Religious Agrarianism and the Return of Place

From Values to Practice in Sustainable Agriculture

Todd LeVasseur

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438467740
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion et sciences

Gold Medalist, 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Religion Category
Finalist for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Religion category Writing at the interface of religion and nature theory, US religious history, and environmental ethics, Todd LeVasseur presents the case for the emergence of a nascent "religious agrarianism" within certain subsets of Judaism and Christianity in the United States. Adherents of this movement, who share an environmental concern about the modern industrial food economy and a religiously grounded commitment to the values of locality, health, and justice, are creating new models for sustainable agrarian lifeways and practices. LeVasseur explores this greening of US religion through an extensive engagement with the scholarly literature on lived religion, network theory, and grounded theory, as well as through ethnographic case studies of two intentional communities at the vanguard of this movement: Koinonia Farm, an ecumenical Christian lay monastic community, and Hazon, a progressive Jewish environmental group.

CHAPTER ONE

SUSTAINABLE RELIGION, SUSTAINABLE ETHICS?

TAKING STOCK: WHY THIS PROJECT?

In this book, I investigate an emerging North American (specifically US) religious agrarianism. I argue that a growing number of religious communities in the United States (with hemispheric and global interconnections1) embody many contemporary ecological agrarian practices and values. Three constellations of such values and practices create the foundation on which religious agrarianism is built. These are fidelity to the local; concern for health, including physical, religious/spiritual, societal, economic, and ecological metrics of health; and a deep concern for justice. Although I devote considerable attention to two religious communities—Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, and Hazon, a predominantly national Jewish food group with statewide chapters, including in Atlanta, Georgia, and Gainesville, Florida—where I carried out the majority of my ethnographic research, the trends I discovered in these groups are also found in other religious communities. Given many years participating in and studying alternative food movements, I am confident in predicting that these trends suggest that religious agrarian values are becoming more nuanced and sophisticated. Such development over the past twenty years is leading to exciting new food-based practices in religious communities where such practices are concerned with local places, various types of health, and an abiding concern for justice.

Although other fields of inquiry have either historically or more recently begun to devote sustained attention to the study of agriculture and food, and despite a historic interaction between religion and agriculture, the professional field of religious studies has been slow to come to the table. The result of this foot dragging is that theoretically, the intersection of agrarian and religious beliefs and teachings, coupled with the interaction of their respective values and practices, is an understudied phenomenon of a slowly greening US religious landscape.2 In this book I take as my starting point this interaction and intersection. This dual focus on agrarianism and religion shapes the following pages, where I analyze and investigate how ecological/environmental agrarianism is combining with and influencing religious beliefs and practices to create an emergent North American religious agrarianism.

RELIGION, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND THE UNITED STATES

Some elements of religions, and especially some religious groups, are undergoing and generating what some scholars call an “ecological reformation.” From attending global meetings about climate destabilization to changing to more efficient, eco-friendly light bulbs in places of worship and practice, practitioners of religion are rapidly becoming involved in sustainability initiatives and projects. Such growth appears to be more than a fad and is generated both horizontally from the margins of religions and vertically via institutional creeds and executive decisions. Evidence suggests that there has been tremendous growth in some subsets of various religions in cultivating environmental concern. Much of this growth has occurred over the past ten to fifteen years, as seen for example in June 2015 when Pope Francis released an encyclical about anthropogenic climate change.3

Given these recent phenomena, an increasing number of scholars claim that the future landscape of religion will be more decidedly “green.” Within this “greening,” much is being shaped by post-Darwinian insights about evolution as well as by taking seriously findings from natural and environmental sciences (Taylor 2004).4

Such activity has prompted one religious scholar to opine, “No understanding of the environment is adequate without a grasp of the religious life that constitutes the human societies which saturate the natural environment” (Sullivan 2000: xiii). Although partly an essentialist normative claim, this scholar, like many others, recognizes the role “religious life” plays in the natural environment within which humans are embedded.5 Because humans are embedded with both religion and with metabolizing bodies that need calories to survive,6 how we grow, harvest, and consume such calories becomes an activity that takes on religious overtones and religious attributes of its own. It is also an activity that can be influenced by religious beliefs, customs, and practices. Therefore, the role of farming, specifically the worldviews behind agricultural technologies and types of farming methods, becomes a topic about which religious environmentalist values, beliefs, and practices are inherently concerned. Religious agrarianism is partly found within this nexus of sustainable food production and religious environmentalism where concerns about the local, health, and justice figure prominently from local to global levels.

