In the latest episode of Moral Revolution, and I sat down with Dr.Heath Carter, a historian of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, who recently wrote a piece in Atlantic magazine asking a controversial question: what if the term itself is part of the problem?

This episode is the third in our summer history miniseries on Christianity and politics. In the first, we explored fascism and the ways religious language can sacralize violence and hierarchy. In the second, we turned to Christian democracy, that “Italian invention” which tried to marry Catholic social thought with pluralistic, constitutional democracy. Now we come back across the Atlantic to ask what exactly we mean when we talk about “Christian nationalism” in the United States.

Heath Carter’s Provocative Plea: Retire the Term

Our starting point was Heath’s recent Atlantic piece, where he argues that Americans should stop using the term “Christian nationalism.” His critique has two layers:

• Analytical: The term is doing far too much descriptive work. As Heath put it in our conversation, if “Christian nationalism” meant “Doug Wilson and others who want to overthrow pluralistic democracy,” it might be a useful label. But in practice, it is being stretched to cover a spectrum that runs from sentimental July 4th hymn-singing to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. At that point, it explains everything and therefore explains very little.

• Strategic: Heath is also worried about what the term does in political combat. When “Christian nationalist” becomes a catch‑all insult for “any Christian who voted for Trump,” it may alienate potential allies and deepen the very polarization it is supposed to diagnose. Meanwhile, it lets other Christian actors—and whole traditions of “Christian America”—off the hook.

This doesn’t mean he thinks the underlying phenomena are harmless. On the contrary, he talks explicitly about “dangerous forms of illiberal Christian faith and practice” that do want to overthrow pluralistic democracy. His point is that we need sharper tools than one big, capacious term.

Doug Wilson vs. James Talarico: Who Gets to Be “Christian”?

To make this concrete, we talked about two figures who both claim the Christian label, but whose projects could not be more different: Doug Wilson and James Talarico.

Doug Wilson, the Idaho pastor who now gets lunch with the Financial Times and interviews on NPR, offers a vision of a thoroughly ordered, patriarchal, anti‑pluralist society grounded in his reading of scripture. Whatever we call it, it is profoundly hostile to democratic pluralism and to any universalist understanding of the gospel.

James Talarico, by contrast, is a Democratic politician who speaks in explicitly Christian terms about feeding the hungry, healing the sick, welcoming the stranger, and building an economy that serves the poor. Heath’s Atlantic piece describes him as standing in the long tradition of New Deal‑era social Christianity—the believers who saw abolishing poverty and building a more humane economic order as a direct outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus.

Both men are, in some sense, engaged in “Christian politics.” This raises the deeper question that animates our episode: What makes a set of values “Christian enough” to warrant that label in public life? Is self‑identification sufficient? Or are there substantive Christological and ethical criteria—about inclusion, human dignity, solidarity—that must be met?

As a European and a Catholic, this is where I become uneasy. Nationalism is a modern ideology that exalts the nation, usually at the expense of others. Christianity, by contrast, is a universal message offered to all peoples, and Catholicism literally means “universal.” When a movement says, in effect, “these rights and opportunities should be reserved for our favored identity,” I struggle to see how that can coherently be called Christian at all.

Heath is cautious about drawing confessional boundaries in his role as historian, but he is clear that not all “Christian Americas” are morally equivalent, and that many versions have always carried strong strains of exceptionalism and paternalism. The point of his critique is not to flatten them, but to recover the range—and insist on moral distinctions.

The Forgotten History of Social Christianity

One of the richest parts of our conversation looked backward, to the New Deal, the Social Gospel, and the broader tradition of social Christianity in the United States. Heath’s research traces how believers fought structural inequality as part of their call to follow Christ—from the late 19th century through civil rights.

In the 1930s, the Federal Council of Churches talked explicitly about abolishing poverty as consistent with Jesus’ teaching, and Christian leaders helped shape social programs like Social Security. For Heath, this history matters because it shows:

• Christians have long tried to weave their faith into law and policy, on both the left and the right.

• Christian political engagement is not inherently nationalist, illiberal, or exclusionary. There is a well‑documented tradition of Christians using their faith to expand democracy, fight inequality, and resist authoritarianism.

This challenges a common reflex on parts of the left: the idea that any religious presence in politics is suspect. Heath suggests that trying to “evacuate religion from politics” is both unrealistic and historically uninformed. The real question is which Christian visions we encourage, and which we confront.

Why Language Matters for Democracy

So why spend a whole episode interrogating a single term?

Because language is part of our democratic infrastructure. When a word like “Christian nationalism” becomes ubiquitous but vague—covering everything from sentimental patriotism to calls for theocratic rule—it can obscure the real stakes. It can also make it harder to build coalitions with Christians who oppose authoritarianism but do not fit comfortably into secular liberal categories.

Heath is not saying that we should stop naming illiberal, anti‑pluralist movements. He is saying that we should be more precise: about who we mean, what they believe, how they relate to the long American history of “Christian America,” and why their projects are incompatible with a genuinely pluralistic democracy.

For Moral Revolution, this episode sits between our exploration of fascism and our look at Christian democracy. Together, these conversations ask: How have Christians historically aligned with authoritarian projects, and how have they also helped build and defend democratic ones? And what kind of Christian political imagination do we need now, in an age of surging illiberalism and deep inequality?

Listen, Reflect, Push Back

If any of this resonates—or irritates—you, I’d encourage you to listen to the full episode. Heath, Tony and I go deeper into:

• Why Heath thinks “Christian nationalism” has exploded in usage over the last decade.

• How scholars like conceptualize it as a spectrum, and why Heath finds that unsatisfying.

• What the history of social Christianity can teach us about reclaiming Christian language on the left, without sliding into exclusionary nationalism.

As always with Moral Revolution, the goal is not to settle the debate, but to ask better questions!

What do you think: does retiring the phrase “Christian nationalism” make it harder or easier to name the real threats to pluralistic democracy—and why?

Guest links

• Personal Page

• Princeton Theological Seminary

What emerged from the conversation was a simple but profound idea: democracy cannot survive on procedures alone. It needs moral and spiritual foundations. That conviction was at the heart of Christian democracy’s rise in Italy and Europe, and it remains, in our view, one of the most important lessons of the 20th century.

1) From fascism to democracy

Christian democracy was born in the shadow of fascism. For a generation of young Catholic intellectuals in Italy, the fascist period was not only a time of repression; it was a crisis of political imagination. Some early Catholic thinkers had hoped that fascism might be compatible with Catholic social thought. But war, violence, racial laws, and the totalizing claims of the regime made that illusion impossible to sustain.

What followed was a profound rethinking of politics. Rosario described how Catholic students, intellectuals, and future political leaders began to move beyond narrow church-centered politics toward a broader democratic vision. They did not simply copy liberal democracy. They tried to build something more rooted in the dignity of the person, the role of community, and the need for moral responsibility in public life. In that sense, Christian democracy was not just anti-fascist. It was a new way of imagining how political life could be organized after totalitarianism.

2) Political spirituality

One of the most striking ideas in the episode was Rosario’s description of Christian democracy as a form of political spirituality. By that he meant that politics was not just about managing interests or organizing institutions. It was about searching for truth after catastrophe — especially after the moral collapse brought about by fascism and war.

This is what made Christian democracy distinctive. It did not try to turn politics into religion, but it also refused to treat democracy as a neutral machine. It argued that democratic life needs a deeper moral horizon: persons must be understood as more than individuals, families and communities must be protected, and the state must never become absolute. The language of subsidiarity, the common good, and the dignity of the person all flowed from this vision.

That helps explain why Christian democracy could be both deeply modern and deeply rooted in Catholic thought. Figures like Luigi Sturzo, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and later Alcide De Gasperi and Aldo Moro all helped shape a political culture that saw democracy not as a weak compromise, but as a moral order worthy of commitment. The key point was that pluralism was not a threat to be feared; after fascism, pluralism became a safeguard of freedom.

3) Italy, Europe, and the postwar order

The episode also showed how central Christian democracy was to the rebuilding of postwar Europe. In Italy, Christian Democrats helped shape the republic, write the constitution, and design major social and economic reforms. They were involved in housing, land reform, taxation, and state investment, especially in the South. Christian democracy was not only a philosophy; it became a governing project.

But its influence was much wider than Italy. Across continental Europe, Christian democratic parties played major roles in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France. They helped stabilize democracy in countries emerging from war and occupation, and they were crucial to the early European project. Leaders like De Gasperi, Adenauer, and Schuman understood that European integration was not only a practical necessity. It was also a moral answer to nationalism, violence, and division.

That is one reason Christian democracy matters today. It reminds us that democracy needs more than elections, and more than administration. It needs a moral vision of the human person, a culture of mediation, and institutions strong enough to protect pluralism. At its best, Christian democracy tried to provide exactly that.

Resources

Italy’s Christian Democracy by Rosario Forlenza

European Union Treaty of Maastricht

Jacques Maritain - Catholic philosopher

Vatican II - Second Vatican Council

We begin with the basic question: what is fascism, where does the term come from, and how did it become a political label? From there, we trace the movement’s development in Mussolini’s Italy, its influence on Nazi Germany, and its later forms in Austria, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Croatia, and beyond.

