Greed, Creation, and Justice: Bridging Racial and Environmental Inequities

In this enlightening episode, Josh Burtram welcomes David W. Swanson, pastor of New Community Covenant Church and author of Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice. They explore the interconnected nature of racial and environmental injustice, framed through a Christian theological lens. Swanson shares his journey from aspiring outdoor educator to urban pastor, where he discovered the shared root of greed underlying systemic racism and environmental exploitation. Together, they discuss how Christians can reclaim their identity as "priestly caretakers," promoting justice and sustainability within their communities. Packed with thought-provoking insights, this conversation challenges listeners to rethink their roles in fostering flourishing for all of creation.

Buy the Book: "Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice" https://a.co/d/dKUMScs

Guest Bio:
David W. Swanson is the pastor of New Community Covenant Church, a multicultural congregation in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. He also leads New Community Outreach, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing trauma in the community. David speaks nationally on racial justice and reconciliation and has written for outlets such as Christianity Today, The Englewood Review of Books, and The Covenant Companion. His books include the acclaimed Rediscipling the White Church and his latest, Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice. David lives in Chicago with his wife and two sons.

Transcript

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Hi there, faithful politics, viewers and listeners. If you're joining us on our podcast stream, viewers, if you're joining us on YouTube, thanks for being here. And if you are joining us on YouTube, make sure you like and subscribe, hit the notification bell because we try to get you great content that you can take and share and that's thought provoking and challenging. And today's conversation is going to be... all of those things. By the way, my name is Josh Bertram. I am your faithful host. Our political host, Will, cannot be with us today. And so today, though, I am joined by David Swanson. He is the pastor of New Community Covenant Church. It's a multicultural congregation in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. He helps lead new community outreach and nonprofit that collaborates with the community to reduce sources of trauma. And he speaks around the country on topics of racial justice and reconciliation. He has authored another book called Rediscipling the White Church. And he's also written articles for Christianity Today, the Inglewood Review of Books, and the Covenant Companion. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two sons. And it's an absolute honor and privilege to have you. on the show with us today. Thanks so much for joining us, David. You're welcome, Josh. This is a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm super excited. And we're here, of course, to talk about your new book, Plundered. And it's the Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice. Got to make sure I get that right. Fascinating book. I appreciate you writing it. But before we jump into all those details, maybe you could give us a little bit more of a view about who you are, who's David, and what brought you to the place of writing a book. about racial injustice and environmental injustice and how they connect. Why did that happen? How did it happen? Yeah, so I, as a high school student, was really interested in the outdoors. This was in Southern California, go on trips to the Grand Canyon, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park, and sort of imagined making a life of that, of some kind. I did an outdoor education degree at a liberal arts college, did a three month internship working with some churches in Bolivia, doing camp ministry and thought that, this is what I wanna do, this is what I wanna give my life to. Always experienced. God's presence in the outdoors, in nature, in creation, always had a heart for. caring for creation, and then went off to the suburbs of Chicago for graduate school, thinking that my wife and I would be aimed towards something like that, some kind of ministry like that, and within the first semester found ourselves being really redirected by the Holy Spirit to local church ministry, which was a shock to both of us, was not how we imagined our lives. My wife did not think she was marrying a pastor. I certainly didn't imagine that for myself. And after about five years of great ministry in the suburbs of Chicago, we were called to a congregation in the city, a multiracial congregation that was in the process of starting a church on the south side, the church that I now pastor. And so through this surprising series of events, I found myself not doing outdoor ministry, but living in the third largest city in the nation on the south side of that city, the largely African-American section of our city doing urban ministry and loving it and feeling so grateful to get to do that. And given the multiracial nature of our congregation, I spent a lot of time reading and learning and having conversations and making mistakes and having to repent and ask for forgiveness and so on in the process of learning how to pastor this congregation. And yet always in the back of my head, Josh, there was this like, yeah, but you used to really care about the outdoors and you believe God's creation is really important. And so it was a long journey and I'm sure we'll talk more about it, but those two areas of commitment and passion and understanding God's call slowly coming together and understanding that no, these are not two discrete things. There's actually a way that they ought to be held together. Yeah, because it seems like you have, it feels like you have two discrete things, right? And that's how they're treated, right? You have environmental injustice, and sometimes it's not called injustice, it's just environmentalism or some kind of, you know, desire to make sure that we care for the environment, which is awesome. And then you have racism and often they aren't put together. what I and I'm so happy that you just felt like you wanted to tackle two easy topics that like, you know, aren't controversial at all. People are going to, you know, just and especially in the evangelical church, man, people are just going to be completely on board with this. I love that. But all jokes aside, Talk to me. What is the basic thrust for our audience to understand? What's