As a scholar I accept the growing consensus that future religions (including those in the United States) will most likely be greener, and I couple this acceptance with the recognition that to understand our environments, we must understand our religions. Given that the most recent and emergent US version of agrarianism is largely about the human relationship and interaction with the environment, it is important to understand what religious attributes, emotions, norms, and values attend to this relationship. It is also important to investigate if and how these religious attributes are green, and how these green attributes might be contributing to a larger greening of US religions. It is also important to analyze if and how religious agrarian beliefs and practices are influencing the beliefs and practices of more mainstream religions in the United States.

What is at stake with how we grow, transport, and consume our food? If we as a species are united by the evolutionary dictate of needing calories and living within the laws of thermodynamics, and if we care about issues like justice, equality, biological carrying capacity, climate change, and social power, then with food, everything is at stake. But this daunting list doesn’t entirely capture what is at stake. Given tipping points triggered by fossil fuel–based lifestyles, within which industrial agriculture is playing an overly determinant role in anthropogenic climate change and species-wide patterns of land use, our very survival as a species (let alone almost all the others) is now, sadly and scarily enough, at stake.7 Throw in the tinderbox of failed states, climate refugees, peak oil, epidemics, ocean acidification, nitrogen deposition, and mass starvation and the stakes only get more pronounced. Unfortunately, this is a very real scenario for the immediate future, not to mention decades from now for our children.

I repeat, with this refrain framing my exploration in this book: what is at stake? Everything. These stakes must be recognized in our scholarship and our writing, regardless of field of study.

Since everything is at stake, it is imperative for us as scholars and embedded biosocial creatures to understand what motivates people to produce and consume foods in certain ways. This holds for unsustainable and unjust methods of food production, but also especially for methods of production that can lead to both biological and cultural resilience. The stakes get more dire and important as we enter deeper into the Anthropocene age, or what Paul Gilding calls “the great disruption” (2011). Data from the present and as we look outward a few decades suggest we will pass sobering tipping points, with most caused by human lifestyle choices, where agricultural choices play an overdetermining factor. Such tipping points range from global concentrations of atmospheric gases to the continued loss of soil fertility to decreasing supplies of fresh water to peak oil. All of this and much more will affect the global art of agriculture—and thus the production of religion.8

Yet if agriculture is global, why focus on the United States? This is because from the standpoints of biological materialism and the quest for sustainability, the United States currently has about 5 percent of the world’s total population of humans, yet as a country consumes 25 percent of the planet’s total resources.9 From the perspectives of environmental justice and the need for humans as biological organismsto live within sustainable limits, this is clearly a problematic figure. The political, moral, and ecological implications suggest that US citizens have a profound duty to ameliorate such discrepancies.10 In claiming this, I must be cautious of engaging in neocolonialist discourses of ecology, so we must clearly recognize that the imperial eco-footprint of the contemporary United States and its unique history of environmental movements is embedded within and constructed by issues of power, justice, complexity, and essentialism (Roos and Hunt 2010; DeLoughrey and Handley 2011).11 Such baggage may also accrue to narratives about sustainable agriculture and religion in a US context, and this reality must be remembered when talking about issues of food and cultural fluidity.

That said, there is an equally articulate, sustained, and active history and contemporary environmental movement, or rather movements, within the United States.12 The books and articles devoted to this aspect of the US gestalt are legion and growing. Also growing is the consciousness within the populace of the states about environmental issues, ranging from climate destabilization to sustainable agriculture (van Wormer et al. 2007). It is foolhardy for scholars of North American/US religion, religion broadly, and the environmental humanities, as well as activists and policy makers to disregard this history. It is as foolhardy for scholars to disregard the growing impact such environmentalist beliefs and values play in US religious production: past, present, and especially the foreseeable future.

Because religions are in large part reified social constructs that have fluid, changing, and contested concepts of what qualifies as sacred, holy, and/or legally obligatory relationships and duties, it becomes the job of religion scholars to study how and why these concepts and categories are changing. Given what is at stake, scholars must pay close attention to how religious concepts and categories relate to nature and environmental issues.13 One area of human/nature relations is the human (and thus religious) relationship to food and how food is produced and consumed. Given the material environmental dimension of food production; the value-laden social, political, and ecological goals and normative claims of agrarianism (and of industrial agriculture; Sanford 2012); and how these relate to sustainable food issues (which are part of a larger sustainability milieu) that some religions/religious bodies are becoming cognizant of, then the study of this emerging environmental dimension of US religions becomes an area of concern and study that scholars are beholden to engage. I hope this book helps us better understand the values and norms that entail to this environmental dimension of US religions and to the sustainable farming practices in the United States. Furthermore, I hope it adds to the growing body of work that clearly spells out what is at stake with our food choices given the social and environmental impacts of food production, distribution, and consumption.

