Robert H. Nelson's new book is engaging, provocative, and occasionally vexing. The basic message is that economics and environmentalism have emerged as oppositional “secular religions” in modern-day America—secular religions that owe a deep debt to, and now compete with, a set of American Christian traditions. Throughout the book, Nelson works to uncover and articulate underlying religious (read “Christian”) themes in American economic and environmental systems of thought. He does this on the assumption that greater intellectual coherence and maturity of policy will result from a deeper understanding of these secular religions' largely Christian roots. Rich historical analysis is offered in support of this notion. Some of the implications of this analysis, though, are set forth in a less convincing fashion, particularly on the environmental side.
The book is presented in four parts. In the first, Nelson offers a theological reading of mainstream American economics. This is an area in which he has a long record of scholarship. As such, this section can be read as a clear and useful summation of an already impressive body of work. The second part is titled “Environmental Calvinism,” and shows in a variety of ways that mainstream American environmentalism has deeply Puritan roots. Part III, “Environmental Creationism,” offers a sustained critique of mainstream environmentalist conceptions of nature and its protection, including a meditation on the theological implications of attempting to, as the author puts it, “re-create the creation” (p. 169). The final part, “Libertarian Environmentalism,” attempts a synthetic treatment of what he views as complementary Calvinist strands of economic and environmental thought.
To describe economics and environmentalism as “secular religions” certainly opens the way to a layered reading of these intellectual and political traditions. Nelson weaves together three rich layers throughout the book, to varying effect. The first layer is sociological. By suggesting that mainstream economics and environmentalism are replete with all of the trappings of religious orders, he is then able to employ the tools of theological analysis to interrogate the assumptions, narratives, and practices that sustain these traditions.
In developing a sociological reading of economics, Nelson treads familiar ground by arguing that mainstream economics is far from a hard, value-neutral science. Rather, it is a system of thought premised on an inadequately substantiated faith in material growth and the rightness of efficiency. Upon this faith an entire economic theology has been constructed. It is a religion that posits that “sin in the world has material sources” (p. 4), and that points the way to a new “heaven on earth” (p. 24) through the ultimate eradication of material scarcity and deprivation. This, though, is by the author's reckoning a fraught endeavor. The book is worth examining for Chapter 4 alone, in which he sets out in careful detail the contours, and what he sees as the multiple shortcomings, of this quasi-religious “economic way of thinking” (p. 70). American economics has become, in Nelson's rendering, the domain of a cloistered set of priestly practitioners. These “true believers” (p. 340) clutch at their belief system despite overwhelming evidence of the great environmental and social harm that can come from slavish adherence to narrow economic precepts.
Environmentalism receives parallel treatment. Nelson pays particular attention to the problematic notion of “nature” within mainstream American environmental thought—a concept that, he suggests, plays much the same role as “growth” and “efficiency” in the economic religion. He catches environmental theology, he says, “in a self-contradiction” (p. 127). On the one hand, environmentalism looks to nature for “values and spiritual sustenance,” yet the core environmental message is that humanity should limit its actions in ways “found nowhere else in nature” (p. 127). Nelson writes on occasion as though he is discovering entirely new grounds for criticism, despite the fact that problematizing and seeking to make sense of nature has been part of the intellectual debate in environmental circles for many decades. Still, again, his sociological analysis on this front is relatively straightforward.
The second sense in which economics and environmentalism can be read as modern religions is a more overtly historical one. Economic and environmental thought are not just religious in a metaphorical or sociological sense; rather, Nelson claims, they offer “securalizations … of core messages of Christianity” (p. 21). By this, he means that these modern-day secular religions take their core messages straight from older Christian sources.
Much of the book is based around short studies of the works of leading figures within the American economic tradition, on the one hand, and the American environmental movement, on the other. It is a straightforward thing to show that the leading lights in what is now thought of as mainstream neoclassical economics all wrote with religious zeal. Nelson goes further, though, to show how key authors invariably drew on Christian tropes and traditions in their work. Tellingly, he notes that of the 50 founding members of the American Economic Association, 20 were former or then-practicing ministers. He traces how these Christian beginnings gave rise to a “hidden theology” (p. 24) that has animated economic thought to the present day. This gives great resonance to his claim that economics is based on deep value propositions, and provides clues as to their origin.
On the environmental side, Nelson shows that early American environmentalists were themselves deeply rooted in Calvinist thought. Environmentalist messages to the present day often read like parables of human imperfection and original sin, the necessity for self-restraint, a moral urgency that informs social activism, and spiritual or godly connection to the nonhuman world. All, he shows, are core Puritan concepts. These religious roots present challenges for a system of thought that, much like economics, purports to be scientific. In Chapter 8, for example, entitled “Environmental Science as a Creation Story,” he argues that much of the field of ecology is a Christian metaphor about apocalypse and redemption masquerading as science.
The third and final way in which Nelson employs the “economics and environmentalism as religion” idea is a little more difficult to unpack. He seems to assert in a number of places not only that environmentalism is, in this case, informed by Christian tradition but also that environmentalism can find coherence as a belief system only if it is animated by a Christian God—that it becomes “literally Christian” (p. 130).
In fact, Nelson already sees this literal Christianity within much environmental thought. One way he hints at this is by implying that many important environmentalists are really just closeted Christians, struggling to express themselves in a field that mistakenly, by his reckoning, views itself as scientific. In writing about famed biologist E. O. Wilson (a self-professed “secular humanist”), for instance, Nelson suggests that Wilson “may in fact be a Christian believer who … finds it impossible to express his Christian understandings in the traditional biblical language” (p. 211). More broadly, the author contends that whenever environmentalists say that certain actions should be taken for the good of “the planet,” the only coherent way to understand this is that “[environmentalists] are talking about submitting to God” (p. 128).
Exactly what Nelson means by such statements is unclear. In them, he appears to deny that there can be moral systems of thought grounded in something apart from the Christian tradition. This would strike many environmentalists as a deeply troubling proposition. One alternative way to read Wilson's work is that he has spent his career arguing for the importance of protection of the planet's biodiversity even in the absence of God. He may not be a closeted Christian, this is to say, but rather someone content to make moral assertions even in a world in which such claims have no final nonhuman arbiter. Modern-day systems of morality have a history, but are also shaped by the all-too-human battles over right and wrong action taking place today. The struggle between economic and environmental religions will surely continue, but whether such a battle can be meaningfully resolved only by assigning ultimate authority to God is a question that remains open in The New Holy Wars.