Dr. Unger helps us understand fascism not as a single fixed ideology, but as a family of movements marked by contradiction: modern and anti-modern, revolutionary and reactionary, secular and religious, nationalist and transnational. He shows how fascism appealed to veterans, workers, intellectuals, landowners, and Christians alike by promising national rebirth and a “third way” beyond both liberal capitalism and socialism. That flexibility, he argues, is part of what made fascism so powerful and so dangerous.

We also explore the crucial role of religion in this history. In Italy, the Lateran Treaty helped forge a temporary reconciliation between the Vatican and the state, even as Catholic opposition to fascism continued to exist. In Germany, the church’s relationship to National Socialism was similarly conflicted, with some Christians accommodating the regime and others resisting it. Across Europe, the episode asks how churches could become entangled with authoritarian power, and why those entanglements mattered so much for the fate of democracy, antisemitism, and war.

The conversation also widens beyond Italy and Germany to consider Spain and Portugal, where authoritarian regimes survived long after World War II, partly because they remained outside the wartime collapse of the Axis powers. Dr. Unger emphasizes that these regimes were not simply “less extreme” versions of fascism or innocuous alternatives to post-war christian democracies in Europe, but deeply repressive systems shaped by violence, nationalism, empire, and political religion. He also reflects on the problem of historical memory: fascism becomes easier to misuse as a label when societies lose living memory of dictatorship and war.

We hope this episode can serve as a reminder that the history of fascism is not only about regimes and leaders, but also about institutions, compromises, and moral choices. If we want to understand the twentieth century honestly, we need to understand how ordinary people, churches, and elites responded when political violence wrapped itself in promises of order, identity, and renewal.

Take a listen and let us know your thoughts!

Resources

• Nicholas Stargot’s ‘The German War’

• Pius XII and the Holocaust - Vatican Archives

Renee begins by sharing her own path into the Catholic Worker world: growing up in a devout suburban Catholic family, discovering Dorothy Day later through theology and journalism, and gradually realizing that the Catholic Worker offered something she had long been seeking: a community where faith, justice, and shared life were not separate concerns. She described how Dorothy Day’s witness drew her not only because of its holiness, but because it posed a direct challenge to the ordinary Catholic imagination: What would it mean to take Catholic social teaching seriously as a way of life?

A major theme of the episode was the gap between personal charity and structural justice. We all reflected on how many Catholics are familiar with acts of service, parish outreach, and generosity, but less familiar with the deeper claims of Catholic social teaching: that justice is not only about giving from one’s own possessions, but about organizing society so that people receive what is due to them. That distinction gave the conversation its moral edge. The point was not to dismiss charity, but to show that charity alone is not enough if the social order itself remains unjust.

The historical core of the episode focused on Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, whose collaboration helped launch the Catholic Worker newspaper and movement. Renee traced Day’s spiritual restlessness, her concern for the poor and excluded, and Maurin’s vision of rebuilding society through houses of hospitality, farming communes, and a renewed Christian culture rooted in the works of mercy. The result was a movement that spoke to the crises of the Depression while also proposing a radically different way of living: one shaped by hospitality, labor, prayer, and community rather than profit and power.

The most provocative part of the conversation was the discussion of Christian anarchism. Renee explained that, in its strongest sense, Christian anarchism is not about chaos or isolated individualism, but about self-rule ordered toward communion, mutual aid, and resistance to empire. She linked this vision to Tolstoy, the Sermon on the Mount, the early Christians, monastic communities, the Anabaptists, and the Catholic Worker’s own concern for personalism and subsidiarity. In her telling, the deepest tension is not between Christianity and community, but between Christianity and domination.

The episode also spent time on the Catholic Worker’s practical commitments, especially the land. Renee described how farms, workshops, and hospitality houses are not side projects but part of a theological vision of labor and creation: human beings are called to co-create, not merely consume. Farming shortens supply chains, resists exploitation, and re-embeds people in dependence on soil, weather, and one another. That same logic extends to work more broadly, including art, craft, and forms of labor that restore dignity rather than reduce people to cogs in an industrial machine.

Another thread was the relation between Catholic thought and broader intellectual life. We all noted how ideas like the common good, subsidiarity, and the dignity of work sometimes appear in secular or mainstream economic and political discourse without being rooted in the Catholic tradition that helped shape them. That concern carried into reflections on business education, cooperatives, and the challenge of imagining a social order beyond shareholder value. The conversation made clear that the Catholic Worker is not just a historical curiosity; it is a living provocation to rethink economics, education, and political life.

The episode ends on a note of hope. Renee spoke about the creativity of Catholic Worker communities, the attraction many young people feel toward alternative ways of life, and the possibility of building institutions that actually serve the common good. In a time of political fatigue and economic uncertainty, that kind of witness matters. It suggests that Christianity is not exhausted when it becomes public, communal, and demanding — it becomes more itself.

Resources

• Catholic Social Teaching - Vatican Website

• Dorothy Day - Biography and Writings

• Quadragesimo Anno - Papal Encyclical 1931

• The Catholic Worker Movement - Official Website

• Leo Tolstoy and Christian Anarchism

• Mennonite Communities and Christian Anarchism

• Emmanuel Mounier and Personalism

Guest links

• Twitter

• Website

That is the story we tell in this episode: a long and contested history of civil economy, Catholic social thought, and the effort to build institutions that keep markets human.

From moral philosophy to civil economy

A useful place to begin is with the contrast between Antonio Genovesi and Adam Smith. Both were moral philosophers, but they asked different questions. Smith tried to explain how commercial society functions; Genovesi asked how an economy can be morally and socially embedded, ordered toward public happiness and human flourishing.

That difference matters. Genovesi’s civil economy was rooted in a civic and relational understanding of human life: people are dependent on one another, and trust, reciprocity, and virtue have to be cultivated intentionally through institutions, education, and shared moral purpose. Smith, by contrast, treated market coordination more through self-interest, law, and incentives, even while retaining a serious moral philosophy in the background.

Catholic social thought takes shape

In the nineteenth century, this older civil economy tradition was taken up and modernized by Catholic thinkers responding to industrial capitalism. Giuseppe Toniolo was especially important here. He rejected both laissez-faire capitalism and Marxist socialism, arguing instead for a social order in which property has a social function, labor has dignity, and intermediate institutions like unions, cooperatives, and families help mediate between the individual and the state.

This did not remain just theory. It became tied to a wider Catholic social tradition, especially the encyclicals Rerum Novarum in 1891 and Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, which deepened the language of social justice and subsidiarity. The point was not simply to denounce capitalism, but to insist that economic life must be ordered by moral limits and oriented toward the common good.

Politics enters the picture

Luigi Sturzo carried this vision into political life. He understood that Catholic social principles could not remain in study circles or church associations; they had to become a democratic political project. That is why he founded the Italian Popular Party in 1919, trying to build a politics inspired by Christian principles without becoming a clerical state.

This was a crucial distinction. Sturzo wanted Catholics in politics, but not ecclesiastical control of politics. His project showed that civil economy was not only about ideas, it was about institutional form, party organization, and democratic accountability.

Camaldoli and the republic

The next major moment in this story came in 1943, when a group of young Catholic intellectuals gathered at Camaldoli to imagine the moral foundations of a post-fascist Italy. The resulting Camaldoli Code offered 76 principles for social and economic reconstruction, centered on human dignity, solidarity, the common good, and subsidiarity (for more background see our previous Moral Revolution post here).

Its influence was enormous. These ideas flowed into the 1948 Italian Constitution, whose opening line: “Italy is a democratic republic founded on labor” captures something of the synthesis at work. Catholic social thought was no longer simply a tradition of critique; it had become part of the constitutional imagination of the republic.

Reconstruction and the mixed economy

Under Alcide de Gasperi and later Amintore Fanfani, this vision took institutional shape in postwar reconstruction. Italy built a mixed economy in which public enterprises, labor reforms, welfare expansion, and industrial policy were all used to steer development toward social goals. The state was not imagined as the enemy of the market, but as an instrument for directing the market toward the common good.

This is one of the most striking features of the Italian Christian democratic model. It did not simply regulate capitalism; it tried to shape the economy through public ownership, strategic planning, and social partnership. Figures like Enrico Mattei made this especially visible in energy policy, where Italy pursued a more sovereign and less extractive international posture.

Decline and recovery

Over time, however, the system became increasingly entangled with patronage and corruption. By the early 1990s, the Christian Democratic political order collapsed amid Mani Pulite and the breakdown of the old party system. Privatization, fiscal discipline, and neoliberal reform followed, and the political tradition that had once held Catholic social thought together fragmented.

Still, the story does not end there. In recent decades, thinkers in Italy have revived the civil economy tradition, rereading Genovesi and Toniolo in light of reciprocity, relational goods, solidarity, and ecology. The language has changed, but the moral question remains the same: what kind of economy deserves to call itself human?

Why this matters now

The deepest lesson of this tradition is simple: economic life is never just economic. It shapes character, community, and the conditions of freedom. That means we cannot evaluate markets only by growth or efficiency; we have to ask whether they serve justice, dignity, and shared flourishing.

That is the inheritance I want to recover. The civil economy tradition reminds us that markets should remain embedded in moral life, and that the common good is not an optional extra — it is the true measure of the economy.

