Living/Dying in the Capitalocene

The term Anthropocene is increasingly being recognized as a proper term to depict the current geological era, replacing the long-used term Holocene, the era that began some 11,650 years ago. This new term was helpfully explained in an article about two new movies that opened last week.*

Theologian Joerg Rieger, however, thinks there is a more accurate term to use for the present age, and he writes about that in his new book.

Joerg Rieger is a professor of theology at Vanderbilt University. He was born in Germany and will celebrate his 60^th birthday next week. An ordained Methodist minister, Rieger had already authored/edited 20 books when he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 2016. 

Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (2022) is the title of Rieger’s significant new book. Since I am also writing a review of it,** I asked GPT chat for help. Here is how they described the book:

Theology in the Capitalocene by Joerg Rieger is an important and thought-provoking book that offers a critical examination of the intersection of theology and capitalism in the context of the Anthropocene era.

Rieger’s book is not a quick read nor is it easy to digest all of his salient emphases. One criticism I have of his valuable book is the overabundance of references to other scholarly works.

This would be an excellent book for doctoral students writing their dissertations on related issues. But it may be overwhelming for the general public. And even I, who finished a doctoral dissertation over fifty-five years ago (though in a far different field), found his book challenging.

Here are some of Rieger’s main emphases that are worth serious consideration, and I am grateful to him for introducing each of these.

* Emphasis on the importance, and neglect of serious consideration of, “unpaid reproductive labor” that is directly linked to discrimination against women.

* Emphasis on the distinction between power and privilege. This has ramifications that are often overlooked.

* Emphasis on class as a societal structure rather than “classism,” which is largely based on stereotypes.

* Emphasis on “deep solidarity.” I have long thought that solidarity is something that we who are privileged, to whatever degree, can choose out of loving concern by becoming allies of those who are “underprivileged.”

While there may be reason to retain some of that emphasis, Rieger stresses that solidarity is a fact that needs to be acknowledged rather than something chosen in an over/under relationship.

All of these, as well as his prevalent emphasis on ecological concerns, are related to the pernicious power of capitalism in the present world.

My main criticism of Rieger’s book is his apparent belief that the serious ecological predicament facing the world today is a problem that can be solved. His position contrasts with what I have written over the past eighteen months about overshoot and the collapse of civilization.

Most scholars who are currently university professors and embrace deep ecological concerns hold the same position that Rieger does. The following words spoken in the 1930s are still quite relevant and true today: 

I can certainly understand why one in Rieger’s position would not want to publicly talk about the possible “end of the world as we know it” in a decade or two. If they believed that to be true, most high school students would likely decide that there would be no use going to college.

Rieger does show considerable compassion for the people who are suffering now because of capitalism as well as for the natural world that is being ravaged by the forces of capitalism, and I appreciate that concern.

Still, there needs to be more awareness that we who are now living in the Capitalocene era will soon be seeing massive numbers of people (and non-human life) dying in this present age because of the ever-expanding predicament produced by capitalism.

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* See “‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ tell the same terrifying story,” an intriguing July 19 opinion piece in The Washington Post.

** Last month I received a free Kindle copy of Rieger’s book by promising to write a blog article and/or review of it. The promise was made to Mike Morrell, who operates “Speakeasy,” a website that offers “quality books in exchange for candid reviews.” Here is the link to the rather long review I have written, subject to further revision. Among other things, that review amplifies the too-brief treatment of Rieger’s emphases given above. 

Not Apathetic about Apatheism

A middle school teacher asked her class, “Who can tell us what are two of the biggest problems in society today.” A smart-alecky student quickly replied, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” The teacher then wisely responded, “Right! Ignorance and apathy.”

Those are also two of the biggest problems related to people’s perception of God and God-talk (theology). This blog post is specifically about the latter, which is sometimes referred to as apatheism, a term and concept I have not been adequately cognizant of. 

