A pervasive neoliberalism, which idolizes unrestrained economic growth, not only threatens God’s more-than-human creation, it betrays human identity, agency, and empathy.
Today, almost unmistakably, people in my tradition—people who have an ancestral distrust of government—find themselves susceptible to populist lines of argument. “They want to take away your freedoms” is a lightning rod in my community. It’s also a go-to populist line: “The elites are coming and they are going to enforce their will upon you.”
We expect a warm assurance that we can have it all—that our dependencies on nature are benignly “managed” somewhere else. Wealthy Christians put a pious spin on this assumption under the guise of “caring for Creation.”
Each of us has our own pandemic story that intersects somehow with our culture’s larger story; our own micro-stories written on the margins of a macro-story. My 2020 story felt like de ja vu, because I was diagnosed with cancer one year before the pandemic.