Statue of St. Charbel Makhlouf situated in the Iraqui suburb of Ankawa just outside Erbil.
I have had the privilege of knowing Mitri Raheb for a long time—since the days when our careers were young. I remember my first attempt to bring college students to Bethlehem and provide them with an honest engagement with the local church. Raheb was the pastor of a Lutheran church in Bethlehem and I had a crew of about 30 eager college students. His students met mine on a rooftop somewhere in town and I watched the magic of what inter-cultural connection looks like. The students later told me it was one the best things they ever participated in. Thanks to that moment and Raheb’s modeling, I’ve had this same experience with hundreds of students since then.
In this short post, I can hardly do justice to this excellent book or provide a substantial response to the many arguments it contains within. I will therefore primarily focus on a few significant points, as well as one point of criticism. My chief interest is in how Raheb has sustained a conversation with the west—in particular with the western church—something few other Palestinians have done successfully. The book helpfully surveys the way that western powers have pursued their interests in the Middle East for the last 200 years, focusing on how such foreign involvement has affected the Arabic-speaking church from Iraq to Egypt. It is full of surprises and is indeed, as Philip Jenkins describes in his blurb, a trove of information and analysis.
One example of this is Raheb’s account of the diplomatic connections developed between the Ottomans and the Germans and how these connections led to their alliance in WWI. Another example is how the Ottoman millet system both benefited from and later fractured the religious communities present during the Ottoman Empire. Still another is his description of the ways that western powers—and here I think mainly of France and England—resisted the inclusion of Arab leadership into the church structures that had been put in place. As a feature of this colonial project, western church leaders had educated and empowered the Arab laity but neglected to include the Arab clergy who were significant leaders in every community. Though they were eventually incorporated, the Greek Orthodox church still struggles with this inclusion and is barely indigenized.
The book helpfully surveys the way that western powers have pursued their interests in the Middle East for the last 200 years, focusing on how such foreign involvement has affected the Arabic-speaking church from Iraq to Egypt.
Another example of western church failings appears in the story of Iqrit. I was familiar with the horrible story of the village of Iqrit but not in the detail provided in Raheb’s book. I found myself once again infuriated and made a silent vow to bring 30 more students to that ruin and its church to show them material evidence of a crime scene. I’ll be back in January with 30 more students where they will meet with some of the grandchildren of Iqrit in Nazareth.
It was a sentence on page 72 that haunted me: “No wonder that many Middle Eastern Christians do not trust western sympathy for ‘persecuted Christians.’” From Balfour to the 21st century Western Christian, calls to protect the church ring hollow when one looks at the implementation of foreign policies in many European states. Today, this hollow ring is heard most loudly from the U.S. and its involvement in the region. While evangelical politicians call for the security of Arab Christians, their policies betray them.
The displacement of Arab Christians is such a sobering story that I, too, would be suspicious of any overtures from the west. The statistics for the depopulation of the Christian Middle East are sobering. In the 19th century, Christians made up 20% of the region’s population; today, only 3%. In Palestine, if this emigration had not occurred, there would be 600,000 Palestinian Christians in the Middle East. Imagine that.
Three themes resonated with me in the book that I will focus on in the rest of this post. And there is a fourth where Raheb lets us off too easily.
First, western involvement in the region instigated the three most destructive events for the region’s churches. Each time, western governments used the claim that they were “protecting minorities” as a pretext for their colonial expansion. There was the German-Turkish collusion in the Armenian massacre, then the British betrayal of the Assyrian communities in Iraq, and lastly the American invasion of Syria and Iraq in 2003. Each of these events devastated Christian communities. Raheb summarizes on page 150, “I am not aware of a single case in which western empires played a constructive role in creating a political framework in the Middle East where Christians and others could thrive.” I agree. We should rethink the explanation that the west has been a force for good in the Middle East. We are skilled at finding and defending oil reserves, but less good at finding and defending the region’s minorities. There is a level of irony and hypocrisy here that must be named: Western powers and in particular, the U.S., have been instrumental in breaking up the most ancient Christian community in the Middle Eastern world.
Second, Raheb describes the western disparagement of Islam as a tool used to understand the region; to decide who are its victims and who its valiant defenders of order. From this perspective, Arab Christians are the victims of Islamic extremism and Israel is usually claimed to be a welcome enclave of sanity. I wish I could count how many times I have heard this in the church. The problem is that this invites us to take on a colonial worldview: the Muslim is backward, barbaric, and intolerant. This worldview, as Raheb shows, has more to do with western perceptions than concrete facts. It helps us feel “civilized” and as the transporters of light to a very dark world. This is why reading Raheb is important. For those who continue to carry stereotypes like this today, hearing an Arab Christian voice of this caliber will certainly change that perspective.
Western powers and in particular, the U.S., have been instrumental in breaking up the most ancient Christian community in the Middle Eastern world.
If the length and scope of the book had allowed, I think we would have benefited from hearing how Islam itself is undergoing its own confusing period of self-definition. 9/11 is now a symbol, an unfair symbol to be sure, of how many perceive Islam. There have been instances from Madrid, to Paris, to London not to mention Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria where extreme groups have not helped western perceptions. I do not pretend to know how Islamic leaders are coping with this and would like to learn more. But I know that for my Muslim friends, it is an embarrassment and a dilemma. Maybe a crisis.
When I guest-lectured in a seminar at a university in Amman a few years ago, to my surprise I met a small group of Muslim firebrands launching threatening criticism of me and the west. Though myself and some of the other faculty present were unsure how to respond, the Muslim women in the room engaged in this verbal battle and silenced all of these militant young men with eloquence and intelligence. I wondered if I was witnessing something important. Were the Muslim women less enamored of this sort of reactive intimidation? Were they the courageous voices that can speak into this situation? I think there is a secret hidden in this story. Perhaps an analogy can be found in modern Iran where women lead the way against the Islamic clerics in their country.
Lastly, evangelicals in the west are driven by an agenda of Christian persecution and suffering in the Middle East. For some mysterious reason, I get a newsletter mailed to me from the organization Voice of the Martyrs. It is a case-study that exposes the reader to dreadful images of loss before asking for money. I see it now as evidence of a persecution-industry within my own evangelical tribe. This view is widespread and never questioned. But as former Vice President Pence has written (and know he is an evangelical Zionist, see page 146), these stories of persecution gain traction in Washington and can be used to justify intervention in any part of the world, particularly the Middle East.
If there was room for improvement, I would argue that Raheb is far too generous with the American Evangelical church and how it has woven Zionism into a political ideology that is a mash-up of eschatology and colonialism. He pins this down well in the late 19th century and gives the British and French their due. Here, however, I am thinking of people I know: evangelical leaders that churches are following whose theological views produce intolerance, violence, and inspire a foreign policy of militancy toward the region. Those in the US need a prophetic rebuking no less than that which appears in the book with regard to the Europeans. But perhaps this is for another book.
After 35 years teaching in liberal arts colleges, Gary Burge joined Calvin Seminary in 2017 as Professor of New Testament and eventually as academic dean. He specializes in the gospels and the ancient cultural context that shaped them. He is a frequent visitor to the Middle East, having served in eight of its countries, and has led students through the Holy Land over 25 times. He studied at The Univ. of California (BA), The American University of Beirut, Fuller Seminary (MDiv) and Aberdeen Univ., Scotland (PhD). He has authored many books and articles both on the New Testament and the conflicts in Israel/Palestine. His two books on theology and Zionism, Whose Land? Whose Promise?(2013) and Jesus and the Land (2010) are used widely by scholars and students.
Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels, Belgium. June 7, 2020. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity is a thoughtful and important reflection on dignity. Taking the Black Lives Matter movement as a starting point, Lloyd writes a philosophical manifesto that does not restrict itself only to theoretical analysis but equally offers ideas for how to re-center the struggle for a renewed Black dignity. Dignity doesn’t restrict itself to what he describes as the opposition to “ontic” manifestations (oppression, exploitation, and harm), but should extend to a continuous opposition and struggle against relationships of domination, which is defined by the capacity to impose one’s will over another human being. Dignity, therefore, is the refusal of that relationship of domination, the refusal of subjugation.
As someone who has been studying, researching, and thinking about race and racialization in continental Europe, and especially from the vantage point of what scholars have come to describe as the Muslim question, I take Lloyd’s reflections on dignity, especially as he constructs it in opposition to respectability, as a basis to reflect on how mechanisms of racialization operate in very distinct forms. While the legacy of the transatlantic slave-trade figures as the background in Lloyd’s reflection, race works differently—but no less insistently—in Western Europe, a continent which still fails to grapple with colonialism and its afterlives. Starting from two cases, which touch upon the question of Blackness and Islamophobia, I want to address how the question of dignity can be rethought in a context where one’s alterity is simply erased.
Respectability and Survivability
In May 2023, the sixth edition of the Afropolitan festival was held at the prestigious Centre of fine Arts (Bozar) in Brussels. This festival started in 2015 as an annual homage to the Belgian and European Afrodiasporic community in all its complexity. Artists, community organizers, and filmmakers gather to discuss questions and issues that are at the heart of the African diaspora. This year’s festival was dedicated to the theme “Legacies from the Black Cosmos.” For three days, dozens of artists gathered to showcase and discuss the imaginative possibilities of Black communities, taking their inspiration from the American artistic movement of Afrofuturism. As with the previous editions, the central purpose of the festival was to allow for African artists to “tell their stories and (re)present themselves.” The festival is well-attended and receives timid, yet overall positive media coverage.
While the legacy of the transatlantic slave-trade figures as the background in Lloyd’s reflection, race works differently—but no less insistently—in Western Europe, a continent which still fails to grapple with colonialism and its afterlives.
About 40 miles to the north of Brussels, in Belgium’s second largest town, Antwerp, which is known for its harbor and diamonds, another festival took place a few weeks earlier: the Medina Expo. The festival started out as the “Muslim Expo” in 2014. It was held in the commercial exposition halls of the city. Its central aim was to create a space of encounter between Muslims and non-Muslims and to allow for Muslims to showcase their talents and competencies in all their diversity. Since 2014, dozens of entrepreneurs and community organizations have gathered in a large public hall, while workshops and public talks are given by influential speakers. In 2017, the organization decided to change its name from the Muslim Expo to the Medina Expo to attract a wider non-Muslim audience. It also hoped to entice more entrepreneurs who often operate in “the city” (Medina in Arabic). This, interestingly, also occurred right after the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016. The festival is largely self-funded and organized using private funding. Since 2015, every edition of the Medina Expo has also been consistently met with demonstrations by the far-right party Vlaams Belang who vehemently oppose its organization. They warn that it marks the steady Islamization of society and threatens the possibility of “Islamic terror.” In 2017, the mayor of Antwerp, Bart De Wever, ordered a security clearance on one of the keynote speakers from the Netherlands and public speakers are regularly subjected to public scrutiny.
The two cases sketched above can be read as illustrations of love: Afrodiasporic and Muslim love. Men, women, and community organizers gathering to celebrate each other and re-center the narrative around their own accomplishments. Yet these two initiatives don’t seem to attract the same kinds of responses from the public, as the reactions to the Medina Expo illustrate. Muslim-centered public initiatives are routinely seen as polemical. Both their body politics (the headscarf being the most infamous), as well as their public initiatives are often met with suspicion. Muslims are accused of promoting unacceptable forms of secessionism, or simply banned from engaging in advocacy work as the dissolution of the French human rights organization fighting Islamophobia, the The Collective Against Islamophobia (CCIF), illustrated. A quick, and misleading, reading could lead one to conclude that anti-Blackness (or Afrophobia, the preferred term in Europe) and Islamophobia don’t work in the same ways in a country like Belgium, and that organizing as Muslim makes one subject to a higher degree of harassment and subjugation. Yet holding such a claim would not only be factually inaccurate (as the moral panic around wokeness and decolonization has aptly shown in the recent years, and which also includes an anxiety around Black collective bodies), but it also risks indulging in an “oppression Olympics” that is neither analytically fruitful, nor politically helpful. Rather, the distinct sociological treatment of these different cases should be seen as an invitation to adopt a relational view of domination, i.e., to understand how domination can take different forms and work through distinct mechanisms.
In Lloyd’s book, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the primordial encounter between the White master and the Black slave serve as paradigmatic and phenomenological starting points for conceptualizing domination and reflecting on dignity. In a context like the US—where slavery and Blackness have historically, legally, financially, and institutionally been co-constitutive in shaping the body politics— one can understand how and why Black dignity comes to represent “the paradigm of dignity” (14). Dignity is in Lloyd’s work also sharply contrasted with respectability, which he considers a temptation that those involved in the struggle against domination should resist. Respectability maintains an asymmetrical relationship with Whiteness as it strives for a multicultural politics of recognition which depoliticizes the struggle against domination.
In the continental European context, however, the dialectical relationship between “Blackness” and “Whiteness” doesn’t operate as an explicit formative element, nor does colonialism, for they are simply erased from the body politics. The Dutch anthropologist Gloria Wekker describes this as White Innocence, which she understands to be the ostensible disavowal of a series of interdependent ties (produced through colonialism, migration, etc.) in the political imaginary of the Netherlands. In the European context, this is manifested in the repeated erasure of the historical role of Islam in the formation of Europe and the erasure of colonialism from the archives of the industrial revolution. This colonial aphasia maintains itself today through the vehement denial of this postcolonial presence, which today is embodied in the presence of migrants from the former colonies. This colonial aphasia is managed through the exoticization and commodification of these migrants and/or their criminalization. The multicultural “other” is either celebrated as a commodity of diversity or chastised as a threat. I see the two cases described above as two sides of the same coin.
