A Place of Solidarity

Elijah Prewit-Davis

16 February 2023

I often say that while I was raised in a fundamentalist church, I was not raised in a fundamentalist household. God-fearing and committed to our Pentecostal church as my grandparents were, other commitments saved me from the stifling rigidity that I often experienced at church. For Mam, it was a commitment to the gospel and her own assurance that she knew more about it than any man, even if she could not preach or serve on the church board. For Pap, it was the pride he took in being a member of the United Auto Workers Union.

My grandparents bought the place in 1957 and raised me here. Mam had worked mostly in the home and at odd jobs, and Pap retired when I was six with a good pension and amazing health insurance. When they adopted me officially, the UAW provided the legal council and helped throughout the process. When I went to college a scholarship from the union helped to make it possible. Mam had chronic heart issues and diabetes and medical bills would have crushed us, as Pap would often remind us, “if not for the Union!”

I have only ever really lived in this place and I cannot quite explain my attachment to it. It’s only five acres, more or less, but it was a world unto itself for me in my youth. I was outside always; exploring the woods around us, catching frogs in the pond, fishing with Pap or alone, planting flowers with Mam, cutting firewood, or playing with whatever animal Pap had brought home that week.

Pap loved animals. Every few years we would go to an animal sale and come home with three cows and a lamb or goat for me. We would raise them up and process one a year. The fact that we had every intention of eating them did not preclude us from treating them as pets, that is, of loving them and enjoying them, and in extension, giving them a good life.

The plan was to move home for a year or two, finish the Ph.D., and then go wherever a TT job demanded. We were expecting our first child and had been home a month when Pap went to hospice. The family offered me the house and due to Pap’s good union pension and Mam’s frugality buying it was certainly possible. I felt torn between two worlds. Every stage of my academic career was predicated on not being where I was, let alone being “home.” I knew that if I moved into this place that I would never leave and I thought at the time that that meant academic failure.

We chose the place. Much work was needed when we first came. The fences were worn, invasive honey suckle covered the property, the pond was unhealthy, and there was no good spot for a garden. For the first few years, I lived with a split consciousness: when I was working outside, I felt I ought to be inside writing, and when I was inside writing, I felt I ought to be outside working and healing the land. As the healing work deepened, however, I began to see how my academic work and this place had folded in and out of each other. The often abstract concepts of process theology and eco-feminist theology concresced as I cleared honey suckle, sowed clover, gathered eggs, or turned a compost pile.

I often joke that the best thing Mam and Pap did to the land in the last 20 years of their life was nothing. Despite the honey suckle and Bittersweet vine, what was a field in my youth is now a diverse forest of Maple, Sassafras, Red Cedar, Oak, Hickory, and more. Nine years in and our 3 miniature cattle have cleared the honey suckle and keep it from returning. The trees are flourishing because the cows love the taste of the bittersweet vines that was previously choking them out. Their manure and hay waste are amending the soil and providing enough compost for our own gardens and the gardens of friends and neighbors. The chickens pick at the manure and keep the fly larva from hatching, and in so doing, help the nutrients and microorganisms find a home in the ground more easily.

The place itself is an ecosystem in which we participate. It gives to us so long as we give to it and live in solidarity with the creatures that inhabit it. Though we “own” it, the only sense in which we consider it “ours” is in the responsibility of its care.

I have no illusion that the work we do in this place can avert the ecological catastrophe that capitalism has created. Averting that catastrophe is no longer possible, but mitigating its effects and the work of healing remains. And it remains, as it always has, for us to do together in and through solidarity—solidarity not only with each other but with the land we find ourselves on and the multitude of creatures we share it with.

It was solidarity, in fact, that allowed me to have a place to love that I now pass on to my children. Certainly, those who participated in the Flint Sit-Down Strike that lead to the formation of the UAW had no idea how far reaching their actions would be. As I watch my children feed the chickens from the window, full of joy and recognition for what is in front of me, I hear my grandfather’s voice echo through our home—If not for the Union!

 Elijah Prewitt-Davis is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he teaches and develops courses for the university's "Justice and the Common Good" core curriculum. Recently, he has developed and taught courses on "Race and Justice," "Healing and Loving Creation," "The Theology of Martin Luther King," and a seminar titled "Anxious, Alienated, Confused: The Subject of Late Capitalism." Outside of the Mount, he is a fellow with the Westar Institute's God and the Human Future Seminar and serves on its steering committee. Prewitt-Davis is also working on an experimental book project that utilizes his training in process philosophy and new materialism to reflect on his working-class background and the practices he used on the five-acre mini-farm where he lives with his wife, two children, three dogs, three goats, four miniature Highland cows, twenty-one chickens, and a whole host of other creatures. 

