REBECCA TODD PETERS offers here a concise treatment of the major moral concern of a large part of Christian social ethics: the structures of globalized economic life and their manifest injustices and unsustainability. She also offers a moral framework to guide the thinking of unjustly, and often blindly, privileged First World Christians about the moral situation in which we find ourselves.
She proposes concrete action guides for how such First World Christians can gradually and intentionally empty ourselves of these privileges in order to stand in solidarity with those whose lives are harmed in the delivery of our advantages. In the end what emerges is a kind of liberation ethics for those who didn’t know they needed to be liberated—in this case, from their own advantages.
More and more primers are being written to help privileged North Americans gain some idea of what exactly it takes for us to enjoy those “everyday low prices” over at the big box store. It should not be so difficult; after all, we can just look at the labels and read on the internet about the people over in Bangladesh and Thailand who work in inhumane conditions to get us our superfluous T-shirts for $4.99.
Peters briskly takes us into the two-thirds world and lets us catch a glimpse of who really pays the price for the consumer goods we enjoy. But especially valuable is her survey of the “neoliberal” and indeed “neocolonial” economic and political structures (trade deals, IMF, etc.) that fix the current regime in place so that the cheap exploited labor of, let’s face it, brown bodies continues to serve the comfort of white bodies in the Northern Hemisphere, all in the name of free-market capitalism and free trade.
As an ethicist, what I found especially compelling in this book was Peters’ deep dive into the ethics of solidarity, a term that becomes her central moral norm. Hers is the first book in Christian ethics I have seen that actually traces the concept to its historical roots and then its use in political theory, theology, and ethics.
Today, solidarity is most strongly associated with Catholic social teaching. Peters shows that it was the wonderful Pope John XXIII who “first introduced the term ... into papal discourse” in 1961. John Paul II is also credited for “a much more vigorous usage of the term” as part of his fabulous contribution to Christian social ethics. Liberation theology, especially emerging from Latin America and now also in feminist ethics, has made solidarity a central ethical concept as well.
Peters’ own working definition of solidarity builds carefully both on this existing literature and on the lived experiences by which privileged First World people take a journey from indifference to sympathy to kind acts to sustained charity and ultimately through these preliminaries to a theory and practice of solidarity. Solidarity is “a model of being in the world that challenges the prevailing social order” and that involves “working across chasms of [privilege, class, social location] difference toward a common goal” of a sustainable and just world.
Solidarity honors difference, is answerable to the oppressed, and demands action and not just talk. Such actions look like “tak[ing] an inventory of all the areas of our lives and examin[ing] ways in which we can change our habits and behavior to decrease both our environmental impact and our exploitation of workers in the developing world.” She calls for comprehensive reconsideration of what we do about “transportation, food, clothing, money, housing, recreation/entertainment, and energy.”
This work is an important contribution to the quest for a just world and deserves the serious study of all Christian people. But be warned: It will require significant changes from the reader who takes it seriously.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!