Ancestral Uprising AR art installation at Spadina Museum, by Afrofuturist Quentin VerCetty. Photo Credit: Flickr User City of Toronto. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
A relational view of domination also shows how striving for “respectability” is not always only a matter of recognition but also of survival. Islamophobia is often defined through discipline rather than domination. At stake is not so much the erasure of Muslims’ will (as is the case with the Slave), but rather their continuous redisciplining into acceptable lifeforms, which means—in the European context—lifeforms which are seen to be compatible with liberalism, secularism, and Whiteness. As has been noted by several scholars, Muslim subjectivities have, for distinct historical and theological reasons, been treated as important challengers of liberal modernity. Their redeemability (or secularization) has often been treated as a conditio sine qua none of their acceptability. This redisciplining is manifested in the case above through the renaming of the Muslim Expo as the Medina Expo, as well as through the heightened emphasis on a neoliberal logic of entrepreneurship and self-governance (all participants are presented as entrepreneurs).
One could read this as an instance of trying to gain “respectability.” Yet respectability includes not only wearing the right “clothes,” but also an existential component. It is also a matter of (social) survivability. For if, and when, Muslims fail to properly comply to liberal and secular demands of Whiteness, they risk a form of social death that may translate into isolation, marginalization, expulsion, deportation and in some cases—and depending on the geographical zone—physical death.
Dignity and/as Solidarity
In Lloyd’s account, dignity appears primarily as an articulation of resistance and opposition to domination. The struggle for dignity is both an individual and collective enterprise which is also affectively charged (rage, love, and spirituality feature prominently in the book). Yet in a context where postcolonial domination is expressed through erasure rather than only domination, the question of solidarity and mutual entanglement imposes itself as a pressing question—one which isn’t addressed in very explicit terms in Lloyd’s text. Solidarity is necessary to make one’s presence visible and to oppose postcolonial racial systems of domination. Blackness, I want to suggest, has historically played an important role in making that possible—in a way that exceeds subjects who are phenotypically defined as Black. Rather, the tradition of political Blackness has produced a set of discursive repertoires that make certain struggles legible, certain oppressions visible, and certain fights possible. Blackness has historically produced a vital and universal repertoire of speakability in the struggle against domination which goes beyond the case of the US. I want to illustrate this point by returning to the BLM movement as it spread outside the U.S. and show how it allowed for an unprecedented political conversation on police violence.
Muslim subjectivities have, for distinct historical and theological reasons, been treated as important challengers of liberal modernity. Their redeemability (or secularization) has often been treated as a conditio sine qua none of their acceptability.
#BlackLivesMatterBrussels, June 2020. Around 10,000 people gather in the streets of Brussels around the monumental Palace of Justice to support the worldwide protest for Black dignity. From the public tribune, Black community organizers and representatives call on the public to face the afterlives of colonialism and tackle the realities of police brutality and violence. One of the banners reads “COLERE NOIRE, COMMUNE REVOLTE” (Black anger, common revolt), thereby signaling a definite rupture with the invisibilization as it is hegemonically imposed through Europe’s postcolonial racial order.
A few weeks before the demonstration, on April 10th 2020, a young man named Adil Charrot of North-African origin was killed in a confrontation with the police. The police denied any guilt in his death and spoke of a tragic accident, while a small coalition composed of family members and friends challenged this version. The story of Adil would have passed unnoticed were it not for the death of George Floyd a few weeks later, on May 25th, 2020. The BLM movement that ensued launched a worldwide conversation on police violence. Suddenly, Adil’s fate was not only discussed in small activist blogs, but in articles that were published in the national press. But he was not the only one: in those weeks, the larger public learned about several other victims who died after a confrontation with the police, not to speak of all those who have perished in their quest for a better future when trying to cross the borders of Europe. The demography of these victims is much more messy: Moroccan, Algerian, Afghan, Syrian, Nigerian, Guinean, Congolese, Slovak.
Preceding the organization of the Black Lives Matter demonstration there was a slight indecision among the organizers on how to deal with this “messy” reality of the victims of police violence. BLM was understood to be a movement addressing Black suffering, and some organizers felt that this focus should remain central. Yet after much negotiation and discussion an agreement was met that family members of Mehdi, one of the North-African victims of police violence, would be allowed to speak in the tribune. The hesitations among some of the organizers stood in sharp contrast with the crowd, who didn’t wait for the organizer’s approval: the banners that were carried honored the most well-known victims of police violence, endorsing this “messy” reality and including victims with “Arab” sounding names. They all understood that they too were “Black” and that they were killed because their lives were considered redundant.
Against institutionalized attempts to erase the memory of #Semira #Lamine, #Mehdi or #Adil, BLM thus served as an incredible opportunity to honor and restore the dignity of the victims of the racialized system of exclusion. Such victims are too often forgotten and erased from the public conversation. By challenging a simplistic take on “Blackness,” a larger alliance was built that defied attempts to co-opt Sub-Saharans (Afro-descendants) into a fetishized politics of representation and place them in competition with other racialized communities (“Arabs” or “Muslims”—implying that Muslims aren’t Black). Racial dominance was addressed in its “ontological” appearance, as Lloyd suggests, by collectively challenging its necropolitics, or politics of death. Just as hip-hop has been able to offer a language and rhythm to the world that has travelled well beyond the Bronx and into the French banlieues or Gaza, the political vocabularies and tactics generated through the African American struggle has had a universal reach that has inspired and shaped struggles all over the world. While the struggle against domination might be a never-ending aim, as Lloyd rightly states, the quest for Black dignity acts as one of the universal compasses in this process.
Nakba, 1948 Palestine, in the Jaramana Refugee Camp, Damascus, Syria. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Mitri Raheb’s The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empires tells several profound stories of loss. One of those is the loss of the interwovenness of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities in the MENA (Middle East and North African) region before western Christian colonial forces violently devoured the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. Raheb’s account doesn’t romanticize the Ottoman period of diversity, which existed within a millet system, but instead shows how its demise brought into being an exclusionary and sectarian political logic.
My remarks put Raheb’s critical account of “the politics of persecution” into conversation with the film ‘Til Kingdom Come (directed by Maya Zinshtein) to illuminate the continuous Palestinian Nakba (or catastrophe) of 1948, which also names the ongoing reality of Palestinian displacement. The Politics of Persecution captures the violence of European missionary and colonial administrations and contextualizes the manipulation and weaponization of Christian persecution for imperial agendas and designs, often under the guise of the protection of “religious freedom.” First, he tells the stories of massacres of Christians that didn’t enrage the colonial or neocolonial forces. If such massacres enraged them, this indignation was connected to expediency, utility, and geopolitical and ideological interests. His point is not that a commitment to religious freedom is ideological as a matter of course but rather that a concern with the plight of communities rendered “religious” has been used as a weapon and is manufactured around hegemonic objectives. When one takes away the utility of the weaponization of religious freedom and concern with religious persecutions, the ethical concerns vanish too. Raheb explicitly points to how and why concern with “religious persecutions” was invented as an integral dimension of imperial designs. In addition, he traces how confining groups along religious labels was deployed to forge the sectarianism that characterizes some areas in the MENA region, such as Lebanon. Relying on the notion of sectarianism as an explanatory framework for the analysis of conflict in the MENA region thus reconstitutes a colonial interpretive frame. Within such a frame, the protection and selective empowerment of various Christian denominations, such as the Maronites in Lebanon, was linked to imperial designs and vice versa. This selectivity persists to this day and is often generative of false analyses of how religion relates to the dynamics of violence (and, in the inverse, peace) in the MENA region.
Religious Freedom and the Secular in the Postcolonial Moment
Raheb’s analysis pushes against rhetorical and explanatory frameworks that render the “plight of persecuted Christians” as the outcome of a sectarianism that has supposedly been in place since the beginning of time. Instead, he traces how sectarianism itself was a product of European colonial and missionary intrusions into the region. Here Raheb’s storyline connects with the late Saba Mahmood’s analysis of the discourse of minority rights in Egypt. In Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (2015), Mahmood challenges secularist accounts of religion and violence. She argues that, rather than a panacea, secularism (as a part of a modernist epistemological colonial project) is the source of political violence that presents and cloaks itself as “religious.” The liberal secular as a discursive tradition is embedded within a parochial European Christian history and political projects, which is undergirded by orientalism. While Raheb does not engage with the critique of the modern/secular, his embodied and historical account conveys the violence that Mahmood’s theoretical intervention demystifies. This is especially the case when he zooms in on episodes of catastrophic violence, such as the Massacre on Mount Lebanon in 1860, a conflict that involved primarily Christians and Druze. Here, Raheb captures the tragic outcome of the colonial discourse of division and reification when he writes, “Geography could no longer tolerate more than one demography: either Christian or Druze” (37).
The liberal secular as a discursive tradition is embedded within a parochial European Christian history and political projects, which is undergirded by orientalism.
Further, as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues, the “promotion of religious freedoms” via governmental and intergovernmental organizations that monitor “religious persecutions” constitutes an international relations strategy intent on reconfiguring hegemonies in the presumed postcolonial moment. Raheb contextualizes this insight within a deep history of Christian intrusions into the delicate tapestry of the Ottoman MENA region via missions, colonial infrastructures, schools, and curricula. In a layered manner, Raheb reveals the epistemic and political violence—along with the mapping and controlling—that the deployment of “religion” as a boundary for identity and as a basis for human and cultural rights allows. As the critical study of religion, especially in its decolonial turn, has demonstrated, “religion” as a mode of an anthropological and comparative classification was born together with empire and the doctrine of discovery (e.g., Nelson Maldonado Torres). As such, religion has been co-constitutive with “race,” or with the logic of racialization, in the development of colonial empires. The story of Jewish Zionism is a part of this story. It is a project of settler colonialism in Palestine that is interwoven with western Christian colonial and imperial designs and has colluded with missionary expansionist moves into the region. The disregard for Palestinian lives (Christian, Muslim, or secular) has exemplified the manipulative nature of the discourses about religious freedoms and persecuted Christians. These discourses, further, are intricately related to Christian and Jewish theologies of restoration, end time, and redemption (e.g., Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin).
American Evangelicals, Israeli Settlers, and the Palestinian Christian
One of the critical points Raheb articulates is that naming violence as a “religious persecution” is misleading and glosses over the process of sectarianization born out of western Christian intrusion into lands previously under the Ottoman sphere of influence. Nowhere is this claim more evident than in the ignoring (and in the denying the validity of) the plight of Christian Palestinians amongst European and US empires.
As I read the Politics of Persecution, I was reminded of the film ‘Till Kingdom Come. The film portrays the consolidation of the political power of White Christian evangelicals in the US during the Trump era and the convergence of this group with the increasingly mainstream settler lobby in Israel. It focuses specifically on the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. The film explores the apocalyptic theological worldview concerning Christian end-time prophecy that animates US Evangelical Christians’ commitment to Israeli settler colonialism. “The Jews” are a mere fetish, an instrument in this antisemitic drama, which proposes the necessity of a Jewish nation being established in Israel for the second coming of Christ to occur. At the same time, Jewish Zionist actors are happy to instrumentalize this toxic “love” to further entrench Jewish Zionist supremacist control over Palestine. The film also depicts a toxic intersection of the prosperity gospel and end-time theology, distorting the pivotal verse from Genesis 12:3 (“whoever blesses Israel will be blessed, and whoever curses it will be cursed”). In the Genesis verse, Abram is the subject of the cursing/blessing, but as the verse has circulated amongst this group in the US it has been decontextualized and treated reductively to refer to the nation of Israel or “the Jews.” The viewer glimpses how members of a church in a poor Appalachian community collect their small change to give to the Fellowship, believing their act of “blessing” Israel will bless them as a church and a community. Driving through a dilapidated community, seeing where people are living, and even commenting that some of the homes look abandoned, the Israeli Jewish leader of the Fellowship, Yael Epstein, is keen to deploy Genesis 12:3 to rationalize her fundraising efforts. This results eventually (in the course of the film) in a 5-million-dollar donation to “friends of the IDF” using the funds she has raised in Appalachia, amongst other places. She announces the check at a fancy gala in Hollywood. Yael manages to bracket the antisemitic theology of the pastor in the church. As he hands her the check, he comments on the wealthy Jews of Hollywood and how one day “soon” they will see their error.
Zinstein, the film director, is brilliant in not lecturing or telling but simply showing us the absurdities of the Christian evangelical and Jewish settlers’ alliances with one another and an array of political opportunists. In doing so, Zinstein shows us the how religion operates violently within American empire.
I now want to highlight a sequence in the film that recurred to me as I read Raheb’s book. In one scene, Zinstein arranges for a meeting of the evangelical pastor from rural Kentucky (aka Pastor Boyd) and Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac from The Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Perhaps there was some sort of naiveté and hopefulness invested in this arranged meeting. Zinstein might have thought that a conversation between Pastor Boyd from Kentucky and Rev. Dr. Isaac, a Palestinian Christian, would somehow make Pastor Boyd see the suffering of Christian Palestinians and the plight of the Palestinians broadly. This would then puncture the myopia that comes with interpreting the world through an end-time prophecy. However, despite Rev. Dr. Isaac’s efforts to explain the concrete realities of dispossession and violence experienced by Palestinians, Christians, and otherwise, Pastor Boyd emerges from this meeting, declaring to the camera that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian!” This unbelievable sequence, where Boyd’s Christianity and all-consuming “love” of Israel and the Jews prevents him from seeing and hearing the story of another Christian person, connects with Raheb’s story in the book. In this instance, the phrase “Christian persecution” rings hollow. For Pastor Boyd, a Palestinian cannot exist because doing so would violate his ahistorical rendering of the world, one in which the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea can only be the land of Israel, and only inhabited by “the Jews.” This is why Pastor Boyd goes on to disturbingly claim that Rev. Dr. Isaac’s theology is antisemitic. For Pastor Boyd, the identity of who is able to count as a Christian goes unnamed, though the racial and imperial logic that undergirds this identity lies barely beneath the surface. Raheb examines the long history of this manipulative politics as a tool for advancing—under the pretense of protecting various Christian communities— specific imperial power agendas. In the case of Pastor Boyd, we see him blinded by his belief in the prophecy. This belief—and its embeddedness in an imperial and colonial framework—blinds him to the concrete suffering of his fellow Christians (and more basically, his fellow humans).