Apatheism is a relatively new term,* although the condition it connotes is certainly not new. It is a combination of the words apathy and theism, and it denotes the attitude of apathy toward the existence or non-existence of God(s).

With reference to belief in God, people have usually been considered theists, atheists, or agnostics. In contrast to theists, who are people who believe in God, atheists are those who deny the existence of, and thus belief in, any transcendent Being.

Agnostics are people who neither believe nor disbelieve in God because they don’t know whether such a Being exists. But the apatheists not only don’t know, they don’t care whether or not God exists.

When I began teaching Christian Studies in Japan, I soon realized that most (90%or so) of my students didn’t believe in God, not the Christian God nor a supernatural being of any other religion. Many said they were agnostic, but others claimed to be atheists.

After a few years, I began to realize that, in reality, most of my students were apatheistic, although I didn’t have that word to describe them then. They just didn’t care whether God existed or not, for they didn’t see how that would make any difference in their daily lives, one way or another.

And now in the U.S., and even longer in Europe, an ever-increasing percentage of younger people, even those with a nominal connection with Christianity, seem to be apatheists, although most would not use that word to describe themselves.

With the clear decline in emphasis on or even belief in Hell and Heaven in the theological position of many Christian churches/denominations, the younger generations seem to have lost interest in theological matters, beginning with the root of all theology (theos + logos = words about God).  

Commenting on my previous post, a Thinking Friend wrote, “Wonder what’s next. ‘Theology not relevant at all?’” It seems clear to me that that indeed is now a widespread attitude among many. Devoid of interest in God, there is mostly apathy toward other theological issues as well. 

However, I am not apathetic about apatheism. I think it is a real shame that belief in God has been related so much to words and has not been seen for its relevance to how people live.

When I finally developed a course in Christian Studies that focused on the way some exemplary God-believers had lived, many students showed considerable interest in that.

I introduced students to some of those I have on my “top ten Christians” list,** people such as Francis of Assisi, Kagawa Toyohiko, and Martin Luther King, Jr. My students were interested in what such Christians did, even though not so much in what they believed.

While not always using those words, I tried to emphasize a key emphasis of liberation theologians: “To know God is to do justice.” Since “justice is simply love distributed” (Joseph Fletcher), this is acknowledging the truth of 1 John 4:11

…love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God.

That’s why I am not apathetic about apatheism: I want more people to know and to practice love broadly (=work for social justice). That’s what the best Christians, who have known God intimately, have always done.

Whether they will self-identify as Christians or not, I strongly hope there will be an increasing number of people who overcome their apatheism and come to know God (by whatever name) in order to love those in society most in need of social justice.

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* Wikipedia says the term was coined in 2001 by Robert Nash—but it mistakenly says that Nash was a professor at Mercer University. Robert N. Nash, who is an acquaintance of mine, was indeed a Mercer professor, but it was the late Robert J. Nash of the University of Vermont who apparently coined the word apatheism in his book Religious Pluralism in the Academy (2001).

** The blog article I posted on 9/15/10 was titled “Top Ten Christians,” and then in my 9/30/10 post I wrote about the criteria used in composing that list. Although I didn’t change the blog article itself, just last week in a comment at the end of the 9/15 post I noted that I have now changed one of the names on my list. 

The Biggest Theological Changes I’ve Seen in My Lifetime

Perhaps this needs to be seven posts rather than one, but at this point I am just listing and briefly describing what I consider to be the biggest theological changes I have seen in my lifetime—and these are not my personal shifts but what I’ve observed in the broad spectrum of Christianity. 

#1 – Widespread rejection of Hell. I list this first because of its impact on the following changes. Emphasis on Hell was not only long the emphasis of Protestantism but of Roman Catholicism as well.

One of the most well-known Protestant sermons was Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God.” And early in the 19^th century, revivalist preachers in the U.S. became known for their “fire and brimstone” sermons. That was still quite common when I was a boy/youth.

