“It Doesn’t Have to be This Way”

Kathryn Tanner ’79 B.A., ’82 M.A., ’85 Ph.D. is the Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at YDS. Her research relates the history of Christian thought to contemporary issues of theological concern using social, cultural, and feminist theory. In recent years she has been drawn to moral questions about market forces—the ways in which the modern economy makes maximizing claims on the emotional, material, and spiritual lives of people. In Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (Yale, 2019) and other books, she regards Christian faith as a countervailing vision of divine grace that spiritually transforms identity, emphasizes forgiveness, and restores a commitment to the world we hold in common. 

Her books include Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Fortress, 2001), Economy of Grace (Fortress, 2005), and Christ the Key (Cambridge, 2010). She is a past member of the Theology Committee that advises the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops. She spoke recently to Reflections editor Ray Waddle. This is a shortened version of their interview.

Reflections: You’ve written a couple books on economics from a Christian point of view but not quite so much on the environmental crisis. How do you see the two issues intersecting?

Kathryn Tanner: There are clearly some major points of contact between economic policy and environmental degradation. The first is on a technical level—a lot of environmental harms and costs are basically considered “negative externalities.” These costs aren’t internalized or factored in on a company’s balance sheet. Somebody’s paying the cost, but it’s not the people who are producing the costs. So if a company produces pollution, that’s a harm, a cost, that somebody is going to pay, often vulnerable communities living nearby or downstream. Enormous damage is being done, but those who pay for it are not those producing the damage. 

I’m not talking about the sort of hope where you just sit on your hands and wait for God to do something at the end of time. We’re still obligated to do whatever we can, as a measure of our hope and reliance on God.  

There are exceptions. Quite a number of businesses are trying to take into account impacts on the community and the environment. But in general, the lack of environmental concern is where religious and other ethical values can come into play in a major way. They represent a larger sphere of moral concern, a community of care that extends to people and nonhuman creatures who are severely affected by the incredibly disparate impacts of pollution and can’t defend themselves.  

The second point of intersection concerns the bigger picture of economic policies in the U.S. after the Great Depression, when pro-growth and pro-consumption decisions were pursued on a national scale. According to the argument, overaccumulation led to the Depression; nobody had the money to buy what was produced. So the country tried to put the economy back in sync by encouraging consumption and by producing as much as possible in order to increase profits. A consumer society was instituted. But that kind of pro-growth strategy leads to pretty horrible environmental consequences. I mean, the system isn’t really concerned about whether you’re producing a mountain of plastic junk that circles the globe and can’t be recycled, as long as you’re making a lot of money off of that. It’s a case of major misplaced priorities. 

The point is: It doesn’t have to be this way. We do have other options. The economy doesn’t just run on its own. It’s based on political decisions. And those decisions can be reversed. You could have, for instance, a low-growth model, and you don’t necessarily have to dismantle capitalism to do that. You can still turn a profit. You just don’t have to turn a maximum profit where you produce as much junk as you possibly could so long as somebody can buy it and then just toss it away.

Reflections: How can people of faith help shape ecological reform, or is it time to panic?

Tanner: Well, I think it’s reasonable to be panicked. The situation is pretty dire. And yet, from a Christian point of view, no matter how dire the circumstances appear to be, we still have to act. We have a religious and moral obligation to stand up and try to make a difference on these issues—while remembering that the ultimate results of our activity are assumed to be out of our hands: God is ultimately the one who’s going to set things right if they’re ever going to be set right, in this world or the next. 

That’s different from other forms of activism, where the reason you’re working for change is you think you have a realistic expectation of changing things. But you can also get fairly easily discouraged if it doesn’t succeed when you thought it would.

Reflections: Does that suggest the difference between optimism, which might be based on statistical probabilities, and a Christian view of hope, which looks to a longer divine horizon of change?

Tanner: I think hope means trust in something beyond yourself, a kind of reliance on God and God’s agency. And this creates a sense of moral obligation to try as hard as you can to make a difference even though, on any fundamental level, you don’t expect it’s necessarily going to be a successful operation in the short term. You do it anyway.

That’ll sound pretty paradoxical to someone on the outside. But I’m not talking about the sort of hope where you just sit on your hands and, you know, wait for God to do something at the end of time. We’re still obligated to do whatever we can, as a measure of our hope and reliance on God.  

Reflections: Does a Christian perspective have something distinctive to contribute to eco-solutions?

Tanner: From a Christian point of view and probably from lots of other religious points of view, the solution is to value the environment in terms other than economic terms. It’s not about economic valuations or capitalization of costs. On a really, really basic level, Christians can say the natural world has a value insofar as it’s the object of God’s concern. It’s valuable in its own right by virtue of its relationship with God. The scope of God’s love is universal: as the Creator of the whole world, God values every kind of creature. They have goodness in God’s own eyes, as you find in Genesis.

And that’s not an economic value. But it’s economically relevant because it means if you’re engaged in economic activity that’s going to have a harmful effect on the creatures around your factory or beyond, you don’t do it.

Reflections: But how do those values get translated into boardroom decisions?

Tanner: It happens whenever decisions about how a company is run take into account not just profitability but social effects, impacts on the community, impacts on water and air. That kind of decision-making is already happening, to some extent. These are values that enter into the economic picture, though they can’t be tallied up very clearly in economic terms. This is where the religious point of view can make a distinctive contribution to the economic picture—by bringing these values into the economic discussion, not because you can quantify them using some kind of cost-benefit analysis but because they have their own distinct value, and they matter to people, and to ignore them would not be good business policy.

Reflections: If this is God’s world, shouldn’t there be more of a groundswell in defense of it?

Tanner: I think it is already a basic view among Christians that the natural world is valuable in and of itself by virtue of its relationship to God. But that view is generally not deployed with reference to, say, economic policy. Why is that? One reason might be the sense that the economy is its own sphere and shouldn’t be interfered with. Or, people think the economy as it presently operates accords with other Christian values and so they don’t want to fundamentally alter the way it works currently. Or, maybe they just think that it can’t be altered, period. You know, “this is just the way capitalism works. It’s always worked this way, and we can’t do anything about it.”

But this doesn’t mean coordinated efforts around climate change aren’t happening. They are. We know that whatever action is going to come is not going to come on the federal level for now. And we’re seeing some movement on that: private nonprofit organizations, public health organization, local initiatives, and others aligning with particular states to put out reliable information and policy directives where they can. 

Reflections: At the conclusion of Economy of Grace (Fortress, 2005), you say social change succeeds in history only when society becomes persuaded that the reform will benefit everyone. Is a win-win vision a possibility in an era of concentrated power and inequality?

Tanner: It certainly seems to be true that people in power are interested in maximizing that power even if they have enough power or enough money already. They always seem to want more because they can get it, and there isn’t anything that necessarily will impede them, and so the powers that be don’t care what other people think or what churches think. The way has to be opened up for some kind of force to change the pattern.

In Martin Luther King Jr.’s last book, what stands out to me is his belief in the power of nonviolent coercive force.[1] He was always interested not just in persuasive force, not just good arguments, but in the kind of force that makes it difficult and inconvenient for people to avoid getting on board with the vision of reform underway. In the 1960s, nonviolent actions like boycotts, mass demonstrations, or general strikes all had the effect of pushing people to go where they might not otherwise go, pushing them to at least see that it was in their self-interest to go there, because otherwise the disruptions caused by the boycotts were making life impossible. It comes down to forming coalitions of like-minded people to push the current system to see how beneficial it is to avoid crisis and advantage everyone.