Solidarity in times of helplessness

Priscila Alves Goncalves DaSilva

16 February 2023

I have been a theologian for about six years and all the systematic, biblical theology, and emerging interpretations I have learned in the academy seem, in a way, insufficient to comfort, denounce, and transform the situation of socio-spiritual helplessness that we face today. The market economy makes us incorporate a performance of restlessness, of deep competitiveness, individualism, fragmentation of our sense of belonging as earthly beings (and here I include the problem of being on a collapsing planet due to the unbridled exploitation of natural resources). We live in a time where visiting space is a breakthrough, but taking care of biodiversity and human life is a delay. We're all, apparently, in a helpless situation. Talking about it is a theological-political act, and that's why we will. But first of all, I ask you, reader, to hear a private experience, which I will use as an example of this helplessness.

One of the most striking scenes of my life was watching my mother cry because she was unemployed at the time of the first Covid-19 quarantine. She is a little over 60 years old, and was part of the high-risk group, besides being part of a group of workers who are already treated as leftover, more disposable because of age. This means that my mother did not have her livelihood guaranteed and, if she risked going out to look for formal or informal work, she would be putting her life further at risk. Her options were to rely on family support, and to request financial assistance from social emergency programs.

This episode marked me because, of course, I was implicated in a sense of impotency, sadness; and also because from it I began to think of the psychic-emotional-spiritual ills that the market economy moves in human beings. What to do when circumstances force us to just wait or risk our lives in search of survival? Faced with the deep anguish caused by the conjuncture, my mother did as Jesus in the Olives: she wept. And she prayed too.

I want to point out that in her prayer aloud, however, she did not ask God for help so that the situation would be mitigated or even resolved. She did not pray for justice, or courage to dismantle the system that made her, on a certain level, a necessary person for the accumulation of a minority. In her prayer, she questioned what she had done wrong to be in such a complex and precarious situation. This is interesting because it reveals how many working-class people have already assumed the maxim of the economic market that the blame for failure is the “loser," and not the system itself; that financial results will be experienced by all, and that otherwise, individual effort has not been enough. The system is collective, but it's personal guilt. My mother was not only afraid of hunger, shame for vulnerability; she felt a guilt that, at first, does not seem to dissolve with any atonement but within the market itself, which legitimizes everything as long as can exploit.

I use her example as a type of candle, which radiates a trembling light, weak, but capable of illuminating our reflections about a problem that sacrifices and invades the routine of most of the Brazilian population (my country of origin) and also North American people: that of helplessness caused by the contemporary capitalist economy. A few days ago, OXFAM (Oxford Committee for Famine Relief) published a survey that shows that the 20 largest Brazilian billionaires have more accumulated wealth (US $121 billion) than 128 million Brazilians (60% of the population). In addition, more than 30 million people do not have guaranteed basic food, and most of them are spread across large centers on the streets or in the favelas, as is the case with my mother, living precariously. In other words, analysis demonstrates an ever deeper social sin (term of liberation theology): extreme wealth and extreme poverty have grown simultaneously at a speed never seen before. Rich people buying apartments in the metaverse, poor people being arrested for living on the streets. In general, the latter have no one to turn to, feel abandoned — solitary and in despair. Therefore, a theology committed to real life needs to know and discern the cry of helplessness of those who accumulate only fears.

This whole scenario has a dimension that is, in a way, related to the spiritual issue. This means that I do not do here just a conjuncture analysis, a neutral reading of our time. It is the duty of theologians to think about material life, its structures, ways of functioning, but mainly to think-act on the following question: what does it mean to build solidarity in a conjuncture as hostile as this? This question indirectly professes that people should not be perpetuated as pieces — workforces, bodies that become matter for exploitation, minds that obey the urgency of survival without being able to quickly create new means of living. In other words, we are all sunk in a sense of helplessness, in a constant fear of everyday effort not being enough to achieve the least: survival.

From my mother, who represents the working class here in Brazil, I point out some clues to how we develop solidarity in times of helplesssness:

Working-class people need the good news that they are not guilty of poverty.

Once free of this guilt, they can understand that their lives are connected to systems and other people in the same situation of helplessness.

Connected not only by helplessness and the system, people can organize themselves jointly to nurture actions that weaken the mechanisms that oppress them.

In this scheme of clues, solidarity is revealed as an ethics of a spiritual nature that dismantles the most solid pillars of capitalism. In the face of helplessness, solidarity is a gospel of communion, it is a reality in constant construction, it is a rebellion against the system. Today, the notion of solidarity is the answer to Yahweh's question: “Where is your brother?” You're with me!

