Book Review | Theology in the Capitalocene (2022)
This book review was originally published in Faith & Economics, Issue 83, Fall 2024. It has been re-published here with permission from the author.
Book Reviews
Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity Joerg Rieger. 2022. Minneapolis, MI: Fortress Press. ISBN 978-150-64- 31581. $22.00 (Paperback).
Reviewed by Jamin Hübner, LCC International University and The University of the People
I originally got into the field of theology because I wanted to pursue the “eternal” and “timeless” instead of selling real estate or farming. Little did I know how much change theology continually undergoes— and has undergone, for thousands of years. Theology, it eventually became evident, is not merely a reflection of faith in the past and its events, but reflection on the urgent moment and the work of the divine today.
This orientation frames Joerg Rieger’s Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity. If one was to overhaul the task and direction of theology for the present moment (i.e. the globalized, twenty-first-century world), what would it look like? What would it center on? For Rieger (and others), our situation requires attention to (1) the ecological crisis, (2) the economic and political crisis, which relates to (3) the crisis of meaning at work, about which much ink has been spilt in the last century.
While many theologians and faith practitioners would like to avoid dirtying their hands with such concerns—perhaps contenting themselves with rehearsing traditional dogmas, coasting on past progress, and con tinuing to privatize religion, Rieger contends that everything is ultimately political and public, even that which at first sight seems personal and private. The personal is political, as feminist thinkers have reminded us, and we should add that the political is also personal. (p. 2)
If religion is relevant to the world, it must deal with the big concerns of the majority of people.
The good and perhaps somewhat surprising, news, is that places exist where all hands are already on deck, even if only by default— for instance, in places where the global 99 percent have to work for a living. This is why theology in the Capitalocene needs to engage questions of work and productive and reproductive labor…topics that theologians at present rarely address. (p. 4)
By “Capitalocene,” Rieger is building on the work of Jason Moore[1]; “Anthropocene” is misleading because, in many ways, humans have only altered the entire globe by means of capitalism in the last half millennia. “Blaming humanity as a whole for climate change and ecological devastation,” he remarks, “misses the flows of power that determine our age. The same would be true for blaming religion as such or all sciences, natural or social” (p. 27).
In the introductory pages, Rieger dismantles the myths of individu alism (pp. 6–8), centers the topic and problems of power, and examines the problems with mediocre change in the church and in society (p. 31). Traditional ideas of God and a few improvements to our energy con sumption just isn’t enough. Quoting Von Logau: “In situations of danger and great need, the middle road leads to death” (p. 36). There needs to be a more sophisticated critique of neoliberal capitalism. “Blaming consumers for consumerism not only fails to address what drives the production of consumers’ desires; it also covers up its causes” (p. 37). Similarly, our images of God—such as those that portray God as “a powerful and transcendent overlord” and “representative of economic elites”—differ from “an entity caring for all creatures, suffering and rejoicing with them, and appreciating diversity” (p. 43). Today’s dominant economic theories, of course, “display theological affinities” (p. 44).
Oddly enough, this isn’t really a “progressive theology”: the material concerns of people exhibit great concern in the Abrahamic religions:
in most of the ancient Jewish traditions, the idea of salvation is not about going to heaven after death but about leading a happy and productive life, and several Christian traditions have been inspired by this. (p. 50) .
“God” is not even found in ideas, but on the shop floor and in the daily struggle for survival. The question then is and this the main ques tion of the book:
What if the major task is neither the formulation of big ideas— the perennial dream not only of religion but of many of the humanities—nor its opposite, the seemingly neutral collection of data, the proliferation of descriptive empirical studies, or technocratic solutions, but the engagement with emerging levels of resistance to the status quo and the concomitant forms of productivity and agency, both human and nonhuman, that mark our age? (p. 57)
This is by all means a “liberationist” and “immanent” approach—which takes center stage in Chapter 2. Rieger tries to get back to not the “crucified Lord” as much as the insurrectionary construction worker who was killed by the state for his subversive organizing (pp. 80, 184). The chapter demonstrates how Christians and people of faith have been blind to the essential issues of direct democracy, worker empowerment, and solidarity (p. 100). It also focuses heavily on solidarity and agency (nonhuman and human), with contemporary engagement of political theologians and scholars.
The next two chapters reveal the startling and unfortunate absence of concern for class and labor in contemporary religious thought— which is all the more bizarre when one returns to the world of the New Testament (e.g. colonization, taxes, class power and privilege and con flict, hunger, social justice, and similar issues that saturate the context of every Gospel). Class isn’t about income levels, of course, it’s about power, and power differentials is what Christianity and other religious traditions directly address. Similarly, in the fourth chapter on “Deep Solidarity” (a topic Rieger has written extensively on), it is clear that few movements of liberation in the US (civil rights, abolitionism, suffragism, etc.) succeeded without ground-up solidarity (pp. 144–145), but few churches are known for their consistent organizing around such change; these are supposedly “social issues,” not “theological and religious” ones, as if that distinction in anyway makes sense from a Christian perspec tive. Rieger notes that racism is a class weapon, and
nationalism is another example of the unite-and-conquer strategy that is often used to defuse the transnational solidarity of working people everywhere, and it is not surprising that racism and nationalism go hand in hand”. (p. 159)[2]
Similar to DuMez, who argued that the evangelical support for Trump was not a surprise, Joerg suggests that the resurgence of fascism in the US and elsewhere (Italy, Brazil, India, Russia, etc.) and the paraly zation of religious communities to collectively resist it, is also of little surprise[3]; systems of oppression complement one another. Rieger also provides brilliant analysis regarding the difference between “privilege” and “power” (p. 165ff), which reminds readers how contemporary dialogue on privilege can obfuscate essential power dynamics (and therefore responsibility). “Deep solidarity” (which cannot be reduced to morality), along with real reparations, is a corrective to both issues and to ongoing injustice.
Theology in the Capitalocene is a marvelous volume essential for anyone interested in the relevance of theology and religious models today. For those bored and dissatisfied with shaving off the rough edges of capitalism and the shallow platitudes of Christian philanthropy and charity, Rieger offers a pressing and much-needed reorientation. It also complements his edited volume Faith, Class, and Labor, which fleshes out much of what he outlines.[4]
Notes
1. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015). Cf. Jason Moore (Ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).
2. “Nationalism” is here used in its common, pejorative connotation in relation to the history of western fascism and imperialism, not, for example, in reference to independence movements or decoloniza tion (where nationalism is anti-imperialist, for example).
3. Kristin Kobes DuMez, Jesus and John Wayne (New York, NY: Liveright, 2020).
4. See Joerg Rieger, Ed., Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020). ■