Resources & Links:

• Rerum Novarum (1891)

• Quadragesimo Anno (1931)

• Luigi Sturzo - Italian Christian Democrat

• Enrico Mattei and ENI

• Camaldoli Code (1943)

Connect with the Host:

• Laura Segafredo - Bluesky | LinkedIn

• Tony Annett - Twitter | LinkedIn

In this episode, Tony walks us through what we mean by “neoliberalism” and why, despite economists arguing over the term, it still names something very real: an ideology built around the free movement of capital, deregulated finance, weaker worker power, and a pared‑back state. We look at how this new “common sense” took hold from the 1970s onward and how it continues to structure our world today.​

Four “Endings” That Made Neoliberalism

Tony frames the story around four major endings that set the stage for the neoliberal turn:

1. the end of Bretton Woods,

2. the end of the post‑war growth boom,

3. the erosion of social democracy, and

4. the collapse of communism.​

He explains how the breakdown of Bretton Woods removed capital controls that had once allowed governments to pursue domestic full employment without fearing sudden capital flight. Once capital could move freely, it gained a veto over democratic choices: raise taxes or strengthen labor protections, and money could simply leave.​

At the same time, the post‑war “golden age” of growth faded, productivity slowed, and the oil shocks of the 1970s brought the toxic mix of high inflation and low growth that existing policy tools were not designed to handle. This opened political space for a new answer: liberalize markets, crush inflation, discipline labor, and roll back the state.​

From Thatcher and Reagan to Clinton and Blair

We trace how this new policy package moved from the right to the center. The first wave came with Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US: tax cuts for the wealthy, aggressive attacks on unions, financial deregulation, and large‑scale privatizations justified by unproven claims about state inefficiency.​

But neoliberalism truly became the water we swim in when center‑left governments embraced it as well. In the 1990s, leaders like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder accepted deregulated finance and weaker worker protections, then went further on “welfare‑to‑work” reforms that pushed people into low‑wage, precarious jobs by tightening benefit eligibility and imposing strict work requirements. By the eve of the 2008 crisis, Tony argues, we had reached “peak neoliberalism.”​

We also discuss how European integration hard‑wired some of these ideas into treaties and institutions: free movement of capital and labor, fiscal and monetary rules that constrained domestic policy, and a long period of austerity in countries like Italy.​

Inequality, Broken Dreams, and a Hidden Depression

The second half of the episode looks at what all of this has done to our societies, especially in the United States. Since 1980, the income share of the top 1% has roughly doubled in countries like the US, UK, and Italy, while the share going to the bottom 50% has stagnated or fallen. Productivity kept rising, but wages for typical workers did not keep up; the gains accrued mainly to capital, not labor.​ Here’s the famous chart from the Economic Policy Institute illustrating this phenomenon:

For working‑class men in the US without a college degree, real wages actually fell by around 18% between the 1970s and 2010s, even as pay for college‑educated workers rose. Prime‑age male employment has dropped sharply, creating what Tony calls a “hidden depression” in labor market participation. Many of these men are either in low‑quality, low‑wage service jobs with no security and little dignity, or have left the labor market altogether.​

We also talk about “deaths of despair”—rising mortality from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol among white working‑class Americans since the 1990s—which are not seen at the same scale in other rich countries. For Tony, the key driver is not just technology or globalization (which every country faces) but the deliberate weakening of worker power and the institutional tilt toward capital that defines the neoliberal era.​

From Economic Pain to Scapegoats

In the last part of the conversation, we connect this economic story to our current political moment. The anger and dislocation produced by four decades of neoliberal policies have made electorates receptive to figures promising simple answers and renewed dignity. But instead of naming neoliberalism or the policy choices that hollowed out worker security, many political entrepreneurs have redirected blame toward immigrants, racial minorities, and other vulnerable groups.​

Drawing on thinkers like René Girard, we explore how stressed societies reach for scapegoats and how this dynamic has played out both in the US and Europe. We also reflect on the political sleight of hand by which many of the same forces that drove neoliberal reforms have managed to avoid blame and even capitalize on the resulting discontent, while continuing to defend free capital flows and deregulated finance.​

If you’re trying to make sense of why our economies feel so unstable, why inequality is so entrenched, and why our politics seems perpetually on edge, this episode offers a historical map of how we got here—and why naming neoliberalism matters for imagining a different future.​

You can listen to the full conversation on the Moral Revolution podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

So inviting Aniket, who is now Managing Director at Jefferies and head of Washington policy and energy transition research, to talk with us about artificial intelligence felt like coming full circle. Once again, we are facing a “general‑purpose” transformation of the economy, only this time the stakes feel even more extreme.​

AI is not new – but this moment is

Aniket begins with a historian’s reminder: AI did not start with ChatGPT. Alan Turing proposed his famous test in 1950; Herbert Simon was writing in the 1960s and 70s about machines approaching human‑like intelligence; IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997; AlphaGo shocked the Go world a little over a decade ago. What feels new now is not the idea of AI, but the sheer scale of computing power and the way these tools have been put directly into our hands as consumers.​

This history also matters for another reason: there have been “AI springs” and “AI winters.” Waves of hype have been followed by disappointment before. So we need a posture that is neither naïve exuberance nor reflexive doom, but a moral realism that can attend to both risk and promise.​

Three futures on one chart

In the episode, Aniket walks us through a striking chart from the Dallas Fed that has been haunting him (see below). On the horizontal axis is time; on the vertical axis, GDP per capita in log scale over roughly 160 years. The historical line is eerily stable: around 2 percent annual growth, through wars, depressions, and new technologies.​

From there, the Fed sketches three AI futures:

• Business‑as‑usual: growth continues at roughly the same trend line, perhaps nudging from 1.9 to 2.1 percent.

• Singularity as utopia: AI drives explosive productivity; the line shoots almost vertically upward as machines become vastly more capable and “we all become infinitely rich.”

• Singularity as catastrophe: AI triggers collapse; GDP per capita goes to zero because, as Aniket bluntly puts it, “we all die.”​

This is the fork in the road facing investors, firms, and governments: Is AI just another chapter in the story of industrial innovation, or something truly discontinuous that could either radically expand human flourishing or extinguish it? Morally speaking, the distance between “slightly higher productivity” and “we all die” is not a matter of basis points. It is a matter of responsibility for the future of life.​

What do we call “progress”?

One of the most revealing parts of our conversation comes when we shift from macro charts to micro decisions about what we value. Today, some of the highest‑paid workers in the economy are specialists in exploiting tiny arbitrage opportunities in financial markets, earning millions to capture price differences that exist for milliseconds. At the same time, teachers, care workers, and others who form human beings and hold communities together are systematically undervalued.​

Laura connects this to a deeper question about what counts as “progress.” If we use AI to automate and reward ever more abstract forms of financial engineering, while continuing to underpay people who educate children or care for the vulnerable, then AI is not morally neutral. It is amplifying a distorted value system.​

Here, Aniket brings in a book he loves, Shop Class as Soulcraft, written by a philosopher who left a think tank job to become a motorcycle mechanic. The book insists that there is a kind of intelligence and meaning that emerges from working with one’s hands, from engaging the material world directly, that our metrics simply don’t see. He links this insight to economic research showing that a lot of innovation actually arises from physical manufacturing: people tinkering with real things.​

In other words, when we hollow out the world of making, we don’t just lose jobs. We lose a pathway of human development, a way of knowing and creating, that is essential for a healthy society.

Hands, machines, and the moral imagination

This leads Aniket to a memory from his own family story. His grandparents in India were active in the Gandhian freedom movement, where hand‑woven cloth became a symbol of resistance to British industrial manufacturing. At the time, this was often dismissed as “Luddite.” But seen through a moral lens, it was also a defense of meaningful work and community against a model of progress that treated people as expendable inputs.​

Aniket wonders whether we need something analogous today: not a rejection of technology, but a renewed appreciation for practices that develop the person, even if they are less “efficient” in output terms. Maybe it is acceptable—even desirable—that a hand‑made shirt costs more, if it reflects a richer ecology of work, skill, and meaning. Europe still preserves fragments of this intuition, though often without a language that situates it in a broader moral framework.​

For us at Moral Revolution, this resonates deeply with the conviction that the economy should be ordered toward integral human development. The key question is not simply, “What can AI do?” but “What kind of people, and what kind of society, will we become if we build our future around this technology?”

Living with uncertainty: a few guideposts

So how do we act in a world where credible experts disagree so radically about AI’s trajectory: where some expect utopia, others foresee extinction, and others predict a continuation of business‑as‑usual? We do not pretend to have a master blueprint. But a few moral guideposts emerge from this conversation:​

• Keep history in view. Remembering earlier cycles of AI hype and plateau helps us resist fatalism and fanaticism alike.​

• Re‑center value. Use AI to support and dignify care, education, and craft, rather than further inflating already over‑rewarded sectors of the economy.​

• Protect the conditions for human development. Safeguard forms of work, especially embodied, relational work, that shape character, community, and creativity, even if they don’t maximize short‑term GDP.

• Refuse the false binary. We are not forced to choose between romantic technophobia and uncritical accelerationism; there is space for a morally serious, prudential discernment.

In the end, the chart from the Dallas Fed is less a prediction than a mirror. It reflects back to us our own moral imagination. Whether AI becomes an instrument of greater justice and solidarity, or a force that deepens inequality and risk, depends on the choices we make now: about what and whom we honor, protect, and reward.​

This is the conversation we are committed to continuing at Moral Revolution: not just about where the lines on the graph might go, but about what it means to be human in an age of powerful machines.