The Roman Catholic Church also taught for centuries that everyone who was not baptized as a Catholic was bound to go to Hell when they died. That position was drastically changed by the Second Vatican Council (1962~65).

And while emphasis on Hell is still much a part of conservative evangelicalism, in Protestant Christianity at large that emphasis has been quite widely rejected, or at least conspicuously ignored.

#2 – Growing de-emphasis on Heaven. For far different reasons, but related to the above, is what seems to me to be a significant decrease in the emphasis on Heaven in 21^st century Christianity. Heaven isn’t particularly denied, it just isn’t talked about nearly as much as it used to be.

The Great Awakenings and evangelical preaching of the 18^th~20^th centuries was about being “saved” from Hell in order to go to Heaven after death. In the early decades of my life the “afterlife” was of primary concern in most of Christianity, but that no longer seems to be the case.  

#3 – Drastic decrease in world mission activity. Although it was never just for that purpose, the desire to save people from Hell in order that they could go to Heaven was long a major motivation for world mission activity of most Christian denominations.

When I went to Japan as a Baptist missionary in 1966, there were not only conservative missionaries of various denominations, many of which were more conservative than Southern Baptists then, but also many from the more “liberal” Protestant denominations as well as Roman Catholics.

Some of the most prominent Christian schools in Japan were founded by Catholic, Anglican, and “mainstream” Protestant missionaries. But by the time I left Japan in 2004, there were hardly any Christian missionaries left other than Southern Baptists and other conservative evangelicals.

#4 – Emphasis on life in the here and now. Closely related to #2 above is the growing emphasis on the importance of life in this world now. Even the understanding of the Kingdom of God has broadly changed from being focused upon the world to come to a feature of the world we live in now.

Contemporary Christianity seems to have increasingly embraced the traditional Jewish position of “salvation” not being “about going to heaven after death but about the flourishing of life in the present.”*

For example, emphasis on flourishing in the present has for many years now been a part of the reflections of two popular theological thinkers I greatly respect, “emergent” Protestant public theologian and author Brian McLaren and Catholic (Franciscan) priest Richard Rohr.

5) De-emphasis and even rejection of substitutionary atonement. Since the blog post I made six years ago today was about that doctrinal belief (see here), I won’t elaborate on this point more now.

6) Change in views related to sexual ethics. Because of the perceived clear positions of the Bible and the teachings of the Church, both Protestant and Catholic Christianity long-held negative judgments against divorce, cohabitation, and homosexuality.

While there were always many “deviations,” Christianity long held to a strong belief in the sanctity of marriage, which meant lifetime monogamous marriage of a man and a woman with no intimate sexual relations condoned outside of such a marriage.

In spite of strong emphasis on the traditional position by some Christians, broadly speaking, to a large extent Christianity now seems no longer to speak out against divorce or pre-marital sexual relations, and there continues to be greater acceptance of the rights of LGBTQ people.

  7) Growth in ecumenical relations, including deep ecumenism. There is a long history of Christian ecumenism—but an even longer history of Christian denominational “tribalism,” which is what I mostly saw in my younger years.

But during my lifetime there has been not only an ever-increasing move toward Christian denominations working together, a movement from exclusivity to inclusivity, but also an increase in what is sometimes called “deep ecumenism,” Christianity working with other religious traditions.**

What would you readers add or subtract from this list? And which of these do I need to write more about?

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* These words are from Jeorg Rieger in his book Theology in the Capitalocene (2022), which I plan to introduce more fully in the last blog post planned for this month.

** According to Chat GPT, “deep ecumenism” is a term coined by Wayne Teasdale (1945~2004), a Catholic lay monk. His book The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions (1999) “is considered a seminal work in the field of deep ecumenism.” (I think I heard that term before 1999, though.)

Matthew Fox, former Catholic and now Episcopal priest, posted a “daily meditation” entitled “What Is Deep Ecumenism? Why Now?” on Oct. 18, 2021.