For Pastor Boyd, a Palestinian cannot exist because doing so would violate his ahistorical rendering of the world, one in which the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea can only be the land of Israel, and only inhabited by “the Jews.”
By moving from rural Kentucky and Pastor Boyd’s little church to the wider political context in which it operates, the film also shows us how this apocalyptic end-time evangelical theology has devastating ramifications for Palestinians. For example, the film depicts the mobilization of Christian evangelicals to withdraw US support of UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees) and to relocate the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Both these policy outcomes were eventually implemented. The story of pastor Boyd shows the importance of thinking intersectionally, in this case, about Whiteness, Christianity, and poverty, for understanding how, when, and in service of whom Christian persecution in the MENA region is raised as an issue of concern.
Indeed, the fact that Dr. Rev. Isaac is a Christian is the least relevant factor contributing to his persecution. Palestinian Christians are under attack, but they are targeted not because of their Christianity, but rather because of their Palestinian identity. Even if Pastor Boyd recognized Isaac as a fellow Christian facing an existential threat, the framing of the threat in terms of Christian persecution would still distort the analysis of settler colonialism, Jewish Zionist supremacist policies, and occupation. The deployment of religion and its extraction from a complex historical and political analysis obscures the explanatory frame that is needed to understand the persecution of someone like Rev. Dr. Isaac. By the same token, without scrutinizing the role of American empire in addition to the Christian restorationist theology and race, class, and gender within the US, we cannot fully understand Pastor Boyd’s lack of empathy. At the moment, “saving” Christians from “persecutions” in the MENA region is refracted through an Islamophobic and orientalist lens consistent with the “global war on terror.” The complicity and co-imbrication of Christian and Jewish Zionisms, amplified by orientalist tropes, totally obscure the reasons for the persecution of Christian Palestinians.
A Concluding Question for Further Discussion
I conclude with a question to open rather than close the discussion. Decolonial thinkers have spoken recently on the need for double critique, namely focusing externally on a critique of empire while also interrogating the traditions themselves through an epistemology from the margins (feminist religious hermeneutics, for example). How should such conversations unfold within the geographies of Christians in the MENA region and perhaps specifically in Palestine?
During the twentieth century and now into the twenty first, White Christian evangelicals have claimed that their standing in the US socio-political landscape is under attack. Even though they have enjoyed political and religious dominance in the US, they believe that they are now the persecuted, and that their persecutors—Blacks, Latina/os, LGBTQI+ persons, and other minorities—are plotting their demise. The perception of Christian persecution is not a new one, as Mitri Raheb demonstrates in his most recent book, The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire, nor is it monolithic. In this monograph Raheb traces the particular histories of Christians in the MENA (Middle East and North African) region who have long served as pawns in the political machinations of empires, including those of White evangelicals in the US. The latter, while more than willing to claim the mantle of persecution for themselves, are far less likely to extend such claims to Palestinian Christians. Who is able to claim the mantle of being persecuted in the Middle East, as Raheb shows, more often has had to do with what suits the interests of European and US powers, rather than the realities of those who live in the region. In the current moment, we find expressions of sympathy (or lack thereof of) for the plight of Middle Eastern Christians still enmeshed in the operations of empire.
What Raheb’s book in particular adds to our understanding of this phenomenon is a deep historical engagement that locates the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in a longer arc of colonial history and the history of empires. Raheb begins his story with the Ottoman Empirem where he gives an account of the treatment of Christians within the millet system. He is not nostalgic for the pre-colonial European Ottoman system, which surely did treat Christians as second-class subjects. But his history is also one that is decolonial, and as such refuses to see in the Ottoman system an imperfect precursor to the liberal nation state system, under which Middle Eastern Christians would arguably fare much worse than under the Ottoman system. In subsequent chapters, Raheb explores the role of European missionary activities in the region and their often symbiotic work with imperial and colonial forces, the effect of the Nakba on Palestinian Christians, and the more recent decisions of US administrations to fly the banner of religious freedom in the Middle East only when it suits their purposes. And it is this latter point that resurfaces again and again in this text. Who is able to claim that they are being persecuted or lacking in freedom, and thus able to reap the benefits of others recognizing that claim, is unevenly distributed and marks not the suffering of those living under oppressive rule, but those with vested interests in marking some as persecuted and others as not, thereby bypassing the need to interrogate political forms of violence defining all Palestinian lives regardless of religion. The latter move, often enough as Raheb shows, acts as a pre-text to further intervention in regions not under colonial political control.
What Raheb’s book in particular adds to our understanding of this phenomenon is a deep historical engagement that locates the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in a longer arc of colonial history and the history of empires.
The contributors to this symposium explore this theme in a variety of ways. Candace Lukasik, for example, takes Raheb’s geopolitical framing of persecution into reflections about her own work with diasporic Coptic Christian communities in the US. What Lukasik finds in doing so is that as communities move from one context to another, their identities as a persecuted minority transform. In this case, Coptics reframe their persecution in Egypt through the US framework of Christian persecution in ways that lift up their Christian identity and downgrade their MENA identity in keeping with US geopolitical framings. Omer likewise takes Raheb’s argument and thinks with it in new contexts. In particular she puts Raheb’s book into conversation with the recent documentary film directed by Maya Zinshtein, Til’ Kingdom Come, which examines the role of Christian Zionists in the US supporting groups who help fund the Israeli military and settlement and annexation projects. This support has been welcomed by some in Israel despite the overt antisemitism expressed by Christian Zionists in the US. Indeed, so-called philo-semitism is antisemitism. The deep irony and tragedy of this story comes in the way that Christian evangelicals fail to see Palestinian Christians as co-religionists and as bearers of human rights and dignity, despite their shared faith. In the film, this is most starkly revealed when a pastor from Kentucky claims, following a conversation with a Lutheran Pastor in Bethlehem, that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Here, recognition fails because of the Christian Zionist lens that constructs “real” Christians as White evangelicals and Christians living under occupation in Israel/Palestine as non-existent. The persecuted Christian again here is tied up with the politics of empire and nation.
In his contribution, Gary Burge also brings in further reflections on the complicity of the west in forms of violence throughout the MENA region. Burge first focuses on the western political violence that has damaged Christian communities in the region before turning to the role of Islamophobia in shaping who are considered victims of religious persecution. He finally turns to a criticism of Raheb, not for his harsh words for Evangelicals in the US, but for his lack of them. Burge worries that Raheb lets American Evangelicals off the hook and calls for an even more strongly prophetic voice to counter their message.
If Omer, Lukasik, and Burge extend Raheb’s critical account of Christian Zionism and Evangelical complicity in the suffering of Christians in the MENA region, Mourad Takawi highlights the moments of hope that surface in Raheb’s text. Takawi finds in even the most horrendous episodes of violence recounted in Raheb’s text moments that illuminate alternative futures for those suffering under the weight of oppression. He delves more deeply into the example of Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883) to illustrate this. Raheb pens a response to these contributors which takes up the central themes analyzed in each of these essays.
This mixture of trenchant critique that is attentive to multiple layers of identity formation—including, but not limited to, religious, ethnic, national, and racial identities—and constructive imagining of ways of forming community beyond those identities is necessary as we confront populist forms of authoritarianism. The latter mobilizes the rhetoric of persecution to further marginalize the most vulnerable in societies around the world. In this symposium the author and contributors alike draw us to the urgency of this analysis and help us chart ways forward beyond our current frameworks.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
The twenty-one martyrs of Libya; a slide from session two of the 3rd Archon International Conference on Religious Freedom. Photo courtesy of Candace Lukasik.
In recent years, the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in the wake of both the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS has been a central focus of Western religiopolitical interest. Western Christians have depicted Middle Eastern Christians as persecuted peoples and martyred co-religionists, viewing their plight as an extension of a broader global trend of anti-Christian hate. In his latest book, Mitri Raheb offers a historical account and contemporary analysis of the representation of Middle Eastern Christians as victims. In doing so, he also advocates for a refocus on their agency and resilience. From the perspective of a Palestinian Christian theologian, The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empires offers a decolonial and grounded view of power as it is experienced by Middle Eastern Christians. In opposition to portrayals of Christian death and ruin in the Middle East, Raheb lays the foundation for a new way of looking at Christian communities in the region—not as merely objects of analysis, but as actors telling their own stories.
In this post, I weave together the findings in Raheb’s book with my own research and forthcoming book on the transnational religiopolitical translations of Coptic Christian persecution between Egypt and the United States. Raheb argues that Christian persecution in the Middle East is a construction of the West and that the idea of persecution says more about the West than it does about Middle Eastern Christians (143). I partially agree with Raheb that broader structures of imperial power have shaped modern Christian identity in the Middle East. Yet, Raheb’s text does not elaborate on the more intimate, ethnographic layering of these structures within the everyday life of different Christian communities in the region and in their diasporas around the world. Such communities experience their Christianity in diverse ways and contend with unique transnational politics of migration in and out of the region.
Mitri Raheb offers a historical account and contemporary analysis of the representation of Middle Eastern Christians as victims. In doing so, he also advocates for a refocus on their agency and resilience.
Between 2016–2021, I conducted multi-sited ethnographic work among recent Coptic migrants: first-, second-, and third-generation American Copts and clergy members moving transnationally between Egypt (primarily the village of Bahjura), Naj Hammadi, Upper Egypt, and the United States (primarily Jersey City, New Jersey). Shuttling back and forth across these sites of migration, I examine the everyday practices and processes that shape transnational Coptic communal formation and belonging as it interfaces with the tension between their minority status in Egypt and their racial-religious placement within an American Christian conservative landscape. My interlocutors related to one another through their religious tradition as well as through their politicized transnational minority condition. As I argue, their struggle to grapple with their minoritization, modulated as it is between Egypt and the United States, poses the question of political praxis and interpellation in a broader geopolitical framework of international religious freedom and counter-terrorism.
Raheb’s Politics of Persecution offers a geopolitical analytic lens as methodology; as he argues, it is impossible to consider the Middle Eastern Christian condition outside of these broader contexts—that is, how such communities are politically and religiously depicted by the west. As Raheb contends, the west’s focus on the plight of Middle Eastern Christians stops short of advocating for substantive and structural change that would impact the material conditions of all peoples in the region, exceeding the bounds of religious kinship. Raheb notes that western empathy for persecuted Christians need not be inherently negative, so long as it attends to the comprehensive sociopolitical positioning of such communities. Such positioning must go beyond fantastical displays of their plight wherein they become nothing more than “an orientalist cliché that is subordinate to Western interests” (41).
As a Christian community in Egypt, Copts have variously experienced forms of discrimination and outright persecution by governing authorities, political factions, and their Muslim neighbors. Yet, the manifest anti-Coptic discrimination in Egypt is also the primary area of interest to U.S. foreign policy, to Copts themselves inside of Egypt, and among diaspora communities, especially the United States. The importance of the Coptic plight to Coptic communal formation, most especially in diaspora, has typically been eschewed in progressive circles. This has had consequences for political mobilization, shaping the possibilities of alternative forms of solidarity in diaspora contexts. It has in turn binded the imaginaries of liberation that flow in and out of Egypt.
Raheb is right to note that Middle Eastern Christians, like the Copts, have often been “Orientalized, victimized, and minoritized” and many people in the west “claim to speak on their behalf” (4). Yet, some of those people in the west tend also to be part of Middle Eastern Christian diasporas, which also speak on their own, tell their own stories, and indeed have “looked to the West for protection, aid, and political backing” (39). Such Middle Eastern Christians do so in the diaspora. And while Raheb champions those Christians who remain in the region “because this is where their national, religious, and cultural roots lie, this is where they belong, and they will not be satisfied with being less than equal citizens” (141), this is not the choice that all Christians in the region make. Others choose to migrate in search of a better life, whether through the Green Card Lottery (in the case of Egypt) or by seeking asylum or family reunification.
In my ethnographic work, transnational Coptic life has offered an intimate window into how hegemonic political forces shape diasporic communities in their translation of collective praxis—the transformation of political orientation, racial identification, and religious solidarity. The transnational lives of my interlocutors I take to exist within multiple realities, following what anthropologist Ghassan Hage has called “diasporic lenticularity.” This approach directs our attention to how migration has impacted life beyond homeland/diaspora framings. Among Copts, the narratives and collective memory of violence and persecution that shape diaspora communities also (re)circulate back to Egypt and are modulated in turn; the news of violent incidents against Copts that occur in Egypt travel to places like the United States, which galvanize American Coptic politics and shape Coptic placement into an American racial-religious landscape.
[Coptic] American patriotism in a church basement. Photo courtesy of Candace Lukasik.The minority Christianity of the Copts allows for a kind of religious inclusion in the United States. It also shapes the contours of their activism and advocacy. While their racial difference from and discrimination in White America is imagined by progressive and leftist academics and organizers as a logical form of solidarity with other marginalized groups, this presupposition displaces the main communal thread of transnational Coptic life—Christianity. While Coptic Christianity, like other eastern Christian traditions, has been theologically and socially marginalized within a broader ecumenical Christian project, it is the Christianity of the Copts that is not only relevant to western religio-political interests, but also to Copts who are discriminated against on the basis of that religious difference in Egypt. That religious discrimination and the relevance of Copts’ Christianity travels with them to the United States, but it also homogenizes and simplifies readings of Christian discrimination in Egypt as well.