the thrust? What's the what's the argument of the book that you want us to see and understand and start to think critically about? Yeah, I appreciate that question because again, like you said, that's not typically how we thought about these things. It's a pick or choose situation. And so you're right, these can be controversial conversations, but you know, for many Christians, the assumption is this is God's world. God cares about this world. God wants the best for this world. In Jesus, as Athanasius said, God has recreated the world and holds all things together in Christ. And so regardless of some of the maybe more controversial aspects or the way that this can become a partisan conversation, most Christians do want to see God's justice, God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, whether that's in the area of racial reconciliation or creation care. But again, they seem like two separate things. The piece that started to shift for me was understanding the way that the sin of greed kind of animates both of these systemic sins. Hmm. easier to see this or more intuitive perhaps when it comes to environmental issues because we understand that there's a human tendency to take more than we need right we we take some and then we take some more then we take some more we take some more and we leave behind you know strip mining in Appalachia for example or you know terrible legacies of kind of mining for the components that go in our cell phones, you know, that end up mistreating people in other countries, overusing pesticides in some of our agriculture and seeing massive, you know, runoff into the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, not because we've taken enough, but because we've taken more and more and more and more. And so we can see the way that the sin of greed rests behind this. A little bit harder to see how that works with racism because the way we talk about racism is that racism makes us treat people poorly. When in fact, historically, race was developed as a justification for treating people poorly. We've treated people poorly forever. This is what humans do to toot one another. And yet historically, there comes this point that's generally located around European expansion and settlement around the world in which there needed to be a justification for kidnapping people, for enslaving people, for taking people's land. so race becomes this explaining narrative about why it's okay because some people are less human than other people. And this kind of covers that sin of greed, again, as it relates to taking things, taking land, taking people, and so on. And so it was recognizing, as a Christian, this very basic ancient sin of greed and how it animates both of these really overwhelming sinful realities that help me start to put some of the pieces together. Yeah, so how do you structure the argument as you're going through the book? Just kind of give us a basic overview of how you're structuring it and the connections that you're trying to make as you're moving through and bringing greed as this kind of foundational sin. What I'm hearing in its connections and its roots going in almost two different but interconnected directions of racism. and then it's almost like, hey, we're going to just say this is mine, whether it's a person or whether it's a resource. And then we treat people as resources and then we treat resources as if they're endless and don't maybe think about the consequences. How do you structure this argument to bring us to this place of of challenge about this. It was important for me to start not so much with the problem, but with God's vision. And so the first couple of chapters in the book articulate a creation theology. It was important for me as a Christian person to say, what is it that we see in scripture that is God's intention for his world, for his universe? what I find in scripture, particularly in the first couple of chapters of Genesis, is that creation is a gift. It's a gift given to us by a God who is just by nature generous. And so we receive the gift of creation, but also God in his design of creation makes creation a gift to itself, right? So that when I wake up in the morning and take a breath, I'm receiving the gift of fresh air, right? When I take a glass of water, I'm receiving the gift. When I take my walk through the park tomorrow. I received that sustaining gift of being in the outdoors, camaraderie, know, and fellowship and community with other human beings and so on. That gift is woven through creation. And this shouldn't be surprising for Christians because we know that our God is a God of grace and that grace is just woven through the very fabric of creation. So this is this beautiful and to me very compelling vision of God's intention for creation. And then you ask the question, so then what is my role as a human being, as an image bearer of God? What is my role in this creation? And the way I describe it is that we are meant to be priestly caretakers, that we are more than just stewards who manage inanimate objects, but rather we are the only creatures in all of creation who have free will. And what theologians will say is that with that free will we serve a priestly function and that we usher all of creation to worship its creator, right, to our fellow human beings. We point them to God, to worship God, but also we encourage the tree in our neighborhood to be its most tree self, right, to hold down the soil, to release oxygen into the air. We want that tree to be its most tree self. And of course, we could go through other examples. And as that priest, we also express God's love for creation to all. of creation. So there's this kind bi-directional thing that we're doing. We're encouraging worship and we're blessing the creation with love. And we do so as caretakers, as those who understand that not only do we care for our places, for our neighbors, for the creatures we share our neighborhood with, we are also being cared for. We don't exist apart from creation. We are being cared for by it. So it's this kind of loving mutual relationship. And so we have creation as a gift and human beings meant to be these priestly caretakers. And then our hearts break then when we understand the damaging power of sin in creation, in our vocation, particularly as it relates to greed. And so I wanted us to see this beautiful thing, to have our hearts broken over what sin has done, and then to see how in Jesus we are put back together and this vocation gives back to us, to live as priestly caretakers even in a world that is groaning under under sin right now. And so that's what I try to do