Recalibrating Our Lives

Willie James Jennings is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at YDS. He teaches in the areas of Christian thought, race theory, and decolonial and environmental studies. His books include The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale, 2010), Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, (Westminster John Knox, 2017) and After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020) which was the inaugural volume in the book series Theological Education between the Times. He is now completing a two-volume project on the doctrine of creation, provisionally entitled Unfolding the Word: Recasting a Christian Doctrine of Creation (vol. 1) and Jesus and the Displaced: The Redemption of Habitation (vol. 2).

He has a B.A. from Calvin College, an M.Div. from Fuller Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in religion and ethics from Duke University. He is also an ordained Baptist minister who has served as interim pastor for several North Carolina churches. He spoke earlier this fall with Reflections editor Ray Waddle. Here is an edited version of the interview.

Reflections: In a short video about the Living Village, you talk about water as a divine gift to us. How would society be different if we regarded water more like that?

Willie James Jennings: We would first of all understand there is an echo of the divine life that’s always present in water. In Christian tradition, God has been compared to water in terms of the divine fluidity, the spirit’s fluidity—the spirit permeating all things, giving life to all things, present in the very things that give life, and yet is also fully the majestic power of God.

Feeling overwhelmed is appropriate. This is what we always learn from social movements: Feeling overwhelmed goes along with taking steps forward. You manage both at the same time.

A second thing to recognize about this gift is it points to our profound dependency on the divine life. Not only are we dependent upon water, but we are water. Our very existence is an extension of water. Without it we would not survive. It is in us. We are inside that flow. And really we should open ourselves more to the flow of water and what it means for everyone’s thriving, just as we open ourselves to the flow of the spirit. These things are tied beautifully together.

And there’s a third thing: the interdependency that water represents. People talk about the importance of the commons. And at the heart of the commons is water. The first historical instance of a commons that we have as creatures are watering holes. Whether you’re in the desert or the Serengeti or anywhere else, especially when the season turns away from the rain and water becomes more scarce, you have all the different animals and birds and insects convening at the watering hole. It’s both a dangerous place yet also a place of life. Remember those old nature shows on TV? The crocodiles are in the water. The antelope are on the edge, sipping the water. The hyenas are on the other side. The lions are there. Everybody’s drinking water there because it represents the energy of the commons.

With water, there’s a level of connectivity that should carry a greater moral density for us than it does. Our shared need of water has not yet yielded an ethic of sharing that superintends what we do in this world. We have not yet entered into that possibility. We’re walking around, disconnected and displaced from the earth, spending so much of our lives not understanding our connection to the earth or to other creatures.

Reflections: What’s thwarting this sharing ethic?

Jennings: I think the problem is the economic vision we’ve been given. As a number of scholars have pointed out, water functions as one of the “cheaps” in the economy. Cheaps are natural things on earth that no one made, and they are here for us to be shared, like the air, the dirt, the seasons and the weather. You don’t have to pay for them—but they can be monetized. And so we have bottled water. It was such a funny concept at first: Who would actually pay for water in a bottle? It turns out, we all would. And look what’s symbolized in that: you can take something that’s available to all, make it a commodity, and sell it, so that some can afford it and some can’t. Suddenly you’re creating a hierarchy inside of water—spring water from Italy, as opposed to spring water from Detroit. 

That’s a major example of how privatization, commodification, and hierarchy can turn our shared experience of the world into something competitive. There are many critiques of capitalism, but I think the most important thing never to lose sight of is what it does to the way we look at the world. It teaches us to see the world as commodity, as object, as resource that people fight over. Until we challenge that idea, we are in an uphill battle to understand any deeper reality of our connection.

Reflections: We’re talking here about the pressures of globalized competition, short-term profits, ecological fallout. Aren’t these dynamics beyond anything religious tradition says about economic life?

Jennings: Long before capitalism, there was buying and selling. Before capitalism, people bartered, exchanged, shared. There were people making money. The question for us is, is it possible for those things to exist in a way that doesn’t destroy the earth and turn us all into commodities? Is there a way to change the equation that now seems to be so incredibly powerful and feels almost inevitable, as if the modern economy represents the only proper evolution of human value and exchange. But that’s a lie we have to challenge.