Minority, a concept that developed through the entangled structures of the liberal European state and its colonies, promises to make politically visible the marginalization of a group within a polity. The plight of Coptic Christians stakes its legibility on the grammar of minoritization—that Copts are persecuted and require social and political redress beyond the authority of the Egyptian nation-state and, instead, through the mediation of the global, imperial power of western countries, most especially the United States. Yet even while Coptic life in Egypt exceeds this grammar (of religious persecution and marginalization), its processes continue in diaspora. In this latter context, they are bolstered by translational activism, Christian majoritarianism, White supremacy, and the exceptionalism of U.S. empire. Minoritization shows its plasticity as it is translated across borders and through empire, sustained by the very contradictions—between homeland and diaspora, race and religion, minority and majority—that seemingly undo it.
Religious discrimination and the relevance of Copts’ Christianity travels with them to the United States, but it also homogenizes and simplifies readings of Christian discrimination in Egypt as well.
This bind that Copts and Middle Eastern others must traverse in their transnational community-fashioning and political activism is one that has framed knowledge production on them in scholarship—as liminal, peripheral, and problematic because of their contested relationship to Islam, Muslim-majority governance, and the broader Middle East. We can better remedy their erasure—between scholarship and political mobilization—by taking the experiences, narratives, and interests of Copts and Middle Eastern others seriously as part and parcel of mainstream discussions and debates, as integral for us to better understand nationalism, empire, class, and migration.
Placing Christians in the center of Middle Eastern historical and broader geopolitical developments, as Raheb’s book does, most certainly diverges from typical renderings of the region, which relegate minority communities to marginalia. As such, The Politics of Persecution offers a much-needed fresh perspective on Middle Eastern Christians and the effects of European colonialism, U.S. empire, and geopolitical intervention. It provides a vital analysis of the representation of Middle Eastern Christians by the West and a necessary argument advocating for a renewed look at their agency—whether in their forms of resistance to persecution politics or their power to shape such discourses of global anti-Christian plight. Ultimately, as a thought experiment on hope, Raheb seeks to refocus attention on the potentialities for abundant Christian life instead of death and ruin in the region—even in spite of varying imperial forces that flow in and out of such transnational communities.
Candace Lukasik an Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Mississippi State University, whose research focuses on the intersections of religion, race, migration, and empire. Her first book manuscript, entitled Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of U.S. Empire, ethnographically examines how American conservative politicization of Middle Eastern Christians has shaped collective memory, patterns of transnational migration, and inter-communal solidarities.
Bluff trail through the grass off the coast of California. Photo courtesy of Evan Berry.
As the climate crisis worsens, socially and economically privileged groups are increasingly faced with the fact that planetary ecological devastation stems from cultural dysfunctions in wealthy societies. People who are concerned about climate change can generally agree that there are deeply rooted cultural ills that disrupt rightful forms of relationship between human beings and the natural world, even if it is hard to come to consensus about the particular source of or cure for these ills. Broadly speaking, the key terms of the environmental humanities—the Anthropocene, relational ontologies, decolonial ecologies, extractivism, etc.—have become a means for diagnosing how out of sync with the Earth’s ecological systems human beings have become. Often, the concepts that ground contemporary scholarly conversations about the cultural roots of the climate crisis are saturated with theological questions.
For example, how do human beings fit within larger systems of material and energetic exchange? What kinds of powers and agencies populate the world we inhabit and how do these powers shape human life? What role do human beings play in shaping a future that is not only about human being, but about life itself? How should culturally particular ethical systems inform matters of global concern? What places, creatures, stories, ecosystems are inviolable, even sacred? What if we take seriously these theological characteristics? Might we see the ways that environmental humanists theorize cultural dysfunctions in a different light? For those interested in “theories of land,” one of the most salient questions is whether land—places, mountains, forests, rivers, deserts—can be said to be alive. These questions are theological not because they touch on any particular religious tradition, but because they grapple with human understandings of the transcendent.
Defining the Anthropocene
The term “Anthropocene” has gained tremendous currency in earth systems sciences, as well as both public and scholarly conversations about sustainability. To speak of the Anthropocene is to speak about what kinds of societal patterns are unsustainable, about what kinds of cultural formations are ecologically grotesque. The Anthropocene echoes other critiques of modernity in that it frames the present as a rupture with the past, historicizing the modern era as a morally and politically problematic departure from the rightful ways of being in the world practiced by those who came before. Because Anthropocene discourse is at its core concerned with human pridefulness, hubris, and even sin, it can be seen as a theological category as much as a geological one. Periodizing the modern era as a kind of mass alienation from the forms of land relation that make human life sustainable is a prophetic move, a move that names and points beyond the transgressions that have brought ecosystems around the world to the very brink of collapse. It is both a call to judgement and an effort at moral renewal.
Because Anthropocene discourse is at its core concerned with human pridefulness, hubris, and even sin, it can be seen as a theological category as much as a geological one.
But the term “Anthropocene” has many critics, primarily those who find it an unsatisfactory way to talk about ecological crisis because it lumps together all humans, regardless of their cultures or carbon emissions, as a morally undifferentiated planetary culprit. To focus the blame more clearly on the specific forms of harmful relationship between human beings and the creatures and places with whom we share this planet, such critics have offered alternative terms, like “Capitalocene,” “Plantationocene,” or “Chuthulucene”. Elaborating on the term “Anthropocene” with specifically Marxist, anticolonial, and feminist emphases, these descriptors aim to diagnose the social bases of the climate crisis more exactly. Although the planetary ecological crisis can be named in many ways, environmental humanists share a basic theoretical aim: to identify and disrupt the dysfunctions in modern life that have produced so much ecological harm.
The Anthropocene in the Ontological Turn
If Anthropocene discourse (and its alternatives) is intended to name the social and political sources of ecological harm, then the forms of scholarly reflection broadly referred to as the “ontological turn” can be seen as efforts to resituate and reconnect human beings within the complex fabric of nature, or, to be more specific, to mend the dysfunctional relationships that industrialized, extractive, settler colonial societies have with the natural world. Ontological in this sense refers to reality, the different ways of encountering and knowing reality in different societies, and how such knowledge systems interact with western, colonial knowledges. The ontological turn is a scholarly intervention that aspires to improve human relationships with land. There are many ways to draw out the theological assumptions and implications of scholarship in the ontological turn, but one underappreciated tension pervasive in environmental humanities literature concerns the agency of land. Is land a kind of material surface on top of which the ecological drama of living organisms plays out? Or is the land we inhabit alive? This distinction turns on a metaphysical dichotomy, a dichotomy that posits human beings as moving through time and space as the lone agential beings on the planet. This is the metaphysical legacy of Christian theologies which have over the centuries been calibrated to the project of colonial domination.
The ontological turn only infrequently engages with theological sources and generally relies on conceptual frameworks that are understood as secular. The ontological turn is premised on the need for dominant societies (i.e., settler, capitalistic, heteropatriarchal, racist) to remake themselves in intimate relationship with other-than-human beings. Scholarship in this area foregrounds the diverse ways that people relate to places, objects, other-than-human animals, etc. as living, agential beings. Anthropological consideration of ontological difference is a critique of the (dualistic, Platonic, Cartesian) metaphysics that alienate dominant societies from the land. It is also a search for alternatives to the racial and ecological violence on which global capitalism is founded.
The ontological turn only infrequently engages with theological sources and generally relies on conceptual frameworks that are understood as secular.
The work of reimagining human relationships in conversation with (continental) theoretical traditions is fraught. Because Anthropocene discourse and ontological turn scholarship invoke manifestly theological questions, scholarship in the environmental humanities often bumps up against latent and unresolved tensions of enlightenment secularism that continue to reverberate in critical theory. The ontological turn wouldn’t be a “turn” at all if it weren’t based on a move away from particular ideas and concepts, namely scientific materialism, rigid separation of religion and science, theological anthropologies grounded in human exceptionalism, etc. Indeed, the ontological turn names a widespread tendency in the environmental humanities (and social sciences) to affirm that other-than-human beings, including animals, but also plants and land itself, cannot be understood merely as inert matter. The ontological turn postulates a world teaming with agency, embodied not just in animals but in plants, places, substances, weather patterns, etc. These are worthy efforts, but theorists cannot, of course, resolve the secular contradictions of the modern academy by fiat.
Many of the key terms and ideas in the environmental humanities remain closely linked with Christian metaphysics and ontology (e.g., “nature,” “natural,” or “wilderness”). Ironically, it is through various ostensibly secular traditions of thought that environmental humanists have remained wedded to ontologies of human exceptionalism and to materialist accounts of other-than-human being. The pantheon of social and political philosophers, from Locke and Rousseau to Hegel and Marx, construct their ideas about justice, democracy, and history by positing human being as something enacted upon nature. Indeed, the decidedly Christian ontological distinction between “man” and “nature” developed systematically in Hegel and reified in Marx has carried forward into contemporary Anthropocene discourse.
A carving of the Virgin of Guadalupe into a tree in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Photo courtesy of Evan Berry.
The scholarly vocabularies used in the closing decades of the 20th century to describe and critique the reduction of living ecosystems to mere raw materials were often Marxist in their orientation, articulating environmental devastation as the inevitable byproduct of capitalist accumulation. It is true that too few people hold power over global systems of land use, and it is true that environmental politics need to be made more democratic and egalitarian. But these important ethical insights risk reducing the question of planetary ecological crisis to a matter of wise use of resources. To speak, with whatever degree of socialist fervor, about environmental crises simply as failures in wealth distribution or poor resource management is to concede that land, including the plants and animals that inhabit it, is but mere material at our disposal.
The idea that land is an inert thing available for human use is constitutive not just of capitalist extractivism, but, as Max Liboiron writes, “Marxism, socialism, anticapitalism, capitalism, and other economic systems.” These systems “can, though certainly don’t have to, enact colonial relations to Land as a usable Resource that produces value for settler and colonizer goals, regardless of how and by whom that value is produced” (14). Whether they are connected to underlying ideas about property, resources, history, or landscapes, anthropocentric concepts of land are tucked into many corners of the environmental humanities. Identifying and overcoming the cultural dysfunctions at the root of the climate crisis involves complex questions about human uniqueness and about whether and which forms of land management remain linked to Christian ontologies. Insofar as it complicates materialist accounts of nature, the ontological turn is theology-adjacent.
Returning to the Theology of Land
As a critical response to the problematic ontologies so deeply embedded in exploitative cultures, environmental humanists have championed diverse ways of knowing and being on land, the moral possibilities suggested by relational ontologies. This area of inquiry began with Indigenous scholars, with many of the most widely known contributions coming from cultural anthropology. Such scholarly endeavors have brought into academic circulation ideas about land intended to resist the crises produced by global capitalist ecocide, but interventions of this kind cannot always easily jettison the metaphysical and ontological baggage inherited from both secular and religious traditions.
The ontological differences among cultures—that is, not just different ways of thinking about the world, but ways of living in irreducibly different worlds—inform conversations about how the colonial, extractive, fossil-fuel addicted societies of the global north can and should be reimagined. Scholarship on place, landscape, or equitable control over resource governance often tacitly accepts that land is inert. This distinction is significant because from it follow fundamental ethical and political commitments and sharply divergent visions of how human life should be organized in relationship to land. For example, Nicolas Howe’s Landscapes of the Secular examines how sacred space functions within the narrow limits set by the prevailing conditions of Protestant hegemony in American law and politics. He writes that “law can…be used to enchant the material world, to imbue mundane ‘things’ with sacred and profane powers” (55). Despite the fact that Howe’s aim is to reveal how deeply Protestant norms have come to shape the ways Americans think about and interact with space and place, his insistence on the centrality of law and politics in generating the spatial realities in which our everyday lives take shape is itself a kind of Christian idealism, one where human institutions establish meaning in the vacuum that is the other-than-human world.
How can attention to the theological aspects of the environmental humanities help address these tensions? To begin with, scholars like Howe can help us see how the “Protestant secular” has closed modern societies to the ability to recognize land as agential. It is important to recognize that, like the Anthropocene, the ontological turn is the recognition of a deep cultural dysfunction, an ontological flattening of the world. But it is equally important to acknowledge where efforts to position privileged groups in rightful relationship with land can be a form of cultural appropriation. If the ontological turn can be summarized, its lesson is that relationships with land are culturally and geographically specific. Appreciating the diverse ways people relate to land does not of itself repair the dysfunctions that have so alienated dominant societies from the Land. If we are to take seriously the work of repair, those of us in the environmental humanities who wish to pursue ethically desirable futures would do well to attend to the theological challenges that entails. Thinking theologically does not necessarily involved explicit engagement with religious source materials, but is rather one possible, hopefully helpful methodology for identifying how particular kinds of interventions in the environmental humanities are linked with fundamental claims about human being and its relationship to the transcendent. Being more reflective and honest about the theological character of environmental humanities scholarship is theoretically and methodologically useful, not only because it helps clarify what is at stake morally in this field of study, but also because it offers a more honest appraisal of the sources of and responses to the ecological dysfunctions of dominant societies.
Evan Berry is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He previously taught at American University and Lewis and Clark College. His research examines the relationship between religion and the public sphere in contemporary societies, with special attention to the way religious ideas and organizations are mobilized in response to climate change and other global environmental challenges. Berry is the author of Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism(University of California Press, 2015) and editor of Climate Politics and the Power of Religion (Indiana University Press, 2022).
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Old man picking corn in the backyard. Via Flickr User Nenad Stojkovic. CC BY 2.0.
Since 2015 I have been conducting research on environmental values among Spanish-speaking Catholics in Los Angeles, a project that was inspired by class discussions with my students at California State University, Northridge. The first-generation college students who have filled my classrooms over the last ten years have challenged me to rethink everything I thought I knew about environmentalism and the study of religion and the environment. The following is a letter addressed to my future students, introducing them to the lessons I learned from their predecessors and inviting them to draw from their own experiences and perspectives as we continue to refine this academic field.
