It’s an old story but worth repeating. Two peasant farmers quarrelled about the boundary between their fields. They went to the wise old man of the village and asked him to adjudicate. He went to the fields with them, knelt down on the ground in the middle of the disputed bit, put his face to the ground, and shouted out, ‘Which of these two men do you belong to?’ He turned his head and put his ear to the ground. After a moment’s silence, he stood up, smiled, and announced: ‘I got an answer’. The farmers said: ‘What did it say?’ ‘It said, “I don’t belong to them. They belong to me”‘.
The usual Christian tradition is not quite that we belong to the land, but that we belong to the one divine being who created the land and also created us to live in it. As far as we know, modern western society is the only society that has ever taken seriously the possibility that we don’t belong to anyone.
In modern western society the theory is that the world can be explained by science without invoking God, so religious belief is a separate matter which you can opt into if you like so long as it doesn’t get in the way of anything else. Atheists believe there is no god at all. If so, the way the world came into existence is to be explained entirely in terms of impersonal, unintending matter obeying impersonal, unintending laws of nature. The world just happens to have come into existence like this, without any purpose. For atheists, it seems that there really is nobody to thank for the existence of the world and the way the world works. Most modern governments, capitalist and socialist alike, operate on this basis even if they also appeal to religious principles.
When a society believes that there is nobody to thank for the world and our lives, three things go wrong.
Firstly, when people believe that nobody deliberately put the sun and the clouds in the sky and the oil and gas under the earth, it follows that they just happen to be there by chance. So instead of appreciating things we take them for granted. We take as much as we want, and the only prices we put on them are the costs of human labour and human profits. As a result the oil and gas under the earth, which took millions of years to accumulate, is being used up in a few generations. As a society we behave towards nature like burglars breaking into a house, grabbing a laptop worth £500, and expecting to sell it for £50 without caring about the broken windows.
Secondly, instead of asking what is the purpose of the world we live in, we imagine that the only purposes are the ones we invent. This makes us self-centred; we don’t see why we should care about other people, or animals or other forms of life. This self-centredness affects not only individuals but society as a whole. Society invents purposes for oil, coal, animals and plants, and then treats them as if the purposes it has invented are their only purposes. The people who help promote society’s agenda then get over-valued, and the people who do other things get under-valued. So instead of worshipping God we worship the rich and powerful, and celebrities, while we undervalue like the elderly, and people whose occupation is to bring up children or care for the ill.
Thirdly, we overvalue human wealth creation. Having decided to take for granted everything that is just given to us, what humans do seems to be all that’s left to be valued. The traditional economic theories of both communism and capitalism treat wealth creation as something that only humans do. When that happens, it comes to seem as though people who are not in paid employment are a drain on the rest of us. We convince ourselves that we deserve the things we have got, we imagine that we have an absolute right to them, and we end up resenting benefits like unemployment pay as though they were unnecessary charitable donations to people with no rights.
When we bring God back into the picture, all these things look different. Firstly, when we see the things we have got as gifts, given to us as an act of love by a God who loves us, we can no longer take them for granted. They are not only useful to us; they are part of a relationship, a relationship which we value over and above the things themselves, like Christmas presents from someone we love. So we value them more and look after them better.
Secondly, when we appreciate that it is God’s generosity that has given us the things we have got, and our friends and neighbours, and our own lives, that gives direction to our lives. We have been given some freedom to choose how to live, and we can if we want make our decisions in a purely self-centred way; but when we recognise that our lives have been given to us within the context of rich relationships, with the potential to contribute to the common good, we can choose to direct our lives to greater purposes than any purposes we merely invent for ourselves.
Thirdly, when we see everything as given, we don’t think in terms of how much we deserve. These days advertisements for self-indulgence often come with the claim that ‘you deserve it’. But what do you and I really deserve? What did we do to deserve being born? Nothing. Because we deserve nothing, we will not turn up our noses at people less fortunate than ourselves as though they deserved less. The value of other people does not depend on how much they get paid, still less on what they do for us. It depends on the fact that they are God’s children, put here to enjoy God’s gifts just as you and I have been.