Resources:

• David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs

• Nassim Taleb’s Work on Black Swans

• Shop Class as Soul Craft

• The World Happiness Report

• Pew Research on AI Perception

• Alan Turing’s Work on Machine Intelligence

• Jeffrey Hinton’s Warnings on AI

When the market becomes a religion

Dr. Jung argues that neoliberalism is no longer just an economic theory; it functions like a theological myth that gives ultimate meaning to our lives. At the heart of this myth is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” transformed over time into a kind of secular providence: the belief that individual self‑interest and competition will miraculously produce the common good.

In Christian language, what used to be called selfishness gets rebranded as the surest path to social harmony. If the market “knows best,” then its outcomes—winners and losers, inclusion and exclusion—acquire a quasi‑sacred status, beyond moral questioning. We learn to say, “it’s not me, it’s the market,” as if a higher power had spoken.

Winners, losers, and the idols we serve

Once market success is treated as a moral verdict, those who “lose” are not only economically marginalized but also subtly blamed. In neoliberal culture, poverty is often seen as evidence of personal failure—laziness, lack of merit, or even sin—while wealth appears as blessing. In that worldview, why would we ever put a limit on “blessing”, i.e. wealth?

Dr. Sung uses biblical language to name what is happening: the old opposition between the God of life and the false god Mammon. When money and capital accumulation become the ultimate criteria for political and social decisions, real people—especially the poor and those deemed “unnecessary” to profit—are sacrificed. Nature, too, becomes nothing more than a stock of resources to be extracted and discarded, collateral damage in service of growth.

Dignity has no price

Liberation theology begins from a very different starting point: the conviction that every human being possesses inherent dignity that cannot be measured, compared, or bought. Dr. Jung is adamant about the language here: people do not “have value”; they have dignity. Value is what we assign to things in a market, things that can be priced, exchanged, and sacrificed. To treat persons as “costs” or “assets” is already to forget who they are.​

This is why he calls slavery a “structural sin” and extends that critique to any system that reduces people to instruments of capital accumulation. In such a system, those who are not profitable—workers, the poor, the sick, even the land itself—are discarded as too expensive to maintain. For Christians, this is a direct contradiction of the Gospel’s claim that God desires “life in abundance” for all, not just for those whom the market deems efficient.

Beyond saving souls: compassion as method

A core insight of liberation theology, as Dr. Jung describes it, is that theology must begin not from abstract doctrines but from compassion, from “suffering with” those who are oppressed. That compassion then drives us to ask hard questions: why is this suffering happening, and how can we change the structures that produce it?

Here social sciences and theology meet. Economic and political analysis help us see the structural causes of poverty and exclusion, but the energy to engage in struggle comes from a spiritual source: a sense of call, of love, of solidarity with the vulnerable. For Dr. Sung, this is where the preferential option for the poor is not an optional “preference” but the heart of Christian faith itself.

The myth of limitlessness

One of the most striking parts of our conversation is Dr. Sung’s critique of limitlessness. Modern capitalism not only tolerates extreme wealth; it cannot imagine placing an upper bound on it. Society accepts the existence of poverty, but the idea of capping wealth seems almost obscene, as if we were limiting grace itself.

He calls this a “transcendental illusion”: the idea that desire has no natural limit, and that genuine freedom means always pushing beyond every boundary. The paradox is that this fantasy of limitless accumulation requires real sacrifices—of time, relationships, mental health, and, at scale, of human lives and ecosystems. In contrast, Dr. Sung suggests that true freedom is the capacity to say “enough,” to embrace our limits as something positive and identity‑giving.

Sacred rules versus the holy

Near the end of our conversation, Dr. Jung draws a distinction that has stayed with me: the difference between the “sacred” and the “holy.” In much theological writing, the terms are used as synonyms, but he insists we separate them. “Sacred” names the untouchable rules of a system—religious or economic—that demand sacrifice and place themselves beyond critique.

“Holy,” by contrast, is what resists those rules in the name of life and compassion. To illustrate this, he turns to the parable of the Good Samaritan: the priest and Levite obey sacred purity laws and pass by the wounded man, while the Samaritan, moved by compassion, draws near, touches him, and cares for him. For Jesus, the true “man of God” is not the one who protects sacred order but the one who lets compassion override it.

Law and institutions are necessary; societies cannot function without them. But when they are treated as ultimate, they become idols—whether they are canon laws or market rules. For Dr. Jung, the Christian criterion is clear: the final measure is not efficiency, purity, or even doctrinal correctness, but whether we protect and nurture life, especially where it is most vulnerable.

This episode is an invitation—especially to those of us who work in or around finance, business, and policy—to recover a moral vocabulary that has been crowded out by talk of efficiency, incentives, and risk‑adjusted returns. It asks us to see the market not as a neutral tool or a divine oracle, but as a human construct that can either serve human dignity and the earth’s flourishing or demand sacrifices to the false god of limitless accumulation.

If that framing resonates with you, I hope you’ll listen to the full conversation and sit with its questions: What gods are our systems asking us to sacrifice to? Who is being sacrificed? And what might it look like, in our professions, institutions, and daily lives, to side with what is holy rather than what our age has declared sacred?

You can read more of Dr. Sung’s work here:

Orcid: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7089-1185

Academia.edu: https://metodista.academia.edu/JungMoSung

Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/8882851559809239

And here’s the cover of his upcoming book (expected April 2026):

In the 1930s, most democracies failed. Yugoslavia, Romania, Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Greece, Spain, and Italy all abandoned democratic rule in the shadow of economic catastrophe. By the end of the decade, only North America, parts of Western and Northern Europe, and Czechoslovakia remained democratic. The United States was not saved by some innate constitutional genius; it was saved, Tony argues, by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s willingness to break with economic orthodoxy and to put workers, not creditors, at the center of the recovery.​

From Versailles to bank runs: how bad economics killed democracy

We start the episode by tracing the Great Depression back to decisions made after World War I. The Treaty of Versailles imposed reparations on Germany amounting to around 300 percent of its GDP, which forced the country into years of transfers that poisoned both its economy and its politics, just as John Maynard Keynes warned. At the same time, the United States insisted that Britain and France repay war debts in full, which in turn pushed them to squeeze Germany even harder, a dynamic that helped fuel German hyperinflation in 1923 and left a deep cultural trauma around inflation that still shapes German policy today.​

Overlaying this was the reimposition of the gold standard, a system that tied currencies to gold and demanded deflation and austerity from deficit countries like Britain and Germany (for a deeper look into the gold standard you can listen to our previous episode here). In a world that now had (at least male) universal suffrage, voters were expected to accept falling wages, mass unemployment, and crushing austerity to defend an overvalued currency peg. Unsurprisingly, they rebelled, and speculative attacks made the system even more fragile, forcing governments into ever harsher policies that devastated ordinary people.​

When the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929, it should have produced a severe but manageable recession. Instead, because of the gold standard and the way central banks responded — by raising interest rates and imposing budget cuts — it spiraled into a Great Depression. Bank runs swept across Austria, Germany, Britain, and the United States, with banking systems in eighteen countries on the brink of collapse and no effective deposit insurance in place. Industrial production fell by roughly half in the U.S., unemployment reached 25 percent there and 34 percent in Germany, global trade contracted by a third, and GDP collapsed across much of the world.​

In this context, fascism did not emerge in a vacuum. It grew from the soil of bad economic policy.

Why the far right thrived — and the left did not

One striking question we discuss is why the far right benefited so much more from the crisis than the left, both in the 1930s and after the 2008 financial crash. In interwar Europe, social democratic parties largely accepted the logic of the gold standard and embraced austerity, while communist parties, under Stalin’s direction, refused alliances with them and denounced them as “social fascists.” This left working people with no credible, organized left alternative that could promise both democracy and relief.​

The far right, by contrast, offered scapegoats and a loosening of economic orthodoxy. In the 1930s it blamed Jews and other minorities; in our own time it blames immigrants, minorities, “Brussels bureaucrats,” and cosmopolitan elites. Tony draws a line between the demonization of Jews in the 1930s, complete with fantasies of a global conspiracy, and today’s conspiratorial targeting of figures like George Soros as all-powerful Jewish manipulators.​

We also draw parallels with the pre‑2008 evolution of center‑left parties. Leaders like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder embraced neoliberalism, prioritizing market-friendly policies and cultural issues over economic security for the working class. When the 2008 crisis hit, many working-class voters no longer saw social democrats as their representatives and turned instead to right‑wing populists who directed anger toward migrants, minorities, and supranational institutions.​

In both eras, the left’s entanglement with austerity and orthodoxy created a moral and political vacuum that the far right filled.