Dear Students,
Thanks for enrolling in RS 370: Religion and the Environment. While some of you are here because you are religious studies majors or because you’re interested in environmental sustainability, students often take this class because it fills a General Education requirement and meets at a time that works for their busy schedules. Whether you bring a personal interest in the course topic or you are here to complete the GE requirement, welcome to the class! I hope RS 370 will challenge you to rethink your ideas about what it means to be an environmentalist and encourage you to identify how your own background, knowledge, and experiences can help shape efforts to heal and repair the planet.
Students often enter this class thinking that the course material will have little to do with their own lives and communities, because they have inherited the message that people like them are not environmentalists. As you know, California State University, Northridge is a Hispanic-Serving Institute where more than half of the students are the first in their families to attend college and more than half are eligible for Pell grants. Our student population does not align with the White, middle-class dynamics that predominate in American environmentalism. Even though ecofriendly practices such as commuting on public transit, conserving energy, avoiding consumerism, and minimizing waste are common behaviors within the CSUN community, many students insist that those behaviors don’t count as environmentalism when they are motivated by financial considerations rather than “virtuous” environmental commitments.
Image of California State Northridge University sign and building. Via Wikimedia Commons.
A major goal of this class is to help us identify and challenge the unmarked assumptions that have led to such limited notions of who can be an environmentalist and what can count as environmentalism. In my own research among Catholic churchgoers in Los Angeles, local community members have suggested that Latinx Catholics do not prioritize environmental issues because they are focused on other challenges such as immigration and economic struggles. A Cuban-American priest I call Fr. Ruben explained that his parishioners were in “survival mode” and were too overwhelmed to worry about the problem of a changing climate. He encouraged me to conduct my research in wealthier, White communities where Catholic churchgoers had the “time and luxury” to worry about the environment. Yet when I spoke with working-class, Spanish-speaking Catholics through focus groups and ethnographic interviews, my interlocutors shared rich traditions of loving and caring for God’s creation.
Throughout the semester we will consider how the misperception that working-class, immigrant communities and communities of color don’t care about the environment is an expression of settler colonialism and its secular understandings of the relationship between humans and the earth.
Political theorist Erin Wilson notes that conversations about climate change are often marked by an intuitive sense of danger and fear, as climate change is perceived as a threat that humans must contain and control. To be sure, fear is a logical response to the reality of a changing climate, Wilson writes, and humans do need to take serious actions to mitigate the dangerous consequences of climate change. But Wilson notes that the widespread fear of climate change is based on more than scientific evidence, and is “somehow embedded in the fabric of our being” (98). This is because Euro-American culture has often viewed humans and nature as separate and unequal, and understood nature as an object for humans to enjoy, study, and control. Climate change is felt as a deep, existential threat, because it represents “a potential fundamental disruption to that (perception of) control and the subordination of nature to humanity” (98). This helps explain why responses to climate change center on “rational” responses rooted in science, technology, and economics and marginalize understandings and approaches rooted in experience, tradition, and place.
Notions of nature as an object also shape broader discourses of environmentalism. American environmentalism is indebted to conservationist and preservationist history, which have often constructed nature as wilderness: sublime landscapes of natural beauty idealized as sacred and set apart. In these constructions, humans ought to protect nature through a sense of “biocentric humility,” and not out of their own anthropocentric interests. In the United States, geographer Nicolas Howe tells us, visions of nature as sacred and set apart are enshrined into the law. While nature has not been accorded standing in and for itself, citizens have a right to protect the land “for aesthetic, recreational, or spiritual reasons” (132).
Environmental justice advocates have challenged constructions of nature as wilderness for decades, insisting that environmentalism is about protecting the places where people “live, work, play, and pray.” Brazilian feminist theologian Ivone Gebara describes environmentalism as a struggle for survival among the poor. Yet despite these myriad voices, American environmentalism retains a tacit moral valence insisting that true environmental actions must be motivated by pure concern for the earth and not by seemingly lesser concerns for human survival. This is the viewpoint that Fr. Ruben expressed when he told me that his parishioners were too overwhelmed to speculate on the causes of global warming. This is also the viewpoint that many of my previous students expressed when they insisted that they were not engaged in environmental acts when they commuted to campus on public transit, since they rode the bus due to financial considerations and not out of concern for the environment.
In my research among Spanish-speaking and bilingual churchgoers across Los Angeles, my interlocutors routinely shared stories that defied the widespread stereotype that working-class communities of color do not care about the environment. Some daughters and sons of immigrants did identify with constructions of nature as wilderness. They enjoyed visiting national parks and associated environmentalism with campaigns to fight climate change and to enjoy and protect the natural world.
But many others expressed environmental values that were not legible within dominant environmental frameworks, in part because they rested on theories of human continuity with and dependence on the land. First-generation immigrants often described a sense of love and kinship with the more-than-human world, describing an affective bond that was especially rooted in memories of agricultural landscapes back home. Roger, a thirty-something churchgoer who I met during a focus group at his working-class, Spanish-speaking parish, told me that “God created everything, and we have to love all of creation.” For him, causing damage to nature was akin to “seeing a brother in the streets and not helping him” and cutting down trees was equivalent to “scorning a brother.”
The bilingual daughters and sons of immigrants also shared stories of relating to the land, but they tended to think of God’s gifts as resources much more than relatives, and their stories integrated biblical teachings with environmental lessons they had learned based on their parents’ and grandparents’ agricultural experiences back home. When I talked to Robert, a 25-year-old charismatic Catholic and the son of immigrants from Jalisco, Mexico, he told me that he loved nature and spent as much time as possible outdoors. He liked to escape to the mountains and beaches that were a short drive from his home in south central Los Angeles, but he also felt a sense of peace when surrounded by the trees, birds, flowers, and leaves in his own neighborhood.
Image of garden bed. Image courtesy of Flickr User Elke Sisco. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Robert attributed his love for nature to his Catholic faith, explaining that the world around him was full of beauty because it was created by God. God gave humans the gift of creation, he explained, and humans were required to protect it. He also attributed his connection with nature to his identity as a Mexican American son of immigrants, explaining that his mother and many other families in his neighborhood came from agricultural backgrounds and cultivated backyard gardens to provide tomatoes, onions, corn, herbs, and other vegetables for their families to eat. In addition to loving nature because it is God’s creation, Robert knew it was important to take care of the planet because humans need a flourishing planet earth in order to survive.
These interlocutors shared stories of living sustainably on the earth, yet their perspectives are seldom reflected in dominant discussions of climate change that center on modern scientific, technological, or economic responses to a looming crisis (Wilson 99). My interlocutors’ relationships with the earth were based on mutuality and dependence much more than domination or control; they understood the earth’s systems in part through their understanding of a God who is not available to scientific inquiry.
In order to address the problem that certain secular perspectives are favored in climate politics while many other perspectives are marginalized, Erin Wilson calls for a “multiple-ontologies” approach to climate change science and policymaking (112). This approach, Wilson explains, “requires holding two seemingly contradictory commitments at the same time.” It means embracing one’s own assumptions and commitments “while recognizing that the assumptions and commitments of other—perhaps wholly contradictory—ontologies and worlds are equally as valuable; that our own ontology may not be the ‘correct’ or ‘real’ version of reality” (114). A multiple-ontologies approach, Wilson suggests, is essential for climate justice and for developing effective, imaginative responses to the climate crisis.
For many of the first-generation college students who enrich our classrooms at California State University, Northridge, embracing multiple ontologies is a matter of daily life. While they have learned to navigate the secular world of the modern university, they also remain intimately tied to the resilient, land-based communities of their ancestors, who knew what it meant to rely on the earth and who cultivated relationships of gratitude, mutuality, and respect. Previous students have told me about plant-loving tias who talked to their flowers as if they were their own children, subsistence farming grandfathers who did not have enough to eat when the rain did not come on time, and the backbreaking labor of parents, aunts, and uncles who toiled as migrant farm workers in the fields of central California. Over and over again, students have written about childhood lessons where they had learned that you must take care of the earth because the earth takes care of you.
Throughout the upcoming semester, I hope that you will embrace a multiple-ontologies approach and reflect deeply on your own background as we discuss how human communities have lived under the conditions of a changing climate. Some of your families have long histories of environmental engagement as camping enthusiasts, Sierra Club members, and activists in the Mothers of East Los Angeles. Others may have backgrounds that are less obviously “environmental,” but I suspect that those students have stories to offer as well.
My dream for this semester is that we will all have a chance to learn from each other, remaining open to varied ontologies and perspectives that are desperately needed. Regardless of your reason for enrolling in this class, thank you for joining me on this journey.
Erin K. Wilson, “Cast out Fear: Secularism, (in)Security, and the Politics of Climate Change,” in Climate Politics and the Power of Religion, ed. Evan Berry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022).
Amanda Baugh is Professor and Associate Chair of Religious Studies at California State University, Northridge, where she is also Director of the Program in Civic and Community Engagement. She is the author of God and the Green Divide: Religious Environmentalism in Black and White (University of California Press, 2016). Her book on environmental values among Spanish-speaking Catholics is forthcoming with NYU Press in 2024.
In Flux (2016) by Baxter Miller. Core Banks, North Carolina for RISING, risingnc.com, baxmiller.com. Approximate coordinates: 34°53’06.8″N ,76°16’33.3″W. Used with permission.
Written as a dialogue, this post brings into conversation our respective research on two U.S. coasts at risk from climate change: the Outer Banks on North Carolina’s Atlantic seaboard and the Buffalo Waterfront on New York’s Lake Erie. This coastal comparison foregrounds the growing ubiquity of the term “resilience.” While it has been used by ecologists since the early 1970s, the term has, over the past decade, entered the domain of governmental and civic institutions. As a result, we are tracking the cultural politics of a polysemous term-in-the-making as it is used by experts and non-experts in our field sites to refer to land, communities, institutions, and subjectivities. We find that its overarching power lies in how it naturalizes the morality of overcoming adversity and vulnerability. This quality leads social actors, even with antagonistic politics, to claim resilience as a guiding principle. Because of the institutions in which it circulates, the idea has acquired the material power to shape the future of coastlines and coastal communities. Our conversation highlights the need for scholars across disciplines to examine various uses of resilience, and resist accepting the term prima facie.
In what follows, we generally use the term “resilience” ethnographically (as used by people in our field sites), though we limit scare quotes for the sake of readability. Phil’s contributions also reflect the norm in his discipline of geography, where scholars employ resilience as a conceptual analytical term.
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Hillary: The Outer Banks of North Carolina is a good place in which to think about ecological change. In fact, you can’t escape it. The land changes quickly and on multiple scales. People can see it happening, sometimes overnight. A low-lying strip of barrier islands in the Atlantic, the Banks is composed of compacted peat and mud, sand, gravel, and shell beds. Storms, waves, and wind regularly open inlets and rework older layers of sediment, which causes the islands to slowly migrate inland. Geologists call it dynamic and “one of the highest-energy coastal systems in the world.” Locals used to call it inhospitable. Large-scale construction began in the 1920s and intensified with each passing decade. Engineering projects shaped the land for mass tourism by stabilizing sand dunes, building roads, bridges, and houses, digging septic systems, and dredging channels. This development, along with climate-driven sea-level rise, is exacerbating erosion and storm damage, particularly from flooding. Today, the Outer Banks supports about 40,000 residents and millions of visitors. Its tourist industry and ocean-front real estate market is worth billions. Some towns are full of shops and restaurants, cut through with a multilane highway. Others retain the feel of fishing villages. To protect the human-built infrastructure, people must actively manage the Banks. They reconstruct dunes and stabilize inlets, dredge nearshore sites, and “nourish” beaches by pumping sand. When discussing such projects, coastal scientists and engineers often call them “resilient.” That’s where I first heard the term used.
Phil: Resilience is also a framing concept for different groups working to redevelop Buffalo’s post-industrial waterfront, but the geographical and historical context gives the term a slightly different resonance than in North Carolina. Buffalo was founded when settlers transformed a dynamic deltaic wetland into one of the nineteenth century’s great commercial harbors. As the Western terminus of the Erie Canal, Buffalo was a key inland port linking Midwest timber, grain, and ore to the eastern seaboard. It’s been 40 years since deindustrialization, and the waterfront landscapes are vast brownfields that the city has tried to develop over and again in the hopes of economic revitalization and “resurgence”—another local buzzword and, uncoincidentally, the name of one of Buffalo’s new waterfront breweries.
Buffalo, NY waterfront in the aftermath of a large storm event in 2022. The storm knocked down about half of the trees on this waterfront nature preserve. Despite its appearance this is a resilient waterfront. Image courtesy of Phil Campanile.
But climate change is recontextualizing these lands. The problem is not monotonic sea level rise, like in the Outer Banks. What’s happening in the Great Lakes is record lake level fluctuations and increased size and impact of seiche storm waves. These create risk for the city’s infrastructure. Environmental groups came together to develop a plan that prioritized, in their words, coastal resilience. The plan looked to redevelop some of the wetlands destroyed two centuries ago. Counter to this plan, the development corporation that manages the city’s outer harbor is trying to build a tourist destination and high-end housing in the same location. It also claims it is creating coastal resilience. It’s a struggle over land use. The place where wetlands would help to protect the city’s infrastructure and restore Lake Erie habitat doubles as valuable waterfront real estate. The developers don’t spell out what they mean by it, but when they talk about resilience, it tends to be tokenistic in terms of ecology—an old slip converted to a model wetland, for example. I think it’s just a rhetorical strategy: this ecological insinuation creates a slippage that helps to justify real estate speculation as a form of “economic resilience”: that is, the regional economy’s ability to withstand fluctuations in the global market. The US Army Corps of Engineers also seems to have its own definition of resilience, as it kicks off a major Great Lakes Resiliency Study in 2023.
