I’ve been reading Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change. Some ultra-conservative Christians have nothing better to do than create websites that call McLaren a heretic. Personally, I don’t see McLaren as a theologian, but more as a Christian philosopher. In the great tradition of philosophy, he seems to be asking more challenging and pertinent questions than I find in most other Christian thought.
In this book, he approaches several of the most severe global crises in respect to Christianity. One of the most interesting is the subject of Western economic growth. He summerizes an economy as like some kind of machine that takes in resources (materials and energy) produces things for a society (goods, food, fuel) and produces by-products (heat, waste, pollution, trash). He uses this diagram.
If an economy is small enough, it is able to replace most of its resources, and its waste by-products don’t negatively impact the bigger system. As it grows, however, it uses up more and more resources and produces more and more waste in an unchanging system. Much like a goldfish that keeps growing within an unchanging fishbowl.
The question McLaren poses is basically this: Is it ethical or moral for a minority of people in the world to keep demanding economic growth while most of the world (everything below the top of Mexico and Africa) struggles to feed, clothe, employ, and hydrate its people at a level that is even survivable?
As a parent, do you let the biggest and older kids bully all the Halloween candy instead of sharing equally with the younger kids in order to teach them lessons about survival and capitalism? Don’t answer that, I might get depressed.
It takes about 5 acres of the earth to support one human being (energy, food, clothing, materials, etc). It takes around 24 acres of earth to support each American (it actually takes around 27 acres to support a Canadian because they use more heating, but there are less of them). And yet both Presidential candidates are promising economic growth for our country. It’s as if we are saying, “We don’t have enough yet. We want more!”
If political leaders aren’t going to address it, shouldn’t Christians be saying something? I guess you can’t talk about economic slowdown without being called a Communist or Socialist or something. In that case, perhaps we ought to put away our WWJD bracelets if we don’t want to be called such names.
As one Rwandan woman said to McLaren during his visit to the African nation of Burundi, “If Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God is true, then everything must change. Everything must change.”
Thanks Brian, for asking the right questions.