towards the back end of the book is to cast a vision for what it would look like as communities reclaim that priestly caretaking vocation. I love that. I would love to explore a little bit more the idea of greed. And you know, we've kind of thrown out some, you know, little, little bits and pieces of a definition, but I would love for you to define greed for us and help us understand, help me understand how does greed serve as this root cause. that I'm assuming is even affecting more than just racial injustice and ecological injustice. But you focused on those in the book, so you can keep it to that. But how has this role of greed, like what is it about greed that gives the soil for the weeds of racism and ecological injustice to grow? Yeah, I think one of the ways to think about greed is the opposite of what the apostle Paul writes when he says, I've learned to be content in every situation, whether in plenty or in want. Greed is to never be content. It's to never have enough. It's the cousin of covetousness, right? Where we're always looking just a little bit over the horizon, over our neighbor's fence in our contemporary society, scrolling through our social media feeds, wanting more, and then pursuing that. so covetousness is in the ballpark. with greed, but also theft, taking something that's not ours. Now that can be like literally, you know, against the law stealing, or it can be just in our relationship with others, treating them as less than human, or our relationship with God's creation, treating it as less than a gift from the Creator. And so I talk about the way that greed has manifested in these kind of systemic sins, which which I name as exploitation and extraction. Exploitation being treating people as less than human. Treating people as objects or as, you said it earlier, as resources. We have human resources departments, right? So we engage with people as though they are not quite fully human, as though they exist to fulfill some need, some want, some desire, some covetousness that I have. When that kind of exploitation gets wrapped in race, entire groups of people become... less than human become objectified in a way where I treat them differently than I treat myself. Now most of your listeners and viewers are not going to have a list of people they treat that way, right? For the most part, we don't think about individuals. in that racialized way in our contemporary society. However, we can look at just the black and white data and understand that you can predict far too many outcomes of well-being, of health, of flourishing through the lens of race. can look at mortality and childbirth. You can look at living proximity to toxic waste sites. You can look at access to well-funded public education and so on and make a lot of predictions based on race. And we've made a kind of piece with that that I think can only really be understood and explained through that... through that lens of greed in which we have treated people like resources, exploited people. And then the other word is extraction. Extraction meaning that we are taking more from creation than we need to have enough, than we need to flourish. And the way that our society is often organized is that we often don't need to see those places where we are doing that kind of extraction. Not a lot of people drive through the areas of Appalachia where mountaintops are being, you blown off or where fracking is happening or where rivers are being polluted or topsoil here in the Midwest is being lost at really rapid rates. Those things are mostly kept from us. We don't see the power of extraction. And there's a way in which we just come to assume that that's how the world works, that this is the normal way to treat God's creation is as a resource from which we can extract as much as we want rather than as a gift that we are meant to receive. And so... Behind all of that is that old human sin of greed. It's gotten big and it's gotten woven into complicated systems and so on, but as a Christian, I want to say we have spiritual resources to think about these things. We have spiritual practices that though these realities are overwhelming, allow us to come to them both confidently and repentantly as we think about how might we live differently. Yeah, I really love that. You know, I was thinking, I don't know why I was thinking about this today, but I was so in the county that I live in, if you go to a stoplight, you'll see a sign that says basically a no soliciting allowed. Right. So please don't give money to anyone who's here. And if, you know, instead call this number, we can help, which is, I don't know what to say about that. I don't necessarily like being, you know. if I'm on the way somewhere with my kids and I'm about to get there having someone who's there or maybe knocking on the window or whatever like that's not what I want to make some uncomfortable right in that one sense and then yet at the other hand you know I don't know maybe this is how people make their living so yeah I can see like two sides of this but it it makes me think about you know people I was thinking about drug addicts and I was thinking about people that say we're addicted to heroin or something like that or methamphetamine, something really extreme, something that was just sucking the life out of them. And just thinking about how like, man, like if you're not careful, you can really get into this mindset that they're kind of not people. They're not really people like I am. That's right. That's right. Yeah. When, when, cause I was thinking about, I wonder what, I don't know why I got on this one. I wonder what they, they're thinking about. I wonder how they're viewing themselves. If they're viewing themselves as filled with shame, if they're viewing themselves as I wish I was different, I wish I could, you know, get this job or do whatever, like, and I don't know, I just got on this thing and it, and it makes me start to wonder, thinking about our conversation. how easy it is at times to not view people as fully made in the image of God, which is this crucial Christian and Jewish doctrine, but crucial doctrine that everyone is made in God's image and what that actually gives to them. And then even more being made in God's image, what that means for us in terms of our cosmic responsibility to the world. And I would love to dig into the priestly caretakers a little bit more, like describe that a little bit more for us. What are the responsibilities that are inherent or intrinsic in that role? And then how might this view of ourselves, this vision of ourselves as priestly caretakers challenge our current