Hillary: I’ve looked quite closely at the Army Corps in the Outer Banks since it plays a central role there. The civil Corps constructs and manages infrastructure—such as channels, dams, or jetties—that shape the land and water. In 2016, the Corps circulated a definition of resilience internally to urge its employees to think differently about their systems. Traditionally, Corps engineers used to think of their infrastructural systems as static; they lamented any irregularity as a failure. By contrast, a “resilient” project acknowledges and even embraces unpredictability—it’s a different way to think about the future. And yet embracing unpredictability is still always in service of reasserting regularity, usually by “managing” the system. The best pithy definition I heard from a Corps scientist is that resilience means “identifying vulnerabilities ahead of time and finding strategies to mitigate them.”
Phil: That sounds very familiar. In speaking with regional climate scientists about resilience, they clarify that they are not trying to diminish unpredictability, but they are looking to calculate it. They insist, in essence, that weather and climate are unpredictable and that’s the reason we need resilient systems. Because we are always going to be surprised when changes come but we can be sure that they will come.
Your comment about managing unpredictability reminds me of the attempts by the International Joint Commission—which is the binational agency that oversees the Great Lakes—to build large-scale infrastructure to control lake levels. The IJC oversaw the building of the Compensating Works in the 1910s and the Moses-Saunders Dam in the 1950s, which compress lake level fluctuations on Lakes Superior and Ontario, respectively. Lake levels are constantly changing and are highly unpredictable from season to season. They are also integral to the ecological resilience of coastal ecosystems. But lake level stabilization is good for shipping, erosion control, and hydropower. In the 1980s the IJC considered building a facility on the Niagara River to control levels on Lake Erie too, but by that time, ecologists were able to demonstrate that suppressing lake level change would further harm fisheries and destroy habitat. I interviewed a leading Great Lakes wetlands ecologist, Douglas Wilcox, who was instrumental in getting the IJC to allow greater fluctuations on Lake Ontario after 2014. His research demonstrated that lake level change created the disturbance essential for maintaining resilient coastal ecosystems in the Lake Ontario basin. So here you have one key confusion: resilience is an essential aspect of ecosystem health but it has also come to name a risk management strategy for institutions like the IJC and Army Corps, and the line between these usages is hardly clear.
Hillary: I’m glad you just mentioned resilience in the context of ecosystems specifically since that is the original technical use of the term. I want to circle back to that point, but I think it’s worth underlining that in both of our coastal field sites we are seeing how the word resilience justifies variable management practices. It also indicates something like “ecologically and, therefore, ethically good.” That interests me as an anthropologist of North American Christianity who wants to know more about how people in dynamic ecological sites think about the future. What are the moral modes of governance that shape what is thinkable on the coast? In my experience, resilience is a prescriptive term for ecological malaise that exerts a strong moral claim. This unannounced claim is characteristic of how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world. Its power comes at least partly from how resilience evades capture; it is used everywhere and evokes a moral good, yet it is not highly debated in the public sphere–certainly compared to a deeply divisive term like “climate change.”
Perhaps that is why few scholars of religion have critically engaged the term resilience. What I mean is that, although more studies of religion are reproducing resilience as an empirical category, there is little debate about what it means and how it is being used. That’s why I wanted to have this conversation with you, Phil, because resilience is highly contested in your academic fields. As a geographer who has studied the origins and applications of the concept in ecology, where does it come from? Who is debating its use and how?
Phil: Yes, I am a human geographer trained in the field of political ecology, which connects environmental issues with questions of political economy and knowledge production. A Canadian ecologist, Buzz Holling, developed the term resilience in the early 1970s while studying wildlife population dynamics. He found that, against the predominant idea of homeostatic equilibrium, ecosystems adapt through disturbance, not in spite of it. He termed “resilient” those ecosystems that could restore structure and function after perturbations. So, the term comes from ecology, but it quickly came to be understood as a general feature of all systems—be they ecological, social, psychological, or cultural. Carl Folke and Fikret Berkes, colleagues and occasional co-authors with Holling, pioneered work on social-ecological system (SES) resilience. It became an important concept in social science to understand how communities dealt with various kinds of hazards and disasters: from earthquakes and hurricanes to war, market instability, and poverty. But managing human systems like ecological ones has some insidious outcomes.
Hillary: It’s interesting to know the origins in Holling’s work. In the Outer Banks, I’ve seen a similar trajectory in my surveys of local newspapers. Based on what I’ve found, it was Duke University geologist Orrin Pilkey who, in 1972, first used “resilience” in the local news. He was almost certainly in conversation with ecologists like Holling because he, too, was talking about ecosystem dynamics. More specifically, he called the “natural features” of barrier islands resilient because they regenerate after storms and other disturbances. His goal was to make a political claim: he blamed humans—in particular, coastal property developers—for inhibiting natural regeneration. So, for Pilkey, human infrastructure was disrupting naturally resilient processes. His critique was fundamentally a moral one, as was the response from many Outer Banks property owners who claimed that economic resilience—though they did not use the term back then—was essential for human flourishing. Pilkey stirred up a lot of ire in the Outer Banks, but you were referring to social-ecological system resilience as insidious more generally. How so?
Landfill in a former coastal wetland filled with slag from the steel factories that once abutted it. Photo courtesy of Phil Campanile.
Phil: Well, the idea of community resilience got picked up in international economic development in the 1990s, in large part because it resonated with neoliberal thinking. Resilience measured a community’s ability to persevere in the face of poverty and natural hazards—without state-funded infrastructure. The World Bank even created a Resilience Rating System, which is not designed to help communities become more resilient but to assess levels of community resilience in order to identify better investment outcomes. Communities that lack resilience are bad investments. This system exacerbates vulnerability since much needed funds are directed away from those communities most immiserated by violence and disinvestment. Since resilience is ultimately about adaptation and survivability, these vulnerable communities get written off as unfit for survival, or at least for investment, which can very well be the difference between life and death. This situation has compelled non-governmental agencies to strategize how to increase community resilience, but, in the hands of big NGOs, this has turned into a technical problem of human, or population management.
Hillary: Terrifying. So resilience is justifying all sorts of radically different political outcomes. That question about human management—and its moral stakes—is also important in my field site but in a different way. As I mentioned, I heard it for the first time among coastal scientists and engineers, but it seemed unremarkable because they used it so frequently. But then I began to notice it in other locations: in the local newspaper, among government officials, and—unexpectedly—at a Christian non-profit. That’s when the polysemous nature of the term and its moral undertones really struck me.
Phil: What? You were hearing the term at church?
Hillary: Yes! Well, not in a church, but at Creation Justice Ministries (CJM), a non-profit that works extensively in coastal North Carolina and recently published the Faithful Resilience Guide. It also hosts events aimed at audiences from mainline or progressive evangelical churches that draw together speakers from different fields. One example is a panel at a CJM workshop on resilience in July 2022 that featured an environmental scientist based in North Carolina and an African American pastor from a United Church of Christ congregation in Atlanta. The scientist spoke first, and her view of resilience felt a bit different than the basic definition at the Corps and more in keeping with Orrin Pilkey’s view. She acknowledged significant overlap between resilience and adaptation, which she defined as “something new and you’re adapting to it…The climate is changing and therefore there is something to adapt to.” But when she talked about resilience itself, she implied that it is, foremost, a characteristic of ecosystems that are free from human tinkering. Here’s what she said: “[N]atural systems especially—wetlands, forests, mangroves, barrier islands—in their natural state they are very resilient ecosystems and so…[w]hen we restore those systems to the way they were before we interfered, they become more resilient—and they help us become more resilient.” This view seems similar to what I’ve heard among employees of environmental organizations who are building things like living shorelines and oyster barriers to mitigate erosion. From their perspective, a “resilient” system is an ideal: a project that humans might build but from which they can then withdraw or intervene very little. So there is some level of expert management, of course, but the resilient ecosystem becomes self-generating. No more humans needed! It becomes “like” natural, which is defined ipso facto as resilient.
Phil: You can really see here how ecological restoration slips into a moral imperative that plays on some very old tropes about “natural” Edenic landscapes being superior to anthropogenic—but really, to modern—ones. Of course, European theologians and natural historians alike thought Indigenous inhabitants were part of the land, so one mark of the Enlightenment was the ability to live separately from the land, or to dominate it. This points to one of the many ways in which scientific thinking about land borrowed—consciously or not— from theology, and it appears to have an afterlife in your scientist’s account.
A lot of my research on coastal resilience has uncovered something like the opposite: a conflation between coastal resilience and techno-managerialism. Most of what I hear tends to view coastal resilience as a design and planning principle tantamount to human micro-management over natural processes premised on socio-ecological systems modeling. But I want to hear more about how Christians are using the term. What did the pastor and the environmental scientist say about resilience? Sounds like the beginning of a joke.
Hillary: It does! I guess the punchline is that the pastor flipped her script. The scientist talked about ecosystems as resilient, which then help humans become resilient. By contrast, the pastor defined resilience as an attribute of people first—not ecosystems in their “natural” state. “We have to shift our focus from caring for climate to caring for community,” he began. “I’ve often said, if you help the people, you’ll heal the climate.” So people become resilient and then ecosystems flourish; the inverse of how the scientist put it. The pastor’s view comes from the pragmatic experiences of African American coastal communities disproportionately affected by poverty and lack of services. So, in his view, resilience means providing practical necessities like homes and electricity, as well as reducing future impacts by, for example, making sure those homes are constructed to withstand coastal storms. But addressing practical needs is the prelude to another type of resilience—“of mind and spirit.” He implied that spiritual resilience is, in fact, the most important bit. Other pastors who spoke that day stated it directly. They defined “spiritual resilience” as an internal quality that allows individuals to withstand significant challenges, leading to human thriving in relationship with God.
Phil: Oh, ok! Yes, we begin to see the proliferation of the concept. The application of resilience to the practical infrastructural necessities of everyday life is really the domain of what’s come to be called urban- or community resilience. One paper I remember reading listed thirty different definitions of urban resilience! Definitions ranged from speaking about resilience in infrastructure, economy, institutions, and social networks, but all pointed to the need to withstand social and economic disturbance, as well as natural hazards. It’s interesting that for the pastor, community resilience has its foundation in spiritual resilience, which perhaps derives from the idea of psychological resilience—yet another application—which has to do with overcoming personal struggle and childhood trauma.
Image of upturned tree bulbs after a storm. This marks an ecologically resilient site on the Outer Harbor in Buffalo. Photo courtesy of Phil Campanile.
There have been some interesting critiques of these uses of resilience too. Again, community and psychological resilience resonate with neoliberal ideas of the city and subject, respectively. Critics say, in essence, that vulnerability is not a natural phenomenon but a social condition. The desire for all systems to exhibit resilience in the face of vulnerability actually accords with the politics of (1) neoliberal urbanism, which looks to justify the removal of social support systems; and (2) neoliberal subjecthood, which asserts that success is a reflection of an individual’s ability to overcome hardship. These critiques make clear that resilience carries a naturalistic fallacy: because resilience is a natural phenomenon found in ecosystems, it justifies moralities structured like it, where overcoming struggle creates stability. In this respect, it’s kind of a twenty-first century version of social Darwinism. It has a quality of redemption—of having to overcome suffering and struggle to become whole. Does that play in the pastor’s sermonizing?
Hillary: I think you’re right about redemption—turns out you’d make a great religious studies scholar, Phil! Although the pastors at the CJM event did emphasize community-level change—one might say systems-level change—they ultimately prioritize resilience as an individual quality. But it isn’t the neoliberal individual of contemporary capitalism that concerns the critics you mentioned. It is the Christian individual who needs God for salvation and solace in times of difficulty. Obviously, we could get into a long conversation about the relationship between evangelical individualism and neoliberal capitalism, but I think for the moment it’s sufficient to point to how resilience has moved into new territory where it is being used to mean internal strength rooted in Christian salvation. That’s a radical departure from its original usage. And from how the Army Corps talks about resilience as strategies to mitigate damage to its infrastructure or how coastal scientists view resilience as an inherent quality in ecological systems where humans are (ideally) absent. It’s also a different kind of spiritual framework than that articulated by Indigenous communities and scholars. For example, indigenous environmental scholar, Kyle Whyte, redefined resilience as the Anishinaabe quality of “developing moral relationships, including responsibility, spirituality, and justice” (137). Not surprisingly, North Americans are mobilizing resilience to talk about a variety of spiritual qualities, which would profit from further comparison. So, returning to my own field site, I’m seeing the term resilience circulate quite widely in local communities but in ways that are inconsistent. Or, perhaps, “creative appropriations” is a better way to put it.
Phil: I think it’s a creative appropriation, but I do think it has to do with the naturalistic fallacy too—this idea that if it’s natural, it must be “good.” In my fieldwork, it’s been really useful to think about it in this way since it helps me understand why developers use “resilience” in the proper context but in a way that’s totally inaccurate. These developers are producing coastal vulnerability by building houses, hardscape, and infrastructure on the waterfront. But they’re calling it resilient. In calling development resilient, they suggest that they’re overcoming generations of economic hardship and creating investment opportunities in a way that is totally in line with natural processes.
Hillary: That’s an excellent point. So, bringing both our coastal sites into conversation, we’re seeing how resilience moves from a term that ecologists used to describe ecosystem function in the 1970s to one that all manner of specialists use to account for social and cultural processes. Resilience—that is, overcoming disturbance in order to adapt to hostile environments—gets analogized across systems, only it’s not understood as an analogy. Instead, it’s made to seem like a natural, and even morally correct, feature of those systems. That move has real consequences. In your case, developers use it to imply that engineers and planners should manage ecosystems to carry on business-as-usual. Perversely, what is actually resilient in that case are the capitalist processes that destroyed those ecosystems to begin with! That’s true of the Outer Banks as well. When it comes to Christians, although I’m hearing pastors use resilience to preface important critiques of social injustice, one implication is that communities that become resilient can stay on their land indefinitely—even coastal lands that will be uninhabitable. I was speaking to a pastor the other day who told me that a major challenge for future clergy will be to help people mourn land loss. I think she’s right. Christians have only recently adapted the term resilience so there needs to be more thinking about how it is used and to what end.
