Acquisitiveness, Asceticism, Affluence, and the Anthropocene: The Environmental Consequences of Ignoring Jesus

The history of Western Christianity is indispensable to explaining the advent of the Anthropocene because of the outsized historical role of Western commercial, industrial, and consumerist capitalism in precipitating our current global environmental realities. The late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins contrasted hunter-gatherers’ paradoxical affluence of “desiring little” with the modern Western consumerist affluence of “producing much.” Sahlins called the former a “Zen way of affluence,” but Christianity, and specifically post-Reformation Western Christianity, is the historically important religious tradition for explaining the emergence of the Anthropocene because of the extent to which the vast majority of Western Protestants and Catholics, since the seventeenth and especially the nineteenth century, have repudiated the anti-acquisitive admonitions of Jesus of Nazareth. Instead of relinquishing their possessions and eschewing wealth, they have sought ever more of both, with corresponding environmental consequences related to the technologies constructed to foster their procurement. Ways of mitigating Jesus’ radicalism of self-dispossession began very early; by late antiquity, they were taken to be voluntary, not obligatory, to be followed by those who took monastic vows and not by the laity. But only after the Reformation era was avarice rebranded as self-interest and acquisitiveness encouraged as natural, normal, and desirable.