The New Deal as a democratic rescue mission

FDR understood that what was at stake was not just GDP, but the survival of democracy itself. In one of the episode’s key moments, Tony quotes Roosevelt saying that democracy had disappeared in other nations not because people disliked it, but because they had grown tired of unemployment, insecurity, and watching their children go hungry while governments appeared weak and confused. Roosevelt’s project was explicitly to save democracy by addressing the material roots of despair.​

He moved fast. In his inaugural address he famously told Americans that they had “nothing to fear but fear itself,” and then used his fireside chats to explain how banks work and why people could trust them again. After a four‑day banking holiday, people lined up not to withdraw their savings but to redeposit them, effectively ending the immediate banking panic. He suspended the gold standard, stopping gold exports and decoupling the dollar from gold so that monetary policy could be used to support recovery rather than defend an arbitrary peg.​

From there, the New Deal unfolded as a flurry of experiments. Some, like the National Industrial Recovery Act’s attempt to cartelize industry, were clumsy and short‑lived. But many others fundamentally reshaped American economic and social life:​

• The Emergency Banking Act and the Glass–Steagall Act stabilized and regulated the banking system, separated commercial from investment banking, and created deposit insurance, ending the era of routine bank runs.​

• Housing institutions like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration refinanced mortgages, lowered interest rates, and enabled a generation of Americans to become homeowners, with long‑term effects on family formation and the post‑war “baby boom.”​

• Public works programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration put millions to work on environmental restoration and infrastructure — highways, bridges, airports, schools, public buildings, and libraries.​

• The Tennessee Valley Authority brought cheap, publicly owned electricity to impoverished rural areas, showing that public utilities could be both efficient and transformative.​

• Social Security introduced unemployment insurance, old‑age pensions, and poor relief, funded via contributions from employers and workers rather than general taxation.​

• The Wagner Act empowered unions, outlawed company unions, required employers to bargain collectively, and helped union membership surge, boosting workers’ bargaining power.​

• The Fair Labor Standards Act banned child labor, introduced a federal minimum wage, and finally instituted the 40‑hour work week, though it initially excluded agricultural and domestic workers — a racist compromise to placate Southern Democrats who depended on cheap Black labor.​

Roosevelt also directly attacked inequality, condemning “economic royalists” and raising the top marginal income tax rate to 79 percent, later to be increased even further during the war.​

The results were striking. Within four years of 1933, industrial output doubled, real GDP rose by about 50 percent, and real wages increased by roughly 30 percent, even though official unemployment remained elevated in part because public‑works jobs were not fully counted. The New Deal did not end the Depression by itself — that required the massive “high‑pressure” war economy — but it fundamentally shifted the distribution of gains toward workers and stabilized the political system.​

This is one of the central contrasts we highlight with the post‑2008 response. FDR prioritized homeowners, workers, and public employment, whereas the 2008 rescue in the U.S. leaned heavily on monetary policy and quantitative easing that buoyed asset prices and disproportionately favored those who already owned capital. In one case, relief flowed from the bottom up; in the other, from the top down.​

Leon Blum, Meloni, and the limits of partial courage

Not every country in the 1930s had an FDR. France offers a sobering example of what happens when a government embraces New Deal‑style reforms but refuses to break with destructive monetary orthodoxy. In the mid‑1930s, France was deeply polarized, with intense distributional conflict between a left that wanted to tax capital and fund social spending and a right that prioritized cutting social programs and taxing consumption. Right‑wing militias attacked parliament in 1934 — an eerie prefiguration of more recent assaults on democratic institutions elsewhere.​

When Léon Blum’s Popular Front government came to power in 1936, it looked to the New Deal as a model and introduced significant reforms: expanded workers’ rights, collective bargaining, wage increases, the 40‑hour week, paid vacations, public works, and support for farmers. But Blum insisted on staying on the gold standard and maintaining the value of the franc, even as capital fled the country and investors bet on devaluation. Eventually he was forced into a series of devaluations and, under pressure, his government fell, paving the way for the instability that would end in Vichy and his own imprisonment in a concentration camp.​

Tony’s conclusion is stark: you cannot have a New Deal while still shackled to something like the gold standard. You cannot pursue a politics of solidarity and worker protection while leaving untouched the rigid structures that empower creditors and constrain democratic choice. Roosevelt grasped this and left gold early; Blum did not, and French democracy survived only in a deeply weakened form.​

In the episode’s final segment, we connect these lessons to today’s Europe, where far‑right parties now command around a quarter of the vote — the highest share since the 1930s — and in some countries are already reshaping institutions. Laura reflects on how Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy combines culture‑war politics and anti‑immigrant scapegoating with an increasingly autocratic approach to the justice system and media, all while relying heavily on immigrant labor to sustain an aging economy. Religion, in this context, is not a prophetic voice for justice but a tool for nationalist legitimation — a pattern sadly familiar from the last century.​

Markets as “vibes” and the moral stakes of economic policy

One of the more provocative threads in our conversation is about how markets actually work. We challenge the comforting fiction that markets are dispassionate calculators of value, guided purely by rational expectations and statistics. In reality, as Laura notes from her own experience in finance, markets are “a collection of vibes”: the aggregated feelings, fears, and hopes of mostly male decision‑makers, expressed through trades rather than tweets.​

This matters because when policymakers treat markets as sacred or super‑rational, they end up prioritizing the moods of investors over the livelihoods of citizens. The gold standard was, in many ways, a system designed to keep markets calm at the cost of human suffering, insisting that governments sacrifice employment and wages to maintain “credibility” with creditors. The New Deal was a rare moment when a major government refused that logic and instead asked markets to adjust to democracy, not the other way around.​

The moral revolution we’re interested in is precisely this: re‑centering economic policy on human dignity, democratic resilience, and the common good, rather than on the sensibilities of “economic royalists” or the anxieties of bond markets. When economic policy ignores these moral stakes, history suggests that demagogues will be happy to fill the void, offering identity and scapegoats where solidarity and security are missing.​

In this episode, we do not romanticize the New Deal; we are clear about its racist exclusions and the compromises FDR made with white supremacist Southern Democrats. But we also insist that, despite these serious flaws, it offers a powerful example of how bold, worker‑centered economic policy can shore up democracy against fascist tides.​

As Europe once again faces a rising far right and policymakers flirt with old orthodoxies in new clothes, the 1930s are no longer just history. They are a mirror. We hope this conversation helps you see more clearly what is at stake — and what kind of moral and political courage our moment demands.

One of the speakers was from the White House’s newly instituted office for “American Energy Dominance,” a phrase that barely bothers to hide its meaning: fossil fuels first, last, and only, despite their outdatedness, cost, and the pollution that shadows every stage of their life cycle. Another speaker was a transparent political appointee with no discernible authority to speak on the subject and even less knowledge of its technical minutiae. I remember my professional contempt at her lack of expertise. But more than that, I remember a single phrase. She described efforts to transition away from fossil fuels, to try to contain the worst effects of climate change, as “the anti-human net-zero agenda.”

I understood immediately what was going on. The purpose was to prop up fossil fuels by invoking familiar talking points I had heard for two decades: fossil energy “allows for economic development,” “expands energy access,” “lifts people out of poverty.” What struck me was not the argument, but the boldness of claiming that solving climate change is somehow anti‑human. In reality, it is human bodies—especially the most vulnerable ones: poor communities in low‑lying coastal regions, women raising children with chronic asthma and respiratory disease, workers exposed daily to polluted air and water—who bear the brunt of climate change and environmental degradation. Years ago, I authored a report with the World Bank titled “Climate-smart development: adding up the benefits of actions that help build prosperity, end poverty and combat climate change,” where we showed that health benefits alone, without counting any other gains, were more than sufficient to justify strong climate policy. That experience left me convinced that climate policy is, at its core, about protecting human lives.

So I was stunned by the rhetorical inversion: the work of protecting those lives recast as an “anti-human” conspiracy. It brought to mind Hannah Arendt’s prophetic reflections on what happens when politics severs itself from factual reality. In “Truth and Politics,” she warns that organized lying does not simply replace truth with a new set of “facts”; it corrodes our shared sense of reality itself. “The deliberate falsehood,” she writes, “deals with contingent facts… [and] the whole texture of facts… is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes.” The result is not that everyone believes the lie, but that people cease to believe anything in particular, losing the very ground from which they might resist.

That same dynamic seemed to surface again when, in the last few weeks, I read that the Environmental Protection Agency had issued a new rule: from now on, when calculating the costs and benefits of environmental regulations, it would include the costs to companies of complying, but no longer count the benefits to human health. In other words, a cost‑benefit analysis without the benefits. Public health experts noted that, for decades, such benefits—fewer asthma attacks, hospitalizations, chronic illnesses, and premature deaths—had overwhelmingly justified stronger pollution controls, often with benefit‑cost ratios of twenty or thirty to one. Now the agency claims that estimating the monetary value of those lives is too uncertain to be meaningful, even as it continues to tally the costs to industry with precision. The moral message is chillingly clear: human suffering does not count.

When I first worked on that World Bank report, I struggled with the practice of assigning a dollar value to human life. It felt morally fraught and theologically thin. But watching this new EPA rule emerge, I find myself more disturbed by its opposite: the naked declaration, under technocratic cover, that the lives of those who breathe polluted air are worth precisely zero. Ignoring health benefits while counting only industry costs assigns a value of zero to human life and makes it easier for polluters to do more harm. This is not a neutral methodological tweak. It is a confession about whom the government serves: not “the people” whose bodies absorb the damage, but the corporations for whom any constraint is a cost.