Priscila Alves Gonçalves da Silva is Brazilian, she was born and raised in the Coronel Leôncio favela, located in Rio de Janeiro. Daughter of immigrant parents from the Northeast, a region of Brazil known for precariousness, she has a degree in theology (Baptist University of Rio de Janeiro), has a master's and Ph.D. (in progress) in Religious Studies, both at the Methodist University of São Paulo. She is also a graduate student in Pedagogy (Estácio de Sá University), which makes her the first of her interracial family to have an academic background.

Climate Crisis of the Collective Imagination

Madeleine Lewis

2 March 2023

Climate change is the most pressing ethical, existential, and theological issue of my lifetime. The understanding that life on our planet faces unprecedented, exponentially worsening peril has long haunted my everyday thoughts and decision-making, eventually prompting my personal turn to organizing and collective action. My first mass protest was the inaugural People’s Climate March in New York City in September 2014, organized by 350.org and a collective of other organizations that were sounding the alarm about the catastrophic effects of fossil fuel extraction and other human activity on the global climate, including Indigenous rights organizations, racial justice groups, unions and labor organizations, churches, and schools. I attended with a group of students and community members who had collaborated with several environmental justice organizations in Alabama to support the cost of our travel. As a young person at the People’s Climate March, I remember feeling an acute, new, and profound sense of hope about the power of organizing, collective action, and social movements to change the world for the better.

Only a few months after the 2014 People’s Climate March, Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’ was released, which addressed anthropogenic effects on global ecology in detail and argued that “the climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.” Because the climate crisis is a global crisis, developing viable alternatives to the system of capitalism that has caused such profound and devastating effects on the climate will take collective action. However, while climate change affects the entire world, its specific impacts are still differentiated according to race, class, gender, geography, and nationality. In the intersection between a concern for the universal and a respect for the particularities of our unique experiences, there exists a profound opportunity for solidarity.

I was born and raised within the geographic territory that is now known as Alabama, in the southernmost foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Much of my childhood was spent outside, familiarizing myself with the surrounding caves, flora, and fauna of lower Appalachia. In fact, the primary site of my childhood curiosity and exploration was a giant abandoned limestone quarry close to my home– I grew up playing among direct evidence of irreversible anthropogenic impacts on the surrounding ecologies. When I began to get involved in collective action in my late teens, it was primarily around local issues of fossil fuel extraction, working to prevent further strip and tar sands mining of the topography of Alabama. Through such efforts, I developed deep relationships with other organizers in burgeoning networks of solidarity across issues of racial, economic, and environmental justice. This type of organizing ultimately changed my understanding of my own agency within the system of capitalism – the system that incentivizes labor exploitation, ecological destruction, and resource extraction no matter the human or environmental cost. Through collective action, it is possible to shape change.

In 2017, the Carbon Majors Database reported that a mere 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. Greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for the rise in global temperatures, which in turn will also produce more extreme global weather patterns, sea level rise, intense droughts, and catastrophic floods. As described by David Wallace Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, climate change is “not just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced but a threat of an entirely different category and scale” (9). It is difficult to imagine the extent of climate disasters that we may live to see within our lifetimes. Such a crisis requires collective theological intervention in the structures of capitalism that have created it.

My personal concern for climate action is rooted in a deep respect for the sanctity of life on Earth, including my own human life and the lives of every being that I know and love. Polar bears are often seen as the poster child for the impacts of climate change on the planet, with descriptions of melting Arctic ice caps and remote, starving predators being commonplace in U.S. discourse about the climate for several decades. Certainly the effects of warming global temperatures on Arctic life are catastrophic, harrowing, and disturbing. However, when our cultural representations of climate change present it as a remote polar bear problem, instead of a people problem, it means walling-off our understanding of climate disaster to the other-than-human world. When we imagine ecology as something that happens apart from or outside of human systems, including economic systems, we suffer the consequences of complacency, inaction, and indifference. Rather, it is imperative to understand the environment as intimately interdependent with human social and political existence.

Now, whenever I return to the environments in which I grew up, I notice incredibly worrying changes in the ecologies that I once knew quite intimately– tornado seasons that start earlier and last longer, the incredible decline of once prominent populations of bumblebees and lightning bugs, flowering trees that bloom months too early to ever be pollinated, flooded out landscapes and intense summer droughts. The ecological changes are not slow, nor are they individual. Systemic changes within the economy are required in order to address the effects of climate change. The work that it takes to reckon with the effects of climate change on human beings and ecologies around the world is as much social, collective, imaginative, and representational – and thus, deeply theological – as it is personal, political, legal, or moral.

Madeleine Lewis: I am a friend, organizer, family member, and student. They were born and raised in the Tennessee Valley, in what is now known as northern Alabama. I have been involved in labor and environmental justice struggles throughout the southeastern United States for more than eight years, focusing on building political power with working people. I studied religion and applied mathematics at the University of Alabama. After graduating from college, I worked as a union organizer for adjunct faculty and graduate students in North Carolina. In my role as a Wendland Cook Fellow, I am particularly interested in studying and participating in church-based movements for redress and reparations, especially as they engage with collective memory projects on the legacies of colonialism and chattel slavery in the United States.

