Abundant Provision [Book chapter 12]

In an apocalyptic world of politically generated scarcity, abundant provision is based on an economy of sharing within & between small communities. In such practice, we bear witness to the state.

This is a summary of chapter 12 of Security After Christendom on the third of three themes of a Christian political theology of security: abundant provision.

Security is not merely about inclusion and protection as denoted by terms like “national defence” and “international order”. Like freedom it has both negative (freedom from) and positive (freedom for) dimensions. We do not merely desire security from threats, as this is just bare life. We also seek security for life of shalom, which requires positive elements such as the provision of the ecological, economic, and social conditions to truly live.

Today, we are faced with a paradox. Technological advances have created abundance: farming is more productive and “meat” can be grown in labs on scale; the movement of labour and the growth of capital is unprecedented; communication technology enables communities to form without presence. And yet across all three metrics – ecological, economic, and social – there is also an acute sense of scarcity. The natural environment is in decline. There is a cost of living crisis in much of the rich world where inequality between capital and labour is again surging. Social media is making the common life more difficult.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of economic and ecological security is that of climate change. The latest UN projections of climate change (AR6, 2021) suggests that catastrophic warming of more than two degrees is more likely than not to be reached in the period 2041–2060 even if atmospheric concentration of carbon is kept at current levels. If emissions return to their historical growth trajectory, global heating that threatens the survival of the human species will occur before the end of the twenty-first century, perhaps by the early 2060s. This means a temperature increase of 3◦C above preindustrial which will result in an additional one to four billion people facing water shortages, and 150 to 550 million additional people being at risk of hunger.

The core security problem here is neither the threat to specific group (“national security”) nor the general lack of resources (“global overpopulation”) but is a matter of provision: the failure of the common or public good. In “the Tragedy of the Commons”, each personal gain creates the loss of common pool resources; fixing this problem requires highly regulated markets. But this problem and its solution assumes basic equality whereas in the real world we are unequal. Climate change is the problem of wealth of the few and poverty of the many; in the middle, billions compete to be winners. The wealthiest 10% produce around 50% CO2 emissions, while the poorest 50% generate about 10% CO2 emissions (Oxfam). And the wealthy have the power to undermine proper regulation.

Can this inequality problem be fixed? Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that return on capital for the rich in the form of profits, rents or interest income is around 5% per annum. By contrast, real wages for the majority have stagnated since the inflation of the 1970s and subsequent weakening of the unions and deregulation of the 1980s. The mid-twentieth century—when this was not the case—was an historical exception. We are returning to the global norm of very high wealth inequality. Even the pro-business Economist magazine argued 12 years ago that long-term inequalities between the owners of capital and labour would create political conflict and instability.

So, the security dilemma which arises in the areas of economic and environmental security, especially climate change, is not between groups with equal standing. Here is a broader truth about the scarcity- and insecurity-inducing practices of all market economics as highlighted by theologians such as Daniel Bell and William Cavanaugh. This is a tragedy of provision where concentrations of wealth in the hands of the powerful harm the capacity of others to share. Modern liberal democracies suppose they have the sovereign power to end this tragedy, this scarcity, but in fact preside over economies of profound injustice. Theology is required to shift our imaginations beyond economic individualism.

However, to bring theology into the conversation presents us with another paradox. On the one hand, the Christian hope is that we are in transition away from this tragedy: we are aware of its form, and we know its arbitrary victims, as in Christ and since Christ they have been revealed to us. And that we can begin to enact forms of transition away from the economics of inequality and scarcity as “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God” (Rom 8:19).

On the other hand, the Christendom reality is that this is a problem which began and was nurtured in Western states with majority Christian populations and where elites were imbued with a partial theology of dominion over nature without a sense of natural limit or jubilee principles of redistribution. In the context of Christendom, these states aspired to be sovereign leviathans over the world and defer climate catastrophe until the apocalypse (the biblical notion of katechon). But Northcott argues that the geopolitics of climate change tend towards destruction insofar as they require “a fearful Leviathan or katechon restraining the contest for the earth’s last habitable lands and potable water.”