economic and political structures? Yeah, I appreciate you kind of sharing as well that moment of reflection because I think. I think a society that's been so organized as I think ours has around consumerism doesn't allow for lot of those moments of reflection. We're just kept moving from one thing to the next to the next to the next to the next to the next. And so even having the ability to be prompted to reflect in that kind of way. and to wonder, know, what are the thoughts, the concerns, the worries of that particular neighbor? There's something that has something really important that happens when we have the space to be able to do that kind of thing. Yeah, this language of priestly caretaking has become very important to me. I worry that... that contemporary Christians, we've whittled our vocation down to make it very small. As Western people, we tend to be a little bit more individualistic, which nothing wrong with that. That's just kind of the culture and the air that we breathe. But scripture, as we know, has a communal assumption behind it. It has a, know, peace is not simply an individual inner peace. It's shalom. It's connected with God, with ourselves, with creation, with our neighbors and so on, right? It's this kind of big and beautiful vision. And so the priestly caretaker fits in that for me. It's a person who understands that created in the image of God, we have a particular obligation in this life. We are free, but our freedom is a freedom for, it's a freedom for worship, it's a freedom for care, it's a freedom that everyone and everything around us would flourish. Wendell Berry, the agrarian author, he somewhere writes that it's God's intention that wherever his people are, the place is better off because of their presence. I think that's the priestly caretaking vision. So for example, I think about like the watershed that I'm in right now. That watershed is meant to be healthier, is meant to be cleaner because Christians who understand their vocation live in that watershed because that's the watershed worshiping. It's being its full watershed self, right? Rather than dumping toxins and pollutants and kind of abusing it and so on. And so I think when we start to develop a vision for that, all sorts of creativity begins to open up, all sorts of possibility for lives of genuine meaning. and purpose and risk that I think we were made for start to open up cracking us out of this very small kind of consumerist mindset that this world is mostly for me to take what I can from it and kind of protect myself in it and make my way through it to something that is far more interesting, far more beautiful and risky, requiring courage, pushing us out of our comfort zones and so on, but also ultimately far better for our neighbors, for the communities that we're a part of. The Christians are meant to be known for the people who, whether you share our beliefs or not, our presence invites the entire community to be more of itself as God intended it to be. Now I think this has to happen together, Josh. I don't think we can just do this on our own. I'm a pastor for a reason. I do think God's intention is for His people to worship and live this out together. I think it's very hard to be a priestly caretaker on your own. You need other priestly caretakers around you helping you to see that vision, to lean into that together, to worship God in such a way that our hearts are inspired, that we repent together away from those things that have pulled us in other sinful directions. So my hope is that there will be communities of people who would read this book and say, we want to do this together. Yeah, that's really cool. I love that idea. You know, something that I was thinking about, and I'll give you a little bit of context. So I did some work and internship in Toledo when I was in college and I was... staying at a house, a host family, and they had a good amount of a nice plot of land and it was really, really pretty. And I remember going with them one time to a friend's house and the guy reaches down and he pulls a carrot out of the ground. He wipes it off and he starts eating it. And I had this like reaction. Number one, it didn't come in a nice plastic, know, cellophane, you know, wrapped and whatever foam on the bottom. It didn't come in a bag. So how did I know it was clean? How did I know it was in this like this mindset that, oh man, it has to be processed. It has to go through several layers. Like you said, you mentioned unseen layers. before it hits us and we only ever hit these things we consume which are all from the earth and from the animals in the earth in a certain way. We're not at the butcher, right? Normally. We're not, you know, at the slaughterhouse. All right. I don't know if they're called that these days, but we're not there, you know, or even thinking about the idea of getting milk from a cow and you see it and you're like disgusted by it. And yet that's exactly what we're drinking. But then it's put through a process. And again, I'm not an expert on any of that, but but one of the themes in your book is this idea, right, of our detachment from from were severed from place, right? I think that's what the chapter is called. This detachment from land and place. How has this contributed to our current situation of extraction and exploitation? And maybe what kind of things might we do to kind of bring ourselves back into connection with the land? I sometimes think about my grandparents or great grandparents or their parents and I think that our way of life, the things that you just described, like milk from a cow, or needing to butcher your own meat, for example, or pulling a carrot up from the ground, things that for most of human history our ancestors would have just taken for granted, you know? knowing the seasons when something ought to be planted, knowing the land enough to know that it can sustain this kind of crop and not that kind of crop, knowing your neighbors generationally, right, because you needed your neighbors, you depended on your neighbors. For most of human history, these are the kinds of, I don't mean to glorify it or, you know, there's all kinds of difficult things about that, but... But this is the way that you lived in a kind of affectionate attachment to your place. You understood in that caretaking sense that this place was taking care of you even as you cared for it. That is not the case for most contemporary people. Certainly there are still... agricultural people and rural people, but most of us, we do live in that kind of detached sense from God's creation. I try to tell the story in the book about the power