Arendt helps name another dimension of what is happening here. In her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how great harm can be carried out, not only by monstrous sadists, but by ordinary functionaries who stop thinking. The essence of totalitarianism, she wrote, is “to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.” Evil becomes “banal” when people no longer ask whether their work is good or just, but simply follow procedures, optimize spreadsheets, and update regulations in ways that quietly empty human lives of significance. A cost‑benefit analysis that assigns no value to our health is just another small step in that direction.

All of this brings me back to the reason I embarked on this substack project a few months ago. The moment we inhabit clearly requires more than technical expertise or partisan allegiance. It demands wakefulness: the willingness to see how language (“anti-human net zero agenda”), bureaucratic rules (EPA cost‑benefit methods), and economic calculations can train us not to notice whose lives are being sacrificed. It demands critical thinking: the courage to question which “facts” are being counted and which are being rendered invisible. And it demands moral imagination: the capacity to envision a political and economic order in which protecting vulnerable bodies is not an afterthought, but the starting point.

To think is to resist a post‑truth politics that tells us, with a straight face, that caring for the climate is anti‑human and that sick children are worth less than quarterly earnings. To think is to refuse that inevitability and to begin, however modestly, to imagine a different way of valuing life.

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The first age of globalization

The episode begins with the basic puzzle: why does this apparently distant slice of history matter for today’s crises? Tony argues that the decades between 1870 and 1914 saw the birth of the modern economy: the second industrial revolution, mass electrification, internal combustion, chemicals, and the rise of the United States as the world’s leading industrial power. Trade and capital flows exploded, migration soared, and a rigid gold standard locked major economies into a system of fixed exchange rates and “rules of the game” set by financial elites. On paper, it looked like a triumph of liberal globalization; in reality, it was built on the backs of workers and indebted farmers who had almost no political voice.​

Winners, losers, and the “long depression”

Tony then walks through the mechanics of the gold standard and why it worked politically only in an era of restricted democracy. Trade imbalances were “corrected” through deflation—falling prices that translated into lower wages, higher real debts, and mass unemployment for those at the bottom. The result was a largely forgotten “long depression” from 1873 to 1896, punctuated by financial panics, bank failures, collapsing commodity prices, and sharp spikes in joblessness comparable to the Great Depression. Elites remained committed to the gold standard and free capital mobility, while workers and farmers bore the risk and the pain.​

Populists, socialists, and the limits of reform

Politically, this economic regime produced explosive ferment on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, inequality rose sharply, industrial conflict turned violent, and the People’s Party and figures like William Jennings Bryan railed against the “cross of gold” and the crushing deflation imposed on debtors and laborers. In Europe, inequality was even higher, rooted in feudal legacies of great landed estates, and socialist parties became mass movements as workers gained the vote. Yet socialist parties often refused to enter coalition governments for fear of “taint” by bourgeois politics, while conservative and liberal elites were reluctant to embrace full social democracy or build robust welfare states.​

Catholic social teaching and the fear of extremes

The episode also traces the birth of Catholic social teaching as a response to both brutal capitalism and revolutionary socialism. Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum condemned socialism’s abolition of private property while insisting on just wages, the right to unionize, and a duty of the state to protect workers and the poor. Laura highlights how the Catholic tradition’s focus on the dignity of the person set it against both collectivist state socialism and newer “techno‑feudalist” fantasies of corporate overlords and passive subjects. Later, figures like John Paul II would deepen this critique, rejecting communism’s suppression of the person while also warning that unrestrained liberal capitalism was no Christian answer either.​

From inequality to empire—and to war

Crucially, the episode argues that governments largely chose the wrong escape route from this combustible mix of inequality, crisis, and social unrest. Instead of fully developing welfare states and labor rights, many channeled tensions into nationalism, protectionism, and imperial expansion, as theorists like John Hobson and later Lenin observed. High savings at the top and weak mass consumption at home fueled a hunt for colonies, markets, and raw materials abroad, entrenching systems of extraction that deliberately kept colonized populations undereducated, disorganized, and politically voiceless. Combined with rising militarism and racialized ideologies, these dynamics helped turn Europe into a set of heavily armed rival blocs that finally collided in 1914—with catastrophic consequences.​

Why this history matters now

Tony closes by suggesting that this earlier age of globalization is not just a prelude to the interwar period, but a mirror for our own moment of high inequality, financial fragility, and rising nationalist backlash. When elites ignore the social question and treat workers and debtors as shock absorbers for crises, politics tends to seek release through scapegoating, xenophobia, and authoritarianism rather than social democracy and shared prosperity. Laura points listeners to Tony’s Washington Post op‑ed on William Jennings Bryan and notes that his forthcoming book on democracy and economic justice will expand on the themes introduced here.​

If you want to understand not only how the first age of globalization ended in catastrophe but also what it can teach us about steering today’s global economy away from similar cliffs, this episode is a dense but accessible place to start.

Matt comes to this as a long‑time insider in finance, not as an academic economist -someone formed both by the discipline of reading balance sheets and by a storyteller’s instinct to ask what is missing from the dominant plot. What is missing from the neat circular diagram of firms and households trading labor and goods, as he notes, is everything that actually makes that circle possible: the flows of energy and materials that enter it, and the wastes it expels into land, water, and air. Ecological economics, drawing on figures like Herman Daly and frameworks like planetary boundaries, begins by insisting that the economy is not a self‑contained machine but a subsystem of the Earth, now “full” rather than “empty.”​

This shift has profoundly moral implications. If seven of nine planetary boundaries are already breached, then continued growth in material throughput is not a sign of prudence or ingenuity, but of a failure of stewardship toward future generations as well as all non‑human life. Here the conversation touches Catholic social teaching and Laudato Si’, which warn against a technocratic paradigm that treats nature as raw material for manipulation rather than a common home we are called to care for as stewards, not dominators. Prosperity, on this view, cannot simply mean “more stuff”; it has to be re‑anchored in ideas of human flourishing that go back to Aristotle: lives of virtue, meaning, and relationship lived within the ecological conditions that make any life possible.​

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Yet finance today is structured around the opposite assumption. Instead of channeling savings into real, shared goods like homes, hospitals, renewable energy, resilient local infrastructure, it has become a vast machine for trading and gambling, often indifferent to social cost so long as short‑term returns are maximized. The infamous Abacus deal, in which a deliberately toxic security was constructed and sold on to unsuspecting buyers while being shorted for profit, is not a bug in this system but a vivid expression of its underlying ethic. Matt’s image of financiers as dragons sitting on piles of gold, oblivious to the burning landscape outside the cave, captures how far the sector has drifted from any notion of serving the real economy, let alone serving a just and livable planet.​

The episode does not pretend that shifting from this growth‑at‑all‑costs model to a post‑growth, wellbeing‑oriented economy will be easy or politically tidy. Degrowth, as a word, triggers understandable fears of permanent austerity and zero‑sum conflict, and it raises hard questions about justice between the “overgrown” Global North and countries in the South that still need to grow to secure basic capabilities. Matt’s answer is twofold: first, that degrowth is best understood as a family of policy ideas aimed at bringing the overconsuming minority back within planetary boundaries, not as a blanket commandment for the world’s poor to stay poor; and second, that people are far more open to the concrete policies such as shorter work weeks, universal basic services, investment in care and low‑carbon infrastructure than to the provocative label itself.​

If there is a through‑line connecting ecological economics, Catholic social teaching, and your own “moral revolution” project, it is the insistence that the economy should be ordered to human and more‑than‑human flourishing, not the other way around. That implies re‑politicizing questions of purpose: what is finance for, who does it serve, what do we as societies count as “enough”? It also means re‑localizing power through practices of subsidiarity, solidarity, and bioregional care for the specific lands and waters that sustain us. The choice, as Arketa’s first paper

puts it, is whether we allow these changes to arrive by disaster or by design; the work of a post‑growth finance is to make design thinkable again.​

We begin by exploring the long and complex history of international climate negotiations and the critical issues at stake today.

From the 1992 Rio Summit, which laid the groundwork for global cooperation through the creation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the world has grappled with how to act collectively to limit global warming. Landmark moments include the Kyoto Protocol’s binding targets for developed countries, the challenging but pivotal Copenhagen talks, and the breakthrough Paris Agreement in 2015, when nearly every nation committed to ambitious emissions reductions.

Despite progress, the path has been uneven. Today, global emissions patterns show developed countries slowly lowering emissions even as developing economies continue to rise. Technological advances in renewables and batteries offer hope, but most existing national commitments fall short of what science demands.

At COP30 currently underway in Belém, negotiations intensify around some of the most contentious issues:

• Fossil Fuel Phaseout: After first being mentioned explicitly in the 2021 Glasgow COP, the calls to phase down and eventually phase out fossil fuels face geopolitical resistance, especially from fossil fuel producers and some developing countries emphasizing development rights.

• Trade and Carbon Pricing: The debate over border carbon adjustments reflects tensions between protecting climate progress and ensuring fair trade for developing economies vulnerable to carbon tariffs.

• Climate Finance: The ongoing struggle to secure sufficient, transparent, and equitable funding for poorer countries to adapt and recover from climate impacts remains unresolved, threatening trust and cooperation.

These negotiations are about more than policy: they are about justice, shared responsibility, and the urgent need for global solidarity. This episode unpacks how far we have come, the challenges ahead, and why this moment demands our full attention.

Join us as we delve into the moral and practical dimensions of the climate crisis unfolding on the world stage.