A further reason this book chooses to study religions in the United States is because of the lengthy historical role US religions have played in politics. With this dynamic and rich past, parts of this book explore this legacy of US religious history, helping shed light on religio-political interactions at the intersection of agriculture and sustainability.

Last, compared to other Western nations, religious identification and belief still constitute a large part of the identity of the vast majority of the US public. Various polls report that nine out of ten US citizens believe in God or a higher power, and others suggest that over 70 percent identify with some variety of Christianity. Coupled with the aforementioned polls about environmental values and concerns within the US public, it behooves scholars to investigate the interaction of religious belief and environmental behavior in the United States. This does not necessarily mean there is a causation between religious belief and environmental practice, but that such study should be undertaken to help the community of scholars understand if such links exist and, if so, how pervasive and effective they actually are.14

For example, religion and nature scholar Anna Peterson comments that “changes in values lead[ing] to changes in behavior [is] an assumption supported by little if any empirical and historical evidence. The paradox of modern environmentalism is that while pro-environmental values have become mainstream in the US and many other parts of the world, anti-environmental practices continue to escalate” (2006: 376). Despite this gap in knowledge, she continues, “Religion is indeed the way many people think about important moral and intellectual issues, and an expansion of environmental ethics to address religious traditions and ideologies is an important and necessary step” (ibid.: 378)—if true, then this is a step to which religious scholars must pay attention. Of course, such debates about religious belief and action toward the natural environment date back to Lynn White Jr.’s (1967) epochal article that blamed Western Christian beliefs, and thus actions based on those beliefs, for the world’s environmental problems. By focusing especially on the iterative and reinforcing interaction of religious values and agrarian praxis, an understanding of religious agrarianism adds to this growing body of knowledge about religious belief and practice regarding environmentally centered behaviors. If a key goal is to understand this iterative and reinforcing interaction, then it is important that I use appropriate theoretical and methodological tools that help the process. I briefly outline these choices in the next three sections.

THEORY AND METHOD: LIVED RELIGION

Readers will notice that throughout the book I adopt various scholarly methods and analytical views. Of these, the two key poles are a sociological point of view (how do religious agrarians act as a group, how do they organize, and how do they make sense of their standing in a plural society?) and an ethical point of view (what specific views about appropriate treatment of the natural world do religious agrarians hold, how do they embody these, and how are they informed by religion?). To dance between these poles, I weave together ethnographic findings,15 historical sleuthing, and constructive ethical building. This syncretic approach mirrors the interdisciplinary raison d’être of religious studies and recognizes that there are multiple approaches to better making sense of real-world data (Strausberg and Engler 2014). Because religious and environmental values are so central to an understanding of religion and nature issues—and sustainable farming in particular—it is important to pay attention to how these arise, are shaped, and are formed. I have found that a “lived religion” approach best makes sense of how religious subjects shape religious beliefs and values, and in turn are shaped by the larger networks in which they reside.16 Even more important, this approach allows scholars to see how nonspecialists shape their own religious worlds, at times in concert with and at times at odds with the larger top-down traditions in which they are participants.

This is because a lived religion perspective takes the symbolic, material, ideational, affective, and emotional worlds that lay religious practitioners create and privileges these worlds as being worthy of study. Rather than privileging the religious teachings, theologies, and institutions of elite experts, lived religion scholars head to the street, literally and figuratively, to see how the average person within a religion is creating a meaningful religious world that works and makes sense for them and their needs.

Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street (2002) remains the standardbearer of lived religion scholarship.17 Orsi’s introduction to the updated version contains some of the key theoretical insights and methodologies of a lived religion approach, most importantly recognizing that

The study of lived religion situates all religious creativity within culture and approaches all religion as lived experience. … Rethinking religion as a form of cultural work, the study of lived religion directs attention to institutions and persons, texts and rituals, practice and theology, things and ideas—all as media of making and unmaking worlds. … Religion approached this way is set ...