We Made This Economy. We Can Transform It, Too 

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda began to recognize systemic injustice around age fourteen, when she saw a film that revealed how much American breakfast foods were based on exploitation of workers in the Caribbean. Since then, she hasn’t been able to stop seeing injustice. 

Moral spiritual power is based on, I think, four forms of seeing,” she told Common Good. Moe-Lobeda outlines those four ways of seeing in the first book of a new series, Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage. She authored this first volume, which shares a title with the series, and will edit the books to come. 

Moe-Lobeda, a professor of theological and social ethics and the founding director of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary Center for Climate Justice and Faith, and her team of authors hope to invite readers first into seeing really what is going on — the injustices that we continue to perpetrate,” she explains. Then it’s time for recognizing and seeing alternatives, which, for Moe-Lobeda, has looked like becoming aware of a global movement of people building a new economy in so many different ways.

Next comes “seeing the power and the presence of God moving us from the way things are toward the way things ought to be,” she says. And finally, “seeing beauty. Beauty feeds the soul and there’s so much beauty around us — in old faces walking down the street or the birds singing when you walk out the door or the feeling of the air on your skin. There’s just so much beauty all around that we often just ignore whereas it’s there to feed us.” 

Moe-Lobeda spoke to Common Good about the economic systems that oppress many, beauty that persists, and how Christians in the West can make meaningful changes that honor God.

In the first chapter, you describe economies as “webs of relationships,” noting that this is a biblical perspective. How so?

The Hebrew Bible, or what Christians often call the Old Testament, is just full of God’s insistence that people act justly toward one another in economic life and practice justice in the ways systems are set up. In other words, the Bible is full of — especially the prophets — excoriating people in power for creating systems that let them live in luxury while other people are living in object poverty. The Bible is just full of that. 

Someone once said that if you took a Bible and cut out all of the passages that refer to poverty or condemning economic oppression, you’d have a Bible in tatters. The reason for that is, as we see in both what Christians call the New Testament and the Old Testament, we’re called to love neighbor as self or to love neighbor as God loves. And love in the biblical sense does not mean just feel kindly toward or treat nicely in interpersonal relationships. It really means a steadfast commitment to the wellbeing of the neighbor or the other. If the neighbor or the other is being trampled by economic injustice, then serving their wellbeing means changing that or challenging it, resisting it, building alternatives. And it seems to me that that’s one of the most powerful and life-changing dimensions of the call to love neighbor as self. 

For instance, under slavery, loving the neighbor didn’t mean just binding up the wounds of the beaten slaves. It meant abolishing chattel slavery. And that’s the same with systems that are set up to let some people accumulate vast wealth by exploiting others and the earth. 

We’re called and created into relationships that enable all to flourish. That’s so evident in the biblical texts. And that involves creating economic systems that don’t just render anguish and suffering for so many people. It’s a beautiful calling to be in right relationships. And one of those forms of right relationships is our economic lives. 

I also see it this way: My life touches the people in my interpersonal world. But my life also has an impact on the people who produce my clothing in a sweatshop. I’ve had so many experiences with people in the global south and I’ll never forget the strawberry picker in Mexico who said very quietly, “Our children go hungry, you know, because this land grows strawberries for your tables and it should grow corn and beans for our children.”

So I’m in a relationship with those children because my strawberry buying impacts them. Or my colleague who said his brother had been killed by the toxins in the river that were poisoned by a mine in Kenya, and it was an internationally run mining corporation. And I knew very well that my salary might be paid from investment funds that are invested in that mining company. So I benefited from the system that killed his cousin.

It’s relationships like that that bind us together to economies.

We live in an era when we are exposed to bad news so constantly that it can be hard to believe we can do anything about it. You propose that the injustices we experience can be understood as “diseases in need of healing.” What might initial steps toward that healing look like?

In the book, I talk about taking steps in three terrains for that healing to take place. All three terrains work together: behaviors, social structures, and consciousness or worldview. 