Phil: Exactly. How people interpret and employ this concept is going to have significant impacts on how our respective coastlines will be managed and imagined in the years to come.
Phillip Campanile recently received his PhD in Geography and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an urban political ecologist and environmental humanist concerned with the production of ecological knowledge in and about postindustrial environments, especially in the Great Lakes region. His work intervenes on the organicist tendency in the social sciences to utilize ecological succession to explain contingent social processes. Such a tendency mystifies settler capitalist pasts and speculative climate futures by considering anthropogenic destruction a natural part of the disturbance cycle. In response, Phillip looks to develop, after WG Sebald, a “natural history of destruction.” Such an approach attempts to study planetary environmental destruction through the uneven particularities evident in this and that landscape. It develops a geographical—rather than geological—approach to the Anthropocene. He follow-up work looks to the reviled plant, Japanese knotweed, not as a marker of biological invasion but as an index of destruction.
“Never Forget” by Nicholas Galanin. North of the Palm Springs Visitors Center at Tramway Road, 2901 N. Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs. Photo Credit: Flickr User Ted Drake. CC BY-ND 2.0.
If the academy is concerned about not only protecting and maintaining Indigenous intelligence, but revitalizing it on Indigenous terms as a form of restitution for its historic and contemporary role as a colonizing force (of which I see no evidence), then the academy must make a conscious decision to become a decolonizing force in the intellectual lives of Indigenous peoples by joining us in dismantling settler colonialism and actively protecting the source of our knowledge—Indigenous land.
The “ontological turn,” despite pretensions to having radically transformed religious and social thought, is actually quite conservative when evaluated from the standpoint of affecting human-land relations. Scholars who study Indigenous lifeways and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) would better serve the concepts and values they promote if they spent less time doing conceptual analysis and more time working in partnership with Indigenous groups.
Like many non-Native scholars in the Environmental Humanities, I came to Indigenous studies via environmental thought. Indigenous philosophies appealed to my taste for high theory, while providing a distinct set of resources for overcoming the nature-culture divide. Unlike object-oriented ontology, new materialism, and other post-humanist discourses, Indigenous ontologies do not bill themselves as “new.” Indigenous ways of being and relating to the land descend from time-tested practices that have sustained people on the land for countless generations. These modes of relation are the sine qua non of tenable human-land interaction.
Several years and one hundred billion metric tons of carbon dioxide later, I still believe that human life on earth critically depends on transforming human-land relations from one of domination to one of care and respect. But I no longer think it is sufficient to read (or write) ontologies (the study of natural existence and relationality). The problem needs to be reframed. The problem is not to which ontology—this or that one—we philosophers, religionists, and earth-bound scholars give our intellectual assent. The problem is how to enact the ontologies we espouse.
Environmental humanists tend to think of climate change primarily as an epistemological failure. Whether Lynn White views climate change as a worldview failure, or Rob Nixon views it as a failure of imagination, or Dale Jamieson calls it a failure of our moral concepts, environmental humanists have often imagined that environmental problems must be remediated by addressing epistemic limitations. This way of framing the problem gives license to scholars to keep doing what they do best: thinking, reading, writing, and expending carbon-intensive resources to puzzle through the failures of Eurocentric thought and the possible advantages of other spiritual and philosophical traditions.
The problem is not to which ontology—this or that one—we philosophers, religionists, and earth-bound scholars give our intellectual assent. The problem is how to enact the ontologies we espouse.
The notion I would like to advance for your consideration is that the world is not going to think its way out of this predicament. To be sure, some thinking is certainly in order, but my view is that careful thinking about how to enact Indigenous ontologies will lead to less high theory and more political and economic action. The “ontological turn” that some in the environmental humanities demand can only be accomplished through the rematriation of Indigenous ancestral homelands. In short, environmental scholars do not enact Indigenous ontologies by studying them or teaching them to others, but by leveraging institutional resources to return the land to its aboriginal inhabitants.
Appropriations of Indigenous Knowledge
One place to begin is to consider what Indigenous ontologies are for. An inability to answer this question ebbs dangerously close to the old anthropological ways of approaching a community to observe its ways, write about it, and disseminate findings to non-Native learned societies. The literature on Indigenous ontologies tends to make value claims about how this knowledge is useful for grappling with the environmental challenges faced by settler cultures. For example, in Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future (2021), Candace Fujikane frames her study of Kānaka Maoli land and water protectors as responding to the need for a “profound epistemological shift” toward Indigenous ways of knowing that attribute to lands “an ontology—a life, a will, a desire, and an agency—of their own” that can “help us grow a decolonial love for lands, seas, and skies…” (3–4). By way of personal example, Fujikane demonstrates how studying Indigenous ontologies can induct settlers into an alternative way of relating to the land. Fujikane calls this ontological hybrid “settler aloha ‘āina.”
One worry I have about Fujikane’s method of cultivating spiritual relations with the land through the study and practice of Indigenous ontologies is a moral question about how these projects are accountable to Indigenous peoples. A striking feature of this literature, as Paul Nadasday points out with reference to TEK, is that it is mostly written by and for non-Native scholars. Since Fikret Berkes popularized TEK in his 1999 publication Sacred Ecology, now in its fourth edition, the literature on Indigenous lifeways, cosmopolitics, and land-based spiritualities has grown in volume and sophistication. But with rare exception—Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Jessica Hernandez’s Fresh Banana Leaves come to mind—Native and Indigenous scholars are not rushing to disseminate their cultural knowledge to non-Natives. The absence of Indigenous scholars writing Indigenous ontologies or TEK may seem surprising at first, especially when we consider the demand among non-Natives for this knowledge. But as Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd demonstrates, this literature has rarely been accountable to Indigenous peoples. The more we examine who writes the literature and toward what end, the more the lack of Indigenous authorial presence in this literature looks like a refusal rather than (just) a shortage of Indigenous scholars in the academy.
Enacting Indigenous Epistemologies
Another concern is understanding how exactly cultivating Indigenous knowledge transforms land relations. For starters, it is unclear whether Indigenous ontologies, rooted as they are in specific land relations, have the desired effect when generalized beyond their context. Since this literature comes from places all over the world, why would readers expect to arrive at understandings relevant to them? As Deborah McGregor (Anishinaabe) observes about the literature on TEK: “The process [of research] requires the knowledge to be ‘decontextualized,’ meaning that the approach and methods are geared to extracting knowledge from the holder and the holder’s context, and applying it elsewhere” (104). To use myself as an example, what good does learning about Kānaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) land relations do for me in xučyun (Berkeley, California)?
Language that travels easily from one context to the next is a language without land; it does not rely on specific land relations to survive.
Relatedly, how does reading about Indigenous ontologies or TEK help to bodily enact it? McGregor notes further that TEK “must be lived. It cannot be passed on through simple studying or memorizing facts as per the Western scientific system” (104). Textual civilizations, like the one from which the environmental humanities emerged, tend to believe that behaviors stem from worldviews, which stem from beliefs. Only following these assumptions does it make sense to pursue an epistemic shift by studying Indigenous ontologies. This theory of change predicates the new epistemic order on knowledge of the land, but this kind of knowledge is principally derived not by living on the land but by learning about living on the land.
Language that travels easily from one context to the next is a language without land; it does not rely on specific land relations to survive. Indigenous languages are not like this. As Graton Rancheria Chair Greg Sarris reminds us, Indigenous sacred text is the landscape itself. The knowledge that comes from it cannot be easily transferred from one context to another as western scientific knowledge is.[1] This knowledge does not originate in books, and it is doubtful that settlers can reproduce it in this way.
Beyond Epistemology
This leads me to one final question about how individual practices of study and self-cultivation could add up to the “profound epistemological shift” that political society requires, for it is a rarefied group of readers who are interested in Indigenous ontologies and who express this interest by reading books. But maybe: if enough professors in enough schools impress this work on their students, it would expose enough people to enough Indigenous ontologies to start an epistemic shift. There are many things that could be said about this theory of change. Suffice it to say that Indigenous scholars have written beautifully about how this kind of top-down, state-run education system continues to disenfranchise Indigenous Knowledge and actively prevents practices that treat the land as pedagogy.[2] Perhaps our epistemic failures are the result of our very practices of knowledge acquisition and transmission.
Prescribed burn by firefighters in Gran Canyon National park, May 2019. Via Wikimedia Commons.
But surely, one might rejoin, writing and reading about Indigenous ontologies is a step in the right direction. Calling attention to Indigenous land relations can still help to raise awareness and valorize those practices. The issue with this literature and its gradualist theory of change is not that Indigenous ontologies are finally being noticed by non-Native readers. The main issue is what the literature does discursively, politically, vis-à-vis those readers. I have pointed out reasons to doubt whether reading, writing, and thinking about Indigenous ontologies leads to the practical effects settler cultures desire. This is what the literature doesn’t do. However, what it does is to misdirect would-be allies, while reinforcing the status quo. As “settler aloha ‘āina” demonstrates, studying Indigenous ontologies allows settlers to believe they are living toward alternative land relations epistemically without transforming those relations politically and materially. Settlers who merely study Indigenous ontologies, using Max Liboiron’s definition of settler colonialism, continue to “assume access to the land” (5). As Elisha Chi argues in her contribution to this series, masking land relations is a primary strategy by which settler institutions sustain their legitimacy.
In “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang call out the way “decolonization” has become an “empty signifier” for any liberatory struggle and almost any strategy seeking justice. This metaphorical conflation of experiences of oppression not only erodes what makes Indigenous struggles distinct, but participates in settler moves to innocence, which “attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity” (3). Settler moves to innocence (such as “settler nativism,” which is the settler practice of locating an ancestral bloodline that “proves” aboriginal relations to the land) exonerate settler cultures from responsibility without having to forfeit privilege and power.
The literature on Indigenous ontologies seems to fit the description of a settler move to innocence. This literature calls settlers to enact an epistemic shift by reading about Indigenous lifeways. Settlers thereby include themselves in the “decolonization movement” without any material sacrifice or any analysis of their material relations with the land. Change is cognitive, not structural. Indigenous ontologies can be read about and embraced without any redistribution of power and resources.
Settler moves to innocence exonerate settler cultures from responsibility without having to forfeit privilege and power.
To be sure, new concepts are intended to lead the reader to new perspectives, and from there to new worldviews, behaviors, and political commitments. Finally, the new ontology, now firmly established in the reader, is supposed to lead to structural change. In practice, however, the “shift” probably ends the moment the reader puts their book down. Perhaps some concepts have a certain staying power, but soon, no doubt, the insistent nag of carbon-intensive daily life encroaches on consciousness again.
Tuck and Yang state unequivocally what decolonization means when we get down to it: the rematriation of Native lands. My own train of thought leads to the same conclusion. Restoring Native practices on the land without untangling the knot of settler colonialism and state is not possible. These structural features of the world will continue to shape both settler and Indigenous futures, leading to the same patterns of political violence and environmental despoliation. Of course, it is tempting to want to solve planetary problems through mere intellectual assent. It just isn’t realistic. There is, however, one way to enact Indigenous ontologies, and that is to give the land back.
Landback should not be contingent on Indigenous groups stewarding the land according to their traditions. But there is a large-scale cultural revitalization underway that is bringing land-tending practices out into the open (for example, good fire and other Indigenous-led restoration). Land can be returned with provisions for its cultural use, rejuvenation, and protection. As major landholders and custodians of massive wealth, universities can be leaders in rising to the call for #Landback. And non-Native scholars who champion Indigenous ways of relating to the land can finally hold their institutions accountable to Indigenous peoples by creating scholarships for Indigenous students, hiring Indigenous faculty, and lobbying for land trusts and other forms of moral, cultural, and economic restitution.
Cured of TEK and environmental high theory, I now ask Native groups what knowledge I can co-produce with them. I am never asked to study their practices and knowledge systems. This knowledge belongs exclusively to them. Instead, I am usually asked to investigate specific problems and opportunities to help them build capacity and achieve short-term political ends. In this small way, I am learning to advance Indigenous ways of being and relating to the land.
Jeremy Sorgen (Ph.D. University of Virginia) is a scholar of religion, ethics, and the environmental humanities and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. He uses community-based research to build capacity at the local level and inform environmental policy and decision making. In collaboration with California Native American Tribes, his current project examines Tribal Cultural Resource protection and intergovernmental consultation under the California Environmental Quality Act. With funding from the Social Science Research Council and the Henry Luce Foundation, he is leading a conversation series and special issue project on “engaged scholarship” in the environmental humanities.
Dr. Sorgen’s publications appear in the Journal of Environmental Ethics, the Journal of Religious Ethics, and the American Journal for Theology and Philosophy and his scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. His book project, at the intersection of environmental ethics and environmental justice, is called Field Ethics: Collaborative Problem-Solving and Environmental Action.
The tabernacle at St Louis. Roman Catholic Church, Buffalo, New York. Photo Credit: Flickr User Onasil—Bill Badzo. CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0.
“Land relations always already play a central role in all sciences, anticolonial and otherwise.” (Max Liboiron [Red River Métis/Michif], Pollution is Colonialism, 6).
Tabernacles—artistic Catholic boxes that house the physical presence of Jesus in Catholic Churches—are one material location that obscures the presence of Land in Catholic theology. This essay illustrates how Liboiron’s assertion about Land relations in the epigraph above also applies to Catholic theology and religious practice. Catholics practice Land relations wherever Catholics practice Catholicism. Catholic theology likewise utilizes specific Land relations in its theorizing.