of racial exploitation and environmental extraction and that one of the things that these forces of greed do is to sever us from place, is to sever our rootedness in a particular place. And so some people are forced to move from one place to the next, they're forcibly displaced, others choose to move from one place to the next, to the point where I would say in our society here in this country, it's just kind of assumed that you don't stay put, that you move from this place to that place. And honestly, they all got a Starbucks and a Target, so you're fine, right? And so we lose the wisdom that gets passed down. We lose the knowledge about... the intricacies of this place and why this place is different than that place and why it needs different kind of care, why it can care for us in different sorts of ways and so on. I think this has created a deep crisis for many of us that we're not even aware of because we're looking for attachment without actually being attached to the ground that we're walking on. We're looking for meaning without actually understanding what it means to live in this part of God's creation and to care for this part and these neighbors that live in this particular place. And so I think this is one of the invitations for us as we begin to reclaim that priestly caretaking vocation. we start to see more importance and meaning in the place that we find ourselves and we realize, I'm not here accidentally. And even if I don't know that I'm gonna live here forever, I'm gonna live as though I'm going to live here forever. I'm gonna care about this place as though I'm gonna be buried in this place. I'm gonna raise my children as though their children are gonna live in this place. Is that gonna happen? We don't know, it's not in our control, but we're gonna live in this kind of way so that we start to redevelop this priestly caretaking affection and love and commitment to this place. And as we do that... My conviction is that we start undermining the power of that sin of greed that is manifested in such powerful systems. Because now we're not living as consumers. We're not living as exploiters or extractors. We're living more harmoniously with our places such that, well, maybe I'm not going to take all of that because I don't need all of that. And it won't actually be good for the place that I've come to love. And this group of people who I used to only see through the lens of race. I now start to see differently because we've developed these friendships, these relationships. We show up at the same town hall meetings because we both care about the school board, for example, or whatever the case might be. As Christians, we have additional resources to think about our place within the body of Christ as we start to address some of these things. But as that severing starts to get healed, as we start to feel our feet walking on the ground again, We start noticing the seasons changing, the migration patterns of the birds coming through, the people who have made up this place over generations. There's some deep, deep healing that starts to happen for God's people, I believe. Man, that's really, really powerful. You know, it makes me think of, again, this cosmic responsibility that God gives people. And I'm just going to read from Genesis 1, just for the sake of people in our audience that have maybe never read it, never even maybe heard of it. It's right after Yahweh or Elohim makes mankind in his image and makes them male and female in his image. And then he says, God bless them and said to them, be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. And then he talks about giving seed-burning plants for food. and this idea of creating and then that theme is brought out again in Genesis 2, where he makes forms mankind out of the land, like literally forms this physical part of us out of the physical and then breathes in the spiritual, this life into us. And, you know, I'm thinking about this like, so it seems to me that we are in a place of being able to fulfill that command in a way unlike we've ever been able to in the history of humankind. Literally the amount of technology, the things that we've created, AI, the ways in which we're moving forward, we could actually begin to, we're trying to... help endangered species, again, we've endangered and then, you know, like we're, but this level of control, this ability to destroy and this ability to create is at an unprecedented level. And it seems like there's a lot of power that's concentrated in a few hands when it comes to a lot of this, right? Cause normal people, right? You know, we, we can make a garden, but my garden is pretty pretty bad. It doesn't have much in it. It's like a little plot next to my house. I can't survive off that. Right. So unless I go so my all my stuff go try to live homestead homesteading or whatever and do it all myself and I don't really have a desire for that. And I'm not I don't think you do either. You're living in Chicago. I mean not that you wouldn't love that kind of thing at some level but I'm just saying like No, that's right. sense of calling, I would love for you to make, make the case for us that God wants us to take care of this world. I mean, we say we should take care of creation, but make, make the case for us, make the case. You can reference your book, of course, and talk about the places where you're, where you're making that case, but make the case for us that God really wants us to create, to love and value His creation because we're at this place where we have unprecedented power of good and ill. And knowing what God thinks about this is really important. And for those who are Christians and Orthodox Jews, they would look and they'd say, the Scriptures, the Old Testament, Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. would look and say, is where we want to find our instruction about this. But for someone who might be ignorant, they'd never really talked about it or they haven't really thought about it, Christian or not, what's the case? Even maybe this, make the case to someone who doesn't know anything about the Bible. What does the Christian God say about creation? Yeah, and I appreciate you starting that off in our modern moment, which is, like you say, it's fraught, right, with great destruction and possibility as well. I tend to be on the more pessimistic side about human nature and whether we will use our power for good or ill. That may just be some of my personality or my theology, I don't know. And so the vision that I try to cast in the book is not one of kind of a techno-optimism that we will finally reach a place where we'll