From “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart” by Brian D. McLaren
And here’s what is striking about the theological narrative I and billions of Christians have inherited: It is both socially disengaged and anti-ecological. It says little or nothing about our need to be engaged with movements for social justice, anti-racism, poverty reduction, violence reduction, and the like. The story is about other things entirely. And when it comes to ecological overshoot and its consequences, this popular theological narrative says those consequences don’t matter, because salvation gives us believers a “get out of ecological jail free” card via the Rapture, and because God can’t wait to destroy the whole damned world anyway, extracting the only thing of value; disembodied human souls. (We’ll consider a radically different telling of the biblical story in chapters 8 and 9.)
Equally striking the same is true of the narrative of capitalism – it is utterly anti-ecological. Conventional capitalism – by which I mean the economic story that upholds our current global civilization – acts as if the economy is the ultimate reality, the invisible hand that guides human history. It tells us who we are: abstracted consumers with wants and needs that the economy can fulfill. It provides ultimate justice, rewarding the hard-working and punishing the lazy. It either ignores social injustice or promises that its own invisible hand will resolve it. It takes no account of the environment. (In fact, it has a subdiscipline called environmental economics, as if the environment were a subset of the economy!) Capitalism-induced environmental blindness, aided and abetted by distorted Christian end-times theologies, made it possible for us to race through overshoot without even noticing.