The tabernacle was a focal point of the conservative traditionalist experience of my Catholic childhood. It was how my father defined our faith for us. Dad consistently emphasized the supposed spiritual lack of Protestant churches—churches without tabernacles. Whenever we drove by one, my Dad would point and say, “that’s an empty church.” The cadence of this interaction (at least in my memory) echoes that famous Oprah episode where everyone gets a car: “that’s an empty church, and that’s an empty church, and that’s an empty church!” Empty because there wasn’t a tabernacle. Empty because God was not physically, and by extension, spiritually, with Protestants.
While recently ruminating on these childhood moments, I started to think about Catholic tabernacles—made of what appears as gold, but is actually likely bronze; sitting on what looks like marble, but may actually only be wood with marble overlay. Material opulence (real or perceived) nestles alongside the Catholic belief in divine eucharistic presence. It is juxtaposed with my Dad’s connection between material privation and divine absence or emptiness.
Certainly, this binary of opulence versus privation, and the presence (or not) of the divine invokes an ecumenical discussion, perhaps illustrating how the spatial aesthetics birthed during the Protestant Reformation remain salient for Christians today. Taking that route might bring us to Dennis Doyle, a White male Catholic theologian from my Dad’s generation, who elaborates on the Catholic anti-Protestant ideologies of the mid-twentieth century: “Our religious faith bonded us together in the face of a hostile Protestant world becoming ever more secularized.”
But what if, instead of referencing the Protestant Reformation, one percolates this notion of privation and absence further back in history through the Doctrine of Discovery? In these series of papal bulls written for the benefit of the fifteenth-century Catholic monarchies of Portugal and Spain, one sees a bonding together of Catholic political theology against a different hostile other. A pagan, savage other, perhaps a nobly savage other. An other, as Cherokee philosopher Brian Burkhart has argued, perceived as “solid waste to be filtered from the land in order for the settler colonial to acquire the land itself” (27).
Indigenous Land and the Catholic Doctrine of Discovery
Thinking about tabernacles alongside the Doctrine of Discovery, the mind’s eye begins to travel beneath the heavy bronze, the marble overlay, the shiny floor, and the concrete foundation, to the dirt—the land—that the tabernacle sits on.
In the United States this is stolen land. Stolen through genocide, trickery, forced displacement and assimilation, and soaked in the blood of that genocide and the enslavement and murder of Black bodies. The entire premise of the Christian Doctrine of the Incarnation is that the uncreated God became creation. Catholic tabernacles ensconce the physical resting place of Jesus in the shape of the eucharistic wafer. As illustrated by the Vatican’s re-released directive on gluten-free hosts, materiality and specificity are not arbitrary or less relevant aspects to Catholic incarnational and eucharistic theologies. Indeed, material specificity infuses them. By extension then, the material reality, history, and contemporary use of Indigenous land supporting the physical presence of Jesus in the eucharistic wafer, matters. This begs a theological question: What does it mean for Jesus to be materially and physically supported by land soaked in the blood of enslavement and genocide? Does God mind?
Indeed, in addition to the tabernacle, there is a special sink, a sacrarium, inside the sacristies of Catholic Churches which ensures that “the natural elements [of the eucharist] are returned to the earth in a more dignified manner than if they were drained into a holding tank or sewer where they would be mingled with sewage.” Jesus cannot be mixed with human and other waste. Yet, in the U.S., all sacrariums drain into Indigenous Land. Drawing again on Max Liboiron, I name Land here as a “unique entity,” a place-based, spirited network of stories, kin, and relationships of more-than-human and human people that transcend time, but are firmly grounded in place.
What does it mean for Jesus to be materially and physically supported by land soaked in the blood of enslavement and genocide?
I myself write this from the Lenapehoking, the Land of the Lenape peoples. First stolen by William Penn’s sons in their crooked dealings with the Lenape in the 1600s, the Lenapehoking writ large was the home of what today includes a diaspora of six federally recognized tribes, as well as three state recognized tribes spread out in New Jersey and Delaware, and one community in Pennsylvania fighting for state recognition. Indigenous communities in the Lenapehoking, and the United States more broadly, are still resisting colonization by non-Indigenous political entities such as the Catholic Church. The theological question of God’s desires for the worship spaces of the body of Christ—bound up in political realities dictating whose religion is recognized, and who has access to land and why—are always political ones. Indeed, regardless of how one theologizes God’s desires, the question of Land and access persist as stubborn practical remainders. How might U.S. Catholics begin to converse with the particulars of Catholic spaces—churches and universities in particular—whose very presence have required Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement?
Some scholars dealing with similar issues, for example theologians in South Africa, have turned to spatial justice ethics. Most articulations of spatial justice ethics draw upon the work of Polish-American geographer Edward Soja and his foundational text, Seeking Spatial Justice (2010). Via an ethnographic exploration of grassroots organizing by the Bus Riders Union in Los Angeles, Soja attends to spatial justice through what is called “the spatialized turn”—an inclusion of space in academic theory and method which insists that space is not merely created by culture, but also acts as a creator of it. Soja explains that the spatialized turn shifts the focus from space as subordinate to history to articulations of history and spatiality where they each “take on equal and interactive significance” (15).
The Lenapehoking and Villanova University
An example of the spatialized turn from the Lenapehoking provides a helpful anchor to this theory.
Villanova University is a Catholic school founded by the Order of St. Augustine just outside of Philadelphia. School grounds include the St. Thomas of Villanova church (and tabernacle), and two other worship spaces with tabernacles. The Villanova campus hosts what Villanova terms the “Nova Nation.” This “nation” is composed of both current students and alumni, as well as staff, faculty, and administrators: in other words, the nova nation is relational. Anyone who has an extended relationship with the campus institution is included in its nation.
Prior to the spatialized turn, one would understand the space which Villanova inhabits as primarily a catalyst for the history of the Nova Nation. The school was founded in 1842, and generations of Wildcats have “continued Villanova’s tradition of excellence in academics and athletics.” A theo-political imaginary where space and history do not involve each other much clouds the ongoing structure of settler-colonialism—a structure based on the theft of Indigenous land. Land-become-property benefits White and other settlers, via, for example, public land-grant universities, or the private purchase of land by the Augustinians to create the Villanova Campus. These universities foster the economic success of settler students at the cost of Indigenous peoples. The imaginary that Soja critiques perceives the land on which the Villanova Wildcats walk as a consequentialist’s tool. It is a means directed solely to the ends of academic and athletic achievement for settler communities.
But via the spatialized turn—when space and history inform and constitute each other—land as a tool of achievement shifts. Now, one sees the Land on which Villanova sits as shaped specifically by the enslavement of Black people known only as Jack and Chloe (legacies unearthed in the work of Colin McCrossan on Villanova’s Rooted Project). The reality of Jack and Chloe’s enslavement continues to shape the life of today’s Nova Nation. It emerges, for example, in the anti-Black experiences articulated in the @BlackVillanova Instagram page, and in the continued presence of the Sigma Pi Epsilon fraternity house called “The Plantation.” In other words, Jack and Chloe and their enslavement continue to undergird the Nova Nation. Their forced labor made the Villanova campus possible, and the anti-Black White supremacy structuring their enslavement continues to form campus today. Indeed, the continued lack of any land acknowledgement (at minimum) or substantive relation with any members of the various Lenape nations (at best) illustrates how the Villanova campus benefits from and requires the continuation of the myths of the “Last Indian” and “None Left Behind” fallacies in order to maintain its presence in the Lenapehoking.
Saint Thomas of Villanova Church in January of 2018. Photo by Maggie Mengel, AKSM photography. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Ultimately, Villanova illustrates what Soja argues: humans not only shape their environment, they are also shaped by it. Indeed, Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr., writing almost forty years before Soja, states, “Spatial thinking requires that ethical systems be related directly to the physical world and real human situations, not abstract principles… space must in a certain sense precede time as a consideration for thought” (72). Thus, refracted back through the lens of Deloria, the “recent” spatialized turn evinced by Soja illustrates an ongoing reality of relationships and structures— structures that do not conform to Euro-American linear progressive notions of time.
This understanding of space and time clears the ground for Patrick Wolfe’s work cited above, which names settler colonialism as an ongoing structure, rather than as a past event. If settler colonialism were merely a point on the historical timeline, then the tabernacle in St. Thomas of Villanova church can be simply an apolitical sacred space—once an unfortunate site of violence and/or theft in the distant past. But acknowledging settler colonialism as an ongoing event suggests otherwise. If settler colonialism persists in the very structures of land ownership and use, then Jesus does not drain through Villanova sacrariums into Augustinian, Catholic, or even U.S. sacred ground. Just as racism and White supremacy braid together within the Nova Nation, settler-colonial violence and Catholic sacrality tangle in the space of St. Thomas of Villanova Church.
Certainly, learning about Jack and Chloe, and the history of the Lenapehoking, is an important first step for the “Nova Nation.” Yet, this learning is not enough. As Jeremy Sorgen contends in his article in this series, “The study of Indigenous ontologies allows settlers to live toward alternative land relations epistemically without transforming their relations politically and materially… . Change is cognitive, not structural.” The continued presence of “The Plantation,” and the lack of relationship between Lenape peoples and Villanova, bears out Sorgen’s analysis.
From Emptiness to Unknowing: Catholic Land Return
Approaching the violent settler-colonialism of U.S. Catholic Churches through the lens of spatial justice ethics thus seems rather promising at first. The inclusion of space/land as a constitutive and ongoing element of culture forces academics and theologians “to dissect the myth of spatial neutrality” as I have done here (Soja, 181). However, in spatial justice ethics, land is understood primarily as space. The land/space framework, particularly for Soja, instantiates humanity as the prime mover, the anthropocentric big bang initiating the history/space relationship. In this anthropocentric relationship, theorists and theologians preserve the debunked prerogative of Euro-American history/temporality. Land, though not neutral, remains a space (the space?) where injustice was once enacted by humans, injustice that foundationally influences the culture today, as with the Villanova example above. Yet, in spatial justice ethics, land is also the contemporary space where, with the right orientation, discernment, and positioning of use, justice can ensue. To put it succinctly, Land becomes instrument. While it can shape subsequent history, Land here primarily functions as a tool for human use and thus, human justice. Within this relational framework of space/land as interchangeable instruments that require human reorientation toward justice, the logic of terra nullius persists. As Liboiron cites British Australian education scholar Raewyn Connell, terra nullius is “invoked every time we try to theorise the formation of social institutions and systems from scratch, in a blank space” (Liboiron, 21). The accusation of emptiness my Dad claimed for the Protestants echoes here. The land Villanova sits on was considered, like the allegations against Protestant churches, a void space without God. A space waiting to be filled with Catholic divinity, sacrality, and achievement. What options do theologians and Catholic peoples have to address these ongoing terra nullius logics?
Just as racism and White supremacy braid together within the Nova Nation, settler-colonial violence and Catholic sacrality tangle in the space of St. Thomas of Villanova Church.
Peruvian Anthropologist Marisol De La Cadena provides a helpful pause for the spatialized turn. As she writes of her ethnographic work with an Indigenous Quechua family in Peru, “I could access tirakuna [earth beings] only through Mariano and Nazario and perhaps other runakuna [what Quechua people call themselves. Pejoratively called “Indians” by non-runakuna]. With my usual epistemic tools, I could not know Ausangate—not even if I got lucky” (xxv). De La Cadena’s articulation of the sovereignty of Ausangate, an “earth-being that is also a mountain,” (xxvii) unknowable except to their runakuna, highlights the incommensurability between herself, the runakuna, and the earth-beings of the Peruvian Andes. She offers a thread of praxis that Christian theology could mimic as part of an attempt to take Land seriously.
Instead of the assertion and practice of Land’s supposed emptiness, the theologies of the Church might admit, like de la Cadena, that they are unable to know Lenapehoking and the other Indigenous Lands of the United States. And that this unknowing, coupled with the Church’s role as the progenitor of the Doctrine of Discovery, requires not a confession of past sins, but the dismantling of ongoing ones. As de la Cadena points out, “Our worlds were not necessarily commensurable, but this did not mean we could not communicate” (xxv). The use of Jack and Chloe’s enslavement to build the Nova Nation requires an embrace of the relational nature of reparations as an overall undoing of anti-Black structures of oppression that includes, but is not limited to, economic reparations. The imposition of settler-colonialism as violence against the Land requires not just an exploration of right land usage per the tenets of spatial justice ethics, but a “communication” of decolonial political praxis rooted in the reality that the land is still Indigenous Land. St. Thomas of Villanova is Lenapehoking, not Augustinian Catholic.
How might the Catholic church, despite the incommensurability of Catholic theology and Land sovereignty, take on this work? What relationality might allow the eucharist, resting in its bronze tabernacle, to jettison its position as a God of genocide?
As Sorgen asserts of scholars, I assert of theologians and the Church.
It’s time for the Catholic Church to give the land back.
Elisha Chi is a registered descendent of the Bering Straits Native Corporation, raised on Duwamish Land in the anti-feminist conservative traditionalist Catholic community of Seattle. Years of experience in academic and non-profit administration culminated in her formative practice of community mediation on Northern Chumash Land in Central California. Today, Elisha is a PhD candidate working on Lenape Land at the intersection of theology and religious studies, ethics, and Indigenous studies. Her childhood and professional life together influence her interest in theoretical and embodied spaces of liminality and paradox as sources for interdisciplinary academic conversations. Her projects thus thread together anticolonialism, political theology, theology and religious studies, and materiality in order to articulate anticolonial academic methodologies and pedagogical practices that pursue the ultimate question of Indigenous land return.
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