use our technology and everything will be okay. That's not the human track record, you know? And so to the non-Christian person, I would say that's actually a pretty important part of the story for me, is that I don't trust the human personality to get this right. And I think history backs us up on this. This is for me why there's a central chapter in this book on the person of Jesus, on the incarnation of Jesus. The Christian story is one in which the same God who breathed the universe into existence takes on human flesh in order to, through his life, his death, and his resurrection, recreate his creation. The one who through whom the universe was spoken and breathed into existence takes on our frail, fragile, vulnerable human flesh, takes onto himself all of our sin, including the sins of greed, covetousness, theft, exploitation, extract, takes on all of our sin and puts it to death. And as Athanasius says, recreates the entire universe. And this is what allows me to say on the one hand, I don't trust that humans in our own capacity are gonna find a way to fix what we're up against. And I'm profoundly hopeful about what God has already accomplished in the person and work of Jesus and in how that work changes the human heart. such that we can say yes to that priestly caretaking vocation. We can walk away from the other stories that say you're mostly a consumer. You have to be, you just have to put up with the status quo, which is abusing so many people and abusing the creation itself because you're mostly a consumer. You're mostly a resource. Your vision for the good life has to be whittled down to just what you can buy, what you can possess. I want say no, Jesus has recreated the universe. and has invited us by placing our faith in him to be recreated in such a way that we can live this kind of life that God intended for us from the very, very beginning. That life is one in which all of creation flourishes because of our presence. That might mean some of us need to be more advocate-like, activist-like. Maybe a few of us need to go have a little farmstead somewhere. But the vast majority of us Josh your garden's bigger than mine. You know we got a few tomato plants you know. But Jesus says that his kingdom comes like mustard seeds and like yeast. And so the wrong approach is to say so I have to go conquer the world. I have to go save the world. No no. We pay attention to where we are, to where God is moving right where we are, and we... We join our lives in with him in that place. The vast majority of human people right now live in urban settings in cities. So this vision of priestly caretaking has to include all of those people as well. Right where you are, what does it look like to begin living a life not just of your own fulfillment but for the flourishing of all of creation? So I come back to what Barry said. This is think the Christian vision. Wherever God's people are that whole place is meant to flourish to its full potential. I think that's a vision worth giving your life to. And I think once you understand that Jesus makes that life possible, I don't know how you can not take the person of Jesus very, very seriously. I really like that. Let me offer a challenge. And I'm just thinking, and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to put myself in the mind maybe of someone who might hear this and say, like, isn't it all these Christians that are, they don't believe in climate change. They don't believe... like or God's going to make the earth again or this earth's going to be destroyed in fire. And so there's some big judgment that's going to happen and God's just basically going to remake it. And so why should they care? Like someone might hear this and say, well, isn't it Christians who are some of the worst perpetrators of these kind of of injustices both towards people of color? yeah, yeah. justifications of slavery. And of course we've talked on the show quite a bit about that. And there are two sides of that. There are Christians that opposed it and Christians that wanted it and try to justify it. But when they say it's been... perpetuated by Christians and this Christian vision, we have that and we need to move on from that. need a vision that says no action has to be done now or this is the only planet that we know of that sustains life and this is it. So we have to do it now instead of this reliance on God. Now I'm super sympathetic to what Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. love Jesus and I've been very vocal about that. It doesn't surprise any of our listeners. You know, that's where I'm at. And I do think that God is going to, my belief is in this faith, not only a resurrected body, but a recreated earth. in which we're here. what would be your response? You're having coffee with someone. They read your book. They're talking about this. They're like, I love this idea, but it doesn't seem like it's happening in practice. How would you work through that conversation with them? I'd be very sympathetic because in a very real and troubling way, they're not wrong. Christians have often throughout history allied ourselves with the powers of coercion, of greed, of theft. And I tell that story, I think, very honestly in the book about the way that different parts of the Christian church justified. the slave trade, for example, justify the theft of land. I actually think that's a very Christian thing to do. Christians are a confessional people. We are a repentant people. We are a people who don't have to trust in our own self-righteousness. So we don't actually have to hide the ugly, heartbreaking parts of our story to say that, Christians have been complicit. in the destruction of creation, in the oppression of other people is a very Christian thing to say because we confess our sin and we are not afraid to confess our sin. We don't have to justify ourselves. And so I want to own that. I never want to sweep that under the rug and I want to say that's just what Christians do. We confess our sin. And I don't need to say, and there were some good Christians who, yes, of course, absolutely. know those, Josh, you and I know those. We can tell those stories. We're inspired by those stories. But we also don't need to do that for the sake of the logic of Christianity because the logic of Christianity rests in the grace of Jesus Christ alone, right? So that would be one piece. I'd want to listen very sympathetically and I'd want to say, yep, yep, yep. And you know what? I can add some more stories to the examples that you're giving. On one hand, you could say a part of this is that sometimes as Christians, our theology