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I’m excited to share my recent conversation on the SRI360 podcast, where I discussed the evolving landscape of sustainable and responsible investing, the power of syste

ms thinking, and the urgent need for ethical leadership in finance and beyond.​

In this episode, I reflect very candidly on my personal and professional journey over the last 20 years. We delve into questions such as: How can investors align their portfolios with their values? What does it mean to design for impact, not just profit? And how can we build systems that serve both people and the planet?​

This conversation is especially relevant for anyone interested in the intersection of ethics, economics, and ecology, which are the core themes of our Moral Revolution substack and podcast. If you’re interested in exploring how to reimagine finance as a force for good, or curious about how systems thinking and theology can transform our approach to sustainability, I invite you to listen to the full episode here: SRI360 Podcast: Laura Segafredo.​

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At its heart, the Scandinavian story is one of consensus over conflict: capital and labor choosing cooperation over class struggle, and the state serving not as a controller but as a guarantor of social rights. Built on the principle of the folkhemmet — “the people’s home” — the model imagined the nation as a family bound by solidarity rather than privilege. Every citizen, not just the poor, was entitled to healthcare, education, unemployment insurance, pensions, and parental leave as a social right of citizenship.

Tony explains how, beginning in the 1930s, Sweden pioneered Keynesian economic policy long before it was fashionable — stimulating demand through public works and farm supports that brought recovery from the Great Depression. Out of this emerged the historic 1938 Saltsjöbaden Agreement, setting a framework for wage cooperation between employers and unions, and later the Rehn–Meidner model, which tied full employment, productivity, and equality together through active labor policies and solidaristic wages. It was, as Tony put it, subsidiarity in action — an economy managed through cooperation, not coercion.

By the 1970s, Scandinavia had achieved nearly universal welfare coverage — free healthcare and education, generous social security, publicly funded childcare, and six months of paid parental leave. Yet the episode also explored the limits of the experiment: demographic pressures that now stretch the welfare state, and political debates over migration and cohesion — who belongs within the “people’s home” in increasingly diverse societies.

Laura highlights how cooperative ownership, especially in Denmark’s financial and housing sectors, offered a quieter revolution — economic democracy. “Finance is infrastructure,” she reflected, “and citizens should be its owners.” Tony agreed, tracing attempts in the 1970s to go further still through wage-earner funds — a proposal to give workers collective ownership stakes, decades before similar ideas gained renewed attention in American debates.

As always, the conversation returned to the moral heart of economic design. Social democracy was neither state socialism nor laissez-faire capitalism, but a disciplined commitment to mutual responsibility — one that made possible Europe’s most enduring prosperity and its happiest, most trusting societies.

And as Laura notes in closing, those high-trust, high-wellbeing outcomes didn’t come at the expense of economic dynamism: Scandinavian stock market returns have matched U.S. performance over decades.

The real question, then, for listeners — and perhaps for policymakers — is whether the “people’s home” could ever take root elsewhere.

What do you think? Please join the conversation - we’d love to hear from you!

Despite its sweeping influence on European society, economy, and institutions, Christian democracy rarely receives the attention it deserves - certainly this side of the Atlantic. Far from a historical footnote, this movement shaped constitutions, social policy, economic reforms, and the very fabric of democracy itself. You will hear Tony leads a fascinating journey through postwar history, highlighting the real meaning of Christian democracy and why its forgotten lessons matter today.

What Is Christian Democracy?

Emerging from the moral void left by fascism and war, Christian democracy drew on Catholic social teaching and a profound belief in the dignity of every person. Unlike fascism, Christian democracy offered an inclusive, communitarian vision rooted in Aristotelian and Thomist traditions. It embraced liberal democracy, but insisted on reforming capitalism with firm commitments to justice, solidarity, and the common good.

This “middle way” rejected both unfettered individualism and collectivist authoritarianism, instead envisioning a society where private property and markets existed within moral boundaries, always serving justice and the needs of the most vulnerable.

The Moral and Intellectual Foundations

A key intellectual force behind this movement was Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher who pioneered “personalism,” claiming that true democracy is born from the Christian affirmation of human dignity. For Maritain, this meant a society upholding both individual rights and deep social responsibility - a vision at odds with both fascism and the totalitarian left.

Importantly, Maritain and postwar Christian democrats did not retreat from modernity. Instead, they sought to shape secular freedoms around a richer vision of solidarity, rights, and the flourishing of every person. His influence extended to the drafting of universal human rights documents and inspired a new engagement among Catholics and Christians with democracy, labor, and social justice.

From Theory to Constitution: The Camaldoli Code

Italy’s story offers a powerful example. In 1943, as fascism collapsed, a clandestine gathering of Catholic intellectuals, future leaders, and economists drafted the Camaldoli Code: seventy-six principles outlining the moral bedrock of reconstruction. This profound document, deeply inspired by Maritain and Catholic social teaching, shaped the Italian constitution and those of other postwar democracies.

Essential values articulated included:

• The dignity and equality of all persons

• Solidarity and the duty to work for the common good

• The universal destination of material goods

• The primacy of labor as the source of wealth

• The imperative for justice in contracts and state intervention

Despite its obscurity outside Italy, the Camaldoli Code remains a testament to how vision and imagination can give birth to new social orders amidst devastation.

Christian Democracy and the Postwar Welfare State

Christian democracy was central to creating Europe’s welfare states - often even more expansive than their Anglo-American or Scandinavian counterparts during the early years. Social spending soared, built around social insurance, family benefits, and solidarity. A notable feature was the model’s focus on protecting the family breadwinner - though, as the episode discusses, its patriarchal biases delayed gender equality in the labor market and beyond.

Another vital principle, subsidiarity, aimed to empower local communities and families wherever possible, with higher authorities stepping in only when local institutions could not meet people’s needs. This approach shaped everything from unemployment insurance to pension systems, worker participation, and the unique structure of the European welfare model.

Building Europe—and Its Challenges

The Christian democratic commitment to solidarity and subsidiarity also drove the creation of supranational institutions, most notably the European Union. Leaders like Adenauer, Schuman, and De Gasperi (the “founders of Europe”) were steeped in this tradition. They envisioned a Europe bound not by narrow nationalism, but by a shared commitment to dignity, peace, and transnational cooperation.

Yet the episode acknowledges how, in recent decades, this legacy has faded. Neoliberal market thinking, deregulation, and a neglect of the movement’s original ideals have left many disillusioned with European institutions. Returning to the movement’s foundational values of pluralism, the common good, and authentic human dignity could offer much-needed moral clarity today.

Lasting Lessons (and a Cinematic Nod)

Christian democracy is not “Christian nationalism.” It is an inclusive, pluralistic vision that affirmed the rights and dignity of everyone, regardless of faith or background. As Italy’s Don Camillo films charmingly show, the postwar decades were built through cooperation (and lively tension) between Christian and leftist ideals, emphasizing what people held in common even as they differed.

The episode ends with a reminder: even amidst chaos, a principled vision of human flourishing can guide whole societies toward a better future.

What are your thoughts on the legacies of Christian democracy? Is there a lesson for our own fractured political moment? Leave a comment, share the episode, and let us know what topics you’d like to see next on Moral Revolution.

What if we could look back, to a moment when a battered society did more than just react to crisis, but rebuilt its very foundations with bold moral vision? There’s a blueprint for us in the story of the Camaldoli Code.

How a Group of Young Catholics Rewrote Italy's Future

In July 1943, as World War II raged and fascism collapsed, about 30 young Italian Catholics (university graduates and professionals, all under 40) gathered at the remote Camaldoli monastery. Most had been involved in Catholic Action, which the regime had banned. Among them were future prime ministers (Alcide de Gasperi, Aldo Moro, Giulio Andreotti), a future mayor of Florence, and religious leaders who would shape not only Italy but Europe.

Their mission was urgent and audacious: to articulate the moral and civic foundations for post-fascist Italy - not in abstract, but as “operating principles” for rebuilding a society from the ashes of totalitarianism and war.

Over the following two years, this group crafted what became known as the Camaldoli Code: 76 principles rooted in Catholic social teaching, grounded in the dignity of the person, human rights, solidarity, and justice. This vision would decisively shape the Italian Republic (proclaimed in 1946) and its progressive, people-centered Constitution (1948).

A New Model for Society

What made the Camaldoli Code so extraordinary wasn’t just its values, but its ability to find consensus among people with sharp generational, ideological, and personal differences. The Code explicitly rejected both totalitarian and radical individualist visions, insisting that:

“The purpose of the State is the promotion of the common good, in which all citizens can participate according to their aptitudes … The State must not replace the citizen in the pursuit of his or her own good, but there must always be a general directive of social justice, such as the protection and uplift of the less privileged, provided that the requirements of distributive and commutative justice are respected.”

They saw society as organic - an “ecosystem,” we might say today - of people, families, and communities, all oriented toward the common good. Their beliefs were not theoretical: “Faith is not passive,” they argued. “Responsibility must become initiative. Otherwise, it becomes complacency. Being on the right side is not enough—without participation, you end up outside of history.”

The Church’s Path and the Lesson for Action

This new engagement didn’t come out of nowhere. For decades, the relationship between Italian Catholics and politics had been fraught, at times ambiguous, even complicit with authoritarianism. Some Catholics had seen Mussolini's fascism as a lesser evil; the 1929 Lateran Treaties gave the Church new autonomy, but at the cost of silencing it on social justice and limiting Catholic Action’s influence.