Flooding in Appalachia Calls Us to Redemptive Work

Robert Kell

March 2, 2023

Long before I knew about ecotheology or understood climate change, I knew the steady flow of water that tumbled down the mountain in creeks. I knew creeks sheltered salamanders and crayfish, not just for my youthful delight but for God's delight. I knew the loud sound of the kingfisher's cry that perched eagerly for a minnow to appear out of the watery shadows. I knew all these things because my Granny taught me to look for crawling life and listen to cawing birds as we searched for watercress and wild mustard. She would say, "God made all this and he loves every bit of it."

She also taught me to respect the swollen rush of water that rose above our creek's bank after heavy rains. Over the years, I watched the stormwaters grow browner because the trees upstream were cut for timber. Granny wouldn't say much about it, only occasionally shaking her head at the mess left after logging. She was the type of person who respected the property rights of others. If they wanted to cut their trees, then so be it. This is the way in Appalachia; folks appreciate the hills and respect God's permission to use them to make a living and survive.

Appalachia is full of dizzying tensions for outsiders who see a place where folks don't know their own self-interest, a place exploited and backward. How can you be "friends of coal” — as the slogan goes — and naturalists? Coal mining provided dignified work and coal camps provided modern conveniences for mountain people. Hillbillies, as mountain people were labeled and now call themselves, were thrust into mining by land speculators and coal barons. Their traditional faith, grounded in God's abundant grace flowing from the natural world, was co-opted so the land under their feet became the symbol of scarcity to be maximized by ownership. Slowly and forcefully, hillbillies were brought into modernity by a nation whose economy rested on one common religion. Despite conforming to this religion, hillbillies have maintained an appreciation for the land.

But what type of religion and god permits the tops of mountains to be blown apart? The god of capitalism. This god's invisible hand controls the market and sees trees, mountains, and hillbillies as commodities. This god has permitted corporations to have dominion to feed an insatiable appetite for an expansionary free market. The god of capitalism bought the land, the coal seams, and the politicians and forced the people to labor as miners, loggers, and millhands to power the industrial machines. Now, the religion of capitalism sees climate change as both an inconvenience and an opportunity in the mountains.

In 2020, rains swelled the creeks and rivers of Eastern Kentucky, causing over $72 million in damage and then again, for five days in July of 2022, the skies poured 16 inches of rain over parts of the region–a thousand-year storm. The deluge stretched across Knox, Clay, and Owsley counties, east through Breathitt and Leslie counties, and into Perry, Knott, and Letcher counties. These counties are among the poorest in our nation and considered "distressed" by the Appalachian Regional Commission. Coal runoff ponds and logged hillsides create a disastrous scenario where stormwaters race down the naked slopes to the places where political interests have failed to invest in infrastructure and where workers live in shabby homes by the creeks. Here, where the water gathers, we see the harbinger of absentee land ownership, coal mining, and poverty, warning of the coming of more flash floods. Despite it, hillbillies band together after such disasters, strong-willed to survive where their people have labored generationally.

The coal industry is dying, leaving a lingering question: what use is hillbilly labor now? Will old industries masquerading as something new keep corporate ownership of the land and resources? The sad irony is that these same regular rains and the temperate climate of the hills will make Appalachia a refuge for those displaced by rising sea levels, fires and drought. Hillbillies will face a new epoch of exploitation from real estate speculators and industry strongmen.

Despite this, they must get to work restoring and protecting the ecosystems that make the mountains resilient to the worst of climate change. Mountain people should work to reclaim coal-impacted lands, build new distributive energy systems, reforest the hills, start cooperative businesses, and establish regenerative economies. Like their ancestors, hillbillies will be responsible for using the land to sustain the nation.

Our mountains' well-being depends on our redemptive labor. Paul makes this connection in Romans 8:19-25, "For creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." However, this is only possible if hillbillies remember their relationship with creation and understand that environmental destruction and climate change create suffering for other creatures, the land, and God; they must abandon the religion of capitalism. Paul indicates in the passage that creation groans with hope for the children of God to realize their intertwined creatureliness and function as co-redeemers of God's work. Yes, the nation needs to hear the groaning of the mountains, of hillbillies, but more importantly, hillbillies need to reconnect to the creeks and rivers, so we can listen to their swollen groans calling us to labor for their redemption.

Robert Kell is the New Economy Program Manager with Appalachian Voices. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt Divinity School and a former Wendland-Cook Fellow in Religion and Justice. Robert works with communities in Central Appalachia to transition to sustainable and regenerative economies.