takes us in unhelpful directions. You build a theology around everything will burn up. Well, that's going to take you in certain directions rather than a vision of the kind of recreated cosmos, right, that you just described, which takes you in a very different direction. But the reason I did want to talk about sin a lot in this book is because I think that's actually a big part of it. Christians that yes our theology matters, yes our biblical interpretation matters, absolutely, but what makes Christians unique is our willingness to confess our sin and to understand something like racism through the lens of sin allows us then to come to these things repentantly because Christians say, we sin, we're very clear about that, we need a Savior, we cannot rescue ourselves. And so where think Christians can get in trouble is when we set aside our spiritual resources that we have, our spiritual language that we have, our biblical resources that we have, and try to come at these things through maybe a partisan or ideological lens. We need the tools of history and sociology and anthropology to understand some of these things. But at the end of the day, as Christians, we can say, and we also sin. And as we can confess that sin, some really amazing possibilities start to bubble up about how we might live differently. So I think that, Josh, I think that's what I'd want to do. Say, want to be sympathetic. Yep, absolutely. And it's a very Christian thing for us to talk about that stuff honestly. And then to say, so what then happens as we start to confess together? What possibilities start to? I really like that. You know, how do you I just want to ask for kind of unfiltered opinion. You know, we've had people say all sorts of things on this podcast. So no filter necessary except the filter you want to have for the people who might be listening. We've had some of the podcasts have had to be explicit because our guests use colorful language. But. How do you feel like the church has done with this confession of sin part with racial injustice and with ecological injustice in this great? How have we done in Europe? How are we doing even now? I think we make two different mistakes and it kind of depends on what sort of church you're in. One mistake I see us make is refusing to confess, right? Refusing to acknowledge this stuff as sin. So we just know this is just partisan stuff, this is political stuff, this is ideological stuff. Climate change isn't real, systemic racism isn't real, so we don't even need to think about it. That's a massive mistake. it props up a vision of humanity that's far better than we actually are. I'm no, of course we are sinful people. So that's a mistake. The other mistake that I see us making is churches that only talk about the ways in which we have failed without then applying the grace of the gospel. to those sinful failures. So these churches are going to be great at saying, yeah, the church has been complicit here and complicit here, and we've messed up here, and we've been behind this injustice and this wickedness and so on. But there's very little then application of the grace of the gospel to that that would allow us to live in a more faithful kind of way. So what I want to see is that quick admission of where we have messed up, of where we have sinned. But I also want to hear that gospel confession that is so powerful, right? That it allows the confession, but it doesn't allow you to stay in that place because my goodness, there's really good work to be done, right? There are neighbors who need to be loved. There's watersheds that need to be cleaned up. There's injustices that need to be confronted. There's children that need to be mentored. And so we're not going to be a people who get so overwhelmed by our sins that the gospel can't actually transform us and send us into the world as those caretaking priests. So that's the balance that I'm hoping we can find. Yeah, I really like that. what would you, how would you respond to the skeptic who's like, hey, I don't really think that, I don't really think that, you know, that like, I don't really believe in climate change. I don't really believe, like I think it's an ideological thing from the left. I think that, you know, it's something that's being pushed down our throats. How would you respond to someone who's kind of in that kind of camp, who's seen this, maybe they've read it and they've seen some of the things that you've pointed out. in areas where you've shown that this is happening, this extraction exploitation, but they are skeptical. What would your kind of response to them be? Yeah, I mean, that's a reality. We are living in a very polarized moment. And so I, again, want to be sympathetic to that person as well. If we can find common ground on our shared vocation, if we can say, you know what, we are priestly caretakers, you know, as Christian people, we can say that, we can find that really easily in Scripture, then I don't mean to be flippant, but I almost don't really care if you believe that climate change is real or not. Instead, the conversation I want to have is, so in your particular area, which you know way better than I do, what does it look like to be a priestly caretaker there? We don't need to maybe spend our time debating climate change. Tell me about what you love about your place. Tell me about how your place fires your imagination. Tell me about what breaks your heart about your place when you read certain news stories or you drive by a certain area and you see how the hillside has been completely stripped of its vegetation and is crumbling away or maybe you're a sportsman, you're a hunter and you've noticed the impact of over-agriculture, over-grazing the fields or whatnot. Like tell me about about what breaks your heart about your place and let's dream together about what it would look like to to care for that place to rally some fellow priestly caretakers to to stand with those neighbors to Make that plot of land more healthy or so on Maybe at some point you'll get around the climate change. Maybe not but regardless we can turn down the volume on the polarizing rhetoric that so often distracts us from the feet on the ground stuff that we could be doing right now. And it's one of my favorite things is talking to people about their places, because I don't know their place, but they do. And you get them talking about the favorite thing. Man, it's just so inspiring, right? To hear the stories, to hear what they love about it. And you go, okay, so what if you lean into that stuff together? What might God do? I really love that because it's like you're