An example of changing behaviors might be to take my investments out of banks that invest in the fossil fuel industry and move my investments into local cooperative banks that invest in the community. Or, as another example, a colleague of mine asked why I was giving students links to buy their books from Amazon instead of the local, Black-owned bookstore? Or one of my students did an Interrupting Injustice project for the ethics course, and she removed her small savings from I think it was Wells Fargo Bank, and she moved them into a local bank. 

The next terrain is social structures. And people avoid that because behavior changes are easier, but we can weave engagement in social structural change into our everyday life by working on public policies. So for instance, becoming involved in public policy to build a living wage instead of an unlivable wage, getting our institutions, our universities, our churches to divest from fossil fuels and invest in renewable energies, or supporting community organizing campaigns for economic justice, the poor people’s campaign, or local community organizing efforts. So becoming involved on a regular basis in change in social structures. I think we could even weave that into young people’s lives. It could be a dinnertime activity in a household with kids  talk about the newsletter that we got from the local faith-based public policy advocacy organization about what senators to call next week. I think that it’s really important to begin to practice working towards change on the structural level and recognizing what a difference that makes. Institutional divestment is really starting to hit the fossil fuel industry. Trillions of dollars are being divested from by the World Council of Churches, Lutheran World Federation, etc.

The third terrain is consciousness, which is  learning to think differently. An example for me has been that I was raised to buy things as cheaply as I could get them. “A good buy” meant getting something inexpensively. But a consciousness shift would be to buy things that are made with a low carbon footprint and that are produced without injustice.

You share many stories of people pursuing justice throughout history and around the world. What is one that you find yourself returning to for encouragement or motivation when the quest for a moral economy grows difficult?

I’ll share one from the Global South and one from the Global North. 

I was working with a team of 12 people at the World Council of Churches participating in a United Nations summit. We were seated around the table introducing ourselves to one another and one person said, “I am Bishop Bernardino Mandlate and from Mozambique and I am a debt warrior.” By ’debt warrior,’ he meant he was dedicating his ministry to fighting the international debt that sucks money out of his country and many impoverished nations into banks and economies of the global north.That money could save so many lives if it could stay there for education and healthcare. The fierceness and simplicity of his statement, I’ll never forget. Later, he gave a talk at the UN representing our team and he said, “The food of American children is covered with the blood of African children.” He was talking about the debt. I will never forget that man or that experience because he wasn’t approaching it with despair or defeat. He was a debt warrior and he was going to carry on.

In the U.S., I think about some of the faith-based community organizing projects that I have encountered and worked with. And one is in Detroit, called Grace in Action. One is in Washington, D .C. — the Beloved Community Incubator. These are starting as small efforts of people to to do listening campaigns in communities being devastated by gentrification or other realities of economic injustice. They’re building power within their communities and they’re building small businesses run by immigrants and unemployed people. They’re building such joy and community and power by shaping a different kind of economy.

They have all inspired me. Just one of those groups literally worked together with immigrants living in an apartment building in the most rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in the country at the time — where people are usually kicked out by gentrification —  and organized such that those residents could buy the building rather than being kicked out of it.

How might someone begin to assess their position in economic life and make meaningful, redemptive changes?

I think one way is to put into our minds and hearts a question: What are the long-term consequences of the various dimensions of my economic life? When it comes to what I buy, consume, throw away, and invest, what are the long term consequences? 

That would be a beautiful activity for a congregation or an individual. For example, a congregation or youth group might say, what are the long-term ecological and social impacts of how we practice the Eucharist? And then start to examine what happens. Where does the bread come from? Who grows it? What is the carbon footprint? Is the wheat trucked in from far away? 

I think that’s a first step. And then just to ask ourselves what is happening to neighbors because of what we’re buying, consuming, investing, and throwing away. I’ll give you one little example. I have, in the last year, realized that there is an enormous carbon footprint impact of data production Our data-based, compute-based, iPhone-based economy uses up astounding amounts of fossil fuel energy and water. So that’s a long-term consequence that we need to think about. 

 

This article has been edited for length and clarity. Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage by Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda is available from Fortress Press.