As a Christian, I’m not against people buying things, selling things, owning things—and as I understand it, Jesus wasn’t against that either. He just demanded that you share! In some ways, he was crumbling the concept of ownership from within.

Take the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19. He was a tax collector. He was rich. Everybody thought he was a sinner. He was up in the sycamore tree to watch Jesus coming by. And Jesus invites him to come down from that tree. And Zacchaeus says two things that are absolutely crucial for us. He says, Lord, I will give half of what I have to the poor. And he also says, If I have defrauded anyone (and of course he has), I will give them back four times what I made from defrauding them. There’s reparation and repair right there. The reality of it is: Jesus offers an intervention into the economic system.

Reflections: How do these ideas bloom if so many people are already feeling overwhelmed?

Jennings: Feeling overwhelmed is appropriate. This is what we always learn from social movements: Feeling overwhelmed goes along with taking steps forward. You manage both at the same time.

Taking small steps is crucial. You might start by just learning about your immediate neighborhood, how things actually work, finding ways to intervene in things that are not working well. Understand the water supply and how to keep it clean. Start a community garden.

Don’t worry about trying to defeat the whole economic system. What we have to do is take what’s in our hands and listen to the Spirit speaking to us. And what the Spirit will always say is: Share. Share what you have.

I think we have to start by creating small circles of action, then larger circles, where people recalibrate their lives to make possible an economy of sharing. The sharing work can, like a ripple, expand to larger and larger groups. 

Reflections: Inevitably, there’s a political dimension to this vision of sharing?

Jennings: Yes, it’s not as though we turn away from governments, or turn away from corporations, and let them continue doing what they do without challenge. We operate as citizens in order to place the very ethic of sharing inside those institutions. A government we imagine to be for the people and by the people is a government where we raise our voices and say, we vote to share, and we seek to convince others to vote to share.

That’s the problem we’re facing: We don’t know how to think our individual and collective agency together. I think the reason is: in this country you have two different visions of the moral formation of citizens. They have different aims and are always going at each other. One vision is shaped inside the ruling class: the elites want their children to be moral so that they can handle the power that will be in their hands and handle what it means to rule and run this country.

Then there’s another vision of citizen formation, which cares about the thriving of all people. It imagines a multicultural reality of multiple people striving together, determining the good, the truth, and the beautiful. It imagines the formation of a citizen who understands what it means to build a more perfect union of all people. That’s the experiment in democracy that in this country has always been both wanted and feared.

Reflections: You’ve said you believe in the idea of “desperate citizenship.” What does that mean?

Jennings: Here I’m thinking of Paul in the latter chapters of the Book of Acts, where he calls on his citizenship in Rome, demands that he be allowed to see Caesar, and does everything he can to survive against enemies trying to destroy him. To me, the Christian is the desperate citizen—our citizenship is a matter of desperation. What I mean is that we understand that we are inside these nation-states, and their goal is self-survival—their first priority is making sure they sustain themselves, not caring for people.

But the desperate citizen will take all the tools of the state and help people thrive, help strengthen the common good, even if a ruling class opposes it.

There’s a desperation in realizing the state isn’t interested in my thriving, but I will use its tools not only for myself, but for the thriving of everybody. So, yes, I believe in desperate citizenship!

Reflections: Which makes you feel hopeful …. not desperate?

Jennings: Given what’s going on in the world, I think there are more and more people who want to say, I’m ready to live by a sharing ethic. More are realizing that that’s what it’s going to take, if we’re going to have a future, because an ethic of competition, commodity formation, and hierarchy is not sustainable. Those things are only going to lead to more war and death.

So, we keep our eyes and activities aimed at national and global conditions. At the same time, we take some simple modest steps too, like finding out who my neighbors are, finding ways to pull people together just to talk about our shared reality in this place, whatever the place may be—and we learn to recognize the water we share, the air we share, the land we share, the dirt we share, and make those truly a part of our lives.