However, the Christendom conditions of hard borders are giving way to what the environmental theologian Michael Northcott denotes as “the post-Christendom borderless condition” where borders are violently imposed but are increasingly ineffective and illegitimate. The Leviathan fails because of the fundamental misconception—a late-Christendom myth perhaps—that the state might limit its demands on the environment. In Christian apocalyptic terms, the practice of radical inclusion for the poor and outsider unveils the inadequacies, injusticess and inequalities of bordered environmental protection (such as the IPCC process).

All this seems rather gloomy and forbidding. Rising energy prices are instructive of the crisis of provision. The crisis is being exacerbated as our rampant inequality causes fuel poverty for the many while the rich continue to use energy in excess. Scarcity makes neighbors into potential enemies as subsistence farmers compete over energy and water—a common cause of localized violence across the global south—while tensions emerge in the global north between those who can afford to be virtuous and those who can’t or can’t be bothered to make the sacrifices required.

Tim Gorringe, a Christian ecologist and my former colleague at the University of Exeter offers a little more hope (just) in The World Made Otherwise (2018), inspired by the work of the Dutch theologian Ton Veerkamp, Die Welt Anders. Both Gorringe and Veerkamp are grounded in the Christian concept of sharing, each according to their need (Acts 2:44-45) which is only realised in a “world turned upside down” (Acts 17:5). Gorringe cites the final paragraph of the classic After Virtue where Alastair MacIntyre advocates, “the construction of local forms of community” amidst “the new dark ages which are already upon us.”

As the effects of climate change – and related problems of provision, protection and inclusion – become apparent, the ordering powers of state and empire will break down completely. We should not welcome decay but prepare to seek security in church and other forms of civil society rather than looking to the state merely to protect our bare life. Gorringe finds hope in “the radicalization of the Deuteronomic imperatives” in the early church where, “the program of Deuteronomy was deepened and extended to cover all people; it was no longer a program for Israel, but for all nations.”

The notion of “the radicalization of the Deuteronomic imperatives” is intriguing, But in the absence of order we typically see conservatism (patriarchy, ethnic separation, strict rules). Such conservatism is biblical, in the sense that it is normative to the Hebrew community of the time, but it is not Christian as its community model is countermanded by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “The Christian,” Cavanagh argues in Being Consumed, “is called not to replace one universal system with another, but to attempt to ‘realize’ the universal body of Christ in every particular exchange.” The universal body of Christ denotes abundant provision instantiated and materialized eventually in a new heaven and new earth.

The apocalyptic theory of abundant provision is clear, but the practice of inaugurating that endpoint in present times is less so. As the Cavanaugh quote above indicates, this is not about one big solution, but a myriad of interconnected micro solutions which may only be scaled up temporarily. Gorringe and Northcott are both inspired by the transition towns movement, which began in the south-west of England and grew at one stage to around 900 communities in 67 countries, and the important role of people of faith in the movement. But Gorringe now acknowledges that transition’s radicalism has been neutered by government grants and that its radicals have long since defected to Extinction Rebellion and other movements.

An ethic of the state can only be derived prophetically from its failure to deliver justice, as it was in the Hebrew scriptures, and the state must be seen as passing away, as presented by Christ himself. This makes a Christian ethic of the state “negative” (in the sense that it is based on critique) rather than pessimistic or cynical. We should not abandon hope in the institutional power of the state to reduce the problem of climate change by capping emissions or subsidizing renewables.

But there is little point making in placing our faith in an order which is passing away. As the climate-apocalyptic literature anticipates, when ecological crises increase in severity and the failure of governments to address the problem becomes more apparent, humankind will search for meaning in sects and militant movements.

The church is in essence a transition movement many of whose wealthier and aspirational members – comfortable in their material lives and fearful of change – long forgot that fact and settled into comfortable affluence. In post-Christendom terms, the church must be prepared to work with other movements of all faiths and none according not to affluence (hoarding by the few) but abundance (sharing within an unbounded community).

Most things we need – clean air, water, locally sourced food – are plentiful at the local scale; economy, technology, and society can help us share them. “My sense is that our energy should go into Transition type initiatives,” Gorringe notes, “but at the same time we should ‘dare to form communes,’ because arks might be needed.”