admit.

Notwithstanding his emphasis on the mutual antipathy between economic and environmental religion, the author looks to their common roots in Judeo‐Christian concepts and categories as a source of possible synthesis or rapprochement. This line of thinking is undeveloped in the book, as is his assertion that, “[…] it is impossible to imagine a vital Christianity of the future that does not take account of and somehow achieve a synthesis with the messages of secular religion” (p. xvi). To be sure, this is not a book about Christianity or Christian theology but thinking about the influence of secular religion on Christianity would be a worthwhile counterpart to the emphasis in this book on the influence of Judaism and Christianity in the other direction.

In a similar vein, the author makes much of the theological confusions abounding especially in environmental science (e.g. God is explicitly barred from playing any role in the “blind” Darwinian evolution of the natural environment and yet somehow “the creation” is infused with the spirit of the divine) and exhorts the value of clear theological thinking in straightening out inconsistencies in secular religion. Yet his own theology is never spelled out, even in outline. Especially for a readership largely untrained in theology, or even familiar with Judeo‐Christian concepts and categories like creation, redemption, salvation and sin, greater theological clarity on the author's part would have improved his exposition.

There are numerous digressions in this book which add to its interest. For economists there are miniature pen portraits of Richard Ely and Frank Knight drawing out dimensions of their intellectual contributions that are generally sidelined, or wilfully obscured, in the economics literature. For environmental scientists there are no doubt infuriating comparisons between themselves and creationists, libertarians and even colonialists! On this latter front, the story of the link between the rinderpest plague in Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which killed 90‐95 percent of all cattle, sheep and goats on the continent, and the creation of some of the greatest game reserves on earth is a gem. It is a timely reminder that secular religions also have embarrassing episodes in their histories that their adherents might prefer not to discuss at dinner parties.