localizing it, right? Because it's almost like, and again, like this is what so many shows try to do. I so, I love the nature shows. I love the shows, you know, that talk about the beauty of nature. And then they inevitably bring this, hey, and all these places are dying and all these, and it's so sad. And it's so terrible. sometimes they're like, hey, you can find out more here, this website, or you can donate here. Mm-hmm. it's like, it's almost like you give them this heartbreaking thing and then there's not really a solution that they can do. And again, I'm not saying that it's an easy solution. And I think we do need to have these, you need to expose people. Cause what you're essentially doing right is you're taking something that's very far away and you're bringing it local. You're bringing it into their living rooms. You're bringing it in front of their eyes. And when we localize something, like I want to be able to go and enjoy the James River. I want to be able to go and be in this national forest. I want to be able to do these things. I don't want these to be gone. That creates this immediacy. Yeah. that's so important. And I really love that. I think that's a great part of the solution. so we don't have a lot of time left and you give some solutions at the end of the book or some ideas of ways that we can become, as you put, becoming naturalized. You talk about nurturing belonging, nurturing Sabbath, nurturing virtue. Kind of just give us a sense If you can, can pick one of those if you like, or the one that was your favorite to write or that spoke most to you while you writing. But what are some solutions that someone like me, someone like the people in my church, that they could do to get themselves more connected with this issue and feel like they're taking some, doing what they can do to be a part of the solution instead of the problem? Yeah, so if one of the impacts of extraction and exploitation is to sever us from place, thus leaving us very vulnerable to these systemic sins of racism and environmental destruction, then the vision, as I understand it, is to become naturalized to our places. We've been severed from our places. How do we become naturalized to our places? And here I'm directly borrowing from some indigenous friends and indigenous theologians who will say things like, people having come to this continent have never made it their home. We've just been too busy, too moving, too distracted to actually make a place our home. And so the invitation that I've heard from some of these friends is, know, what would it look like for you to actually become naturalized to make this your home? And so I believe that if we were to do that and to do that in worshiping communities together, would be some of that healing of the severing that has happened would take place and we'd be much in a much better position to resist these sins of greed that have done so much damage. And so those last three chapters, as you've mentioned, are my attempt of saying here's some ways I think we could do that. nurturing belonging to our place and different ways we can do that, nurturing Sabbath rhythms. I think Sabbath is far more than just taking an occasional day off. I think God has woven the rhythms of Sabbath rest into the creation and we're meant to experience those and enjoy those ourselves. And then the last one, maybe say a little bit more here, is nurturing virtue. Too often as I talk with Christians like myself who care about justice, we really are thinking about problems out there that need to be solved. You know, this manifestation of racism or this environmental destruction that's happening. You mentioned there's other concerns as well around the world. And that's right, but a Christian vision is always gonna include ourselves as well. It's always gonna include that we need to be put back together. We need to be healed. We need to be reconciled. We need to be restored. We're not the savior. There is only one savior. And so one of the ways that we can include ourselves in this vision of restoration is to nurture virtue in our lives. Christians have talked about this for a very long time, the theological and the cardinal virtues of ways of saying, who is it that we are becoming? you know, in Jesus as we have been recreated, who are we becoming? And so by identifying these virtues and applying them specifically to being naturalized to our places is my attempt to say, actually, this vision is so good, it includes you too. It's not just for something out there, it's for our own wellbeing and for the good of our own hearts as well. not to over-quote him, Wendell Berry says it's a mistake to think that we can kind of just tinker around the edges of the institutional machinery and actually make a difference. He says the problem is with our own hearts as well. That's what needs to be renewed. And so yes, the vision is holistic and we need to think big picture, but if we're not including the renovation of our own hearts, Well, we're not going to be successful for one and we're missing out on something really, really good and beautiful as well. So that nurturing virtue is hopefully a way of saying this is going to be really good for you too. That's really well said. I appreciate that a lot. How can people follow your work and how can they, you know, get in touch, see what you're doing, continue this conversation? Yeah, I keep a pretty simple website, dwswanson.com, dwswanson.com, and that has social media links, and I send out a e-newsletter every couple of weeks or so that folks can subscribe to there. So yeah, it'd be great to stay in touch. That's awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for coming on the program. It's been a real pleasure to have you and have this conversation. Very enlightening and challenging for me. I really appreciated it. Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me, Josh. Appreciate what you're doing. Yes, thank you so much. And to our audience again, this has been David W. Swanson. We want you to pick up his book Plundered, The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice. We'll put a link to that. That's through InterVarsity Press, by the way. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. And again, guys, we try to bring you good, great content that's thought provoking, helping you applicable to your life, giving you things to talk about, think about, pray about, wonder about, dream about. And so please share this with someone that you think might need it. Thanks again for sticking with us to the end of this conversation. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. Take care.