That began to change as Catholic lay movements grew, especially among students and intellectuals, even as fascism tried to stamp them out. Exiles and repression only deepened many young Catholics’ resolve. Influences from European thinkers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier pushed Catholic social thought beyond doctrine toward concrete democratic activism, while papal encyclicals such as Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Summi Pontificatus (1939) challenged Catholics to see the moral stakes of both economic life and political freedom.

But the decisive turning point was Pope Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas radio address: an implicit but unmistakable condemnation of racism, persecution, and tyranny. Spurred by this, Italy’s Catholic student federation (FUCI) called a meeting called “The Responsibility of Intellect” in January 1943, which set in motion the preparatory work that led to Camaldoli later that year.

The Ingredients of Moral Reconstruction

What’s most striking, and urgently relevant for us today, are the core lessons of the Camaldoli story:

1. Consensus is Possible, If We Start with Shared Moral Principles
In 1943, no one knew if the Camaldoli project would succeed. Deep divisions existed even among its members - by age, experience, and vision. Yet tireless work by their leaders reconciled differences. The Catholic Church, much like any society, was (and is) a wide tent. But in the end, the drafters succeeded in crystallizing principles that could guide everyone. Less purity tests, and more shared values.

2. Translate Theory to Praxis
Faith and moral conviction must become action. Many Church leaders initially dismissed Camaldoli’s work as doctrinally “impure.” Pope Pius XII, however, saw the urgency for bold, innovative reflection and linked the futures of democracy and peace. Politics is inherently messy, and pluralism can be uncomfortable. Still, people of faith can - and must - find ways to bridge doctrine and practical reform.

3. Invest in Grassroots Engagement and the Next Generation
Grassroots Catholic and faith-based movements, especially those fostering youth formation and public service, proved essential. The Church’s greatest social impact came not by narrowing itself to a single issue, but by empowering lay people to take leadership and shape public life in its multifaceted ethical dimensions. This is a template sorely needed today, when so much activism has been reduced to single-issue politics or performative outrage (see: abortion).

Why This Matters Now

This story is not just a distant history lesson. Today, we face wounds both material (the climate crisis) and moral (depleted trust, norms, and solidarity - just look at the debates about immigration). “Politics” is an ugly word, yet as the Camaldoli vision affirms, neither social peace nor universal brotherhood is possible without good politics.

Catholics, and all people of faith and conscience, must reflect on what democracy should look like in the 21st century, and what genuine human and ecological flourishing requires. We must step out of passivity. Responsibility must become initiative, or it hardens into complacency. Being on the right side is no longer enough: if you don’t engage in shaping history, you risk being left out of it.

As Churchill said, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.” The Camaldoli Code invites us to look back so we can move forward: to build a society that puts the person before profit, the community before the market, and our shared world before narrow self-interest.

In a moment that feels, once again, “between the ruins,” may the example of Camaldoli help us imagine - and act on - a blueprint for moral revolution.

I recently read Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in full for a class assignment, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. That’s what true moral clarity looks like. Inspired by King's letter, I decided to write my own, highlighting the major injustices we face today: economic inequality and environmental devastation. Both are symptoms of our current neoliberal economic system, which is in urgent need of radical transformation. Here’s what I wrote.

To all faith leaders of good will:

There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal, and where moral hesitation in the face of injustice becomes complicity. We find ourselves today at such a crossroads, not merely as individuals, but as a society, as communities of faith, and as stewards of a wounded natural world.

Economic oppression is not a thing of the past: it is intentionally, deliberately woven into the fabric of daily life in our ultra capitalist society. When working parents need to choose between rent and childcare, when families ration medicine because healthcare is priced like a luxury, when paychecks stagnate while the powerful gobble up ever greater portions of wealth, we are confronted by a system not just tilted, but rigged, calibrated to favor the few and justified by a politics superficially termed “populist” but in reality beholden only to a very few, immensely privileged, elites.

And the destruction that this system has engendered is not only economic, but ecological. Our forests, oceans, glaciers and rivers, the living systems on which all depend, are pillaged and ground to dust so that the engines of profit may roar for a few more years. Meanwhile, it is the poor, the marginalized, the already burdened, who breathe the soot, drink the poisoned water, and see their lands vanish beneath rising tides, devastating floods and scorching sun.

And what do we hear from those dubbed “pragmatists,” “centrists,” and “moderates”? Too often, a litany of platitudes: suggestions for minor tweaks, promises to trust technological innovation, or calls for patience as if history itself is an honest broker. I say to you, as Dr. King said to the moderates of his era: justice too long delayed is justice denied. Small tweaks to an engine built for exploitation cannot bring liberation. Our moment demands radical imagination, prophetic courage, and, yes, nonviolent disobedience to unjust laws and a rigged economic system.

The crisis we face is not merely economic or environmental: it is fundamentally a moral one. Where is the moral voice in our political discourse? Too often, it is muffled, ignored, deferred to technocrats or traded away for campaign funds. But the sacred texts of every tradition call us to justice, to mercy, and to courage. Faith is not merely a private comfort but a public commitment. If our faith communities found the conviction to organize together - not just for charity, but for justice - politicians could be finally compelled to serve the good of the many, not the greed of the few. As St. Augustine reminded us, “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.” Philanthropy and acts of mercy, however noble, can never take the place of organized, democratic action for structural change.

I call upon the communities of faith - synagogues, churches, mosques, temples, all houses of worship - to join hands in organizing as a mighty voting bloc. Let us not be content with charity at the margins, but demand policies that put health, education, human dignity, and a flourishing planet at the center of public life. Let us stand together, refusing to keep silent while creation is ravaged and neighbors suffer the indignity of poverty.

We are told to wait, to trust reforms that never come, to trim our dreams to the narrow channels deemed “realistic.” But realism without moral vision is only cowardice draped in the robes of propriety. Now is the time to imagine better, organize boldly, and march together in nonviolent resistance not out of hate, but out of a deep and abiding love for all people, and for this earth we share as a community of creation.

Let us not yield to apathy or resignation. The arc of the moral universe still bends toward justice, but only when we gather in faith and courage to seize it with both hands.

Yours in struggle, hope, and faith,

Laura

The Limits of Human-Centered Thinking

Dr. Johnson is clear: putting humans at the center of creation (what theologians call “anthropocentrism”) is not just an ecological error, but a theological one. When we imagine God as caring only about one species, “we think of ourselves as little gods,” Johnson warns, “and we then think we have the right to use other species to our own advantage without considering their own vital reality in themselves as beloved of God.”

She reminds us that every Christian creed begins by naming God as the Creator of heaven and earth. Losing sight of this origin, she says, “is a distortion right away in our ethics.”

Community of Creation, Not a Pyramid

Rather than a pyramid with humans at the top, Johnson invites us to see life as a “community of creation”: a web of kinship across all living things. Quoting scripture’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” she asks us to expand our conception of neighbor: “Does it apply only to people?…What about crossing the species line and seeing other species as kin?”

In this vision, humans become caretakers within creation, reliant on the very systems we so often seek to dominate: “The tree is perfectly happy in its existence, whether humans are on this planet or not…But think about human life without trees. They are absolutely essential to our existence.”

Deep Incarnation: Christ, Cosmos, and Darwin

Johnson’s theology bridges faith and science with rare depth. She describes how evolutionary science, especially Darwin, shaped her thinking: “Darwin’s wisdom was to see connections where other people had not…to see that in the end, we are all part of the tree of life…different branches, but from the same source.” She ties this scientific story to Christian concepts like “deep incarnation”—the idea that the Word became flesh, and that flesh connects us not just to God, but to all of nature and even the stardust of the cosmos itself.

Beyond Dominion and the Limits of Stewardship

Dr. Johnson takes on familiar but misunderstood scriptural ideas. She explains that the biblical “dominion” granted to humans is meant as delegated care, not domination: “Whoever had dominion was a representative, to make sure the king’s will was being carried out…So rather than giving human beings the right to exploit…the word dominion really means take care of this. You’re here in my name; what would God want for these creatures?”

She appreciates “stewardship” as a step forward, but warns it falls short: “Stewardship ignores the fact that what we humans are stewarding is also giving back to us. So the mutuality of our relationship in the community is overlooked.” Instead, she calls for reciprocity and real interdependence, rather than a continuing hierarchy that keeps humans at the center.

Eco-Conversion: No Divide Between Ecology and Justice

Johnson is a fierce advocate for what Pope Francis calls “integral ecology”: the inseparable tie between environmental crisis and social injustice (we talk about this in Episode 3). “Who suffers most from ecological degradation? It’s the poor,” she notes, sharing stories of communities poisoned by pollution or devastated by climate change. Her call: “To hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor together.”

The Feminist Lens: Expanding Our Imagination of God

Dr. Johnson’s feminist perspective runs deep: she’s spent decades challenging the masculinized, exclusionary images of God: “The Western imagination of God is still, in large part, Michelangelo’s art in the Sistine Chapel: male, old, white, wealthy. But the God of the scriptures…is the God who hears the cries of the suffering, who liberates, who is beyond any image or word we can use.” The patriarchal tradition of the Church, she says, “makes me feel it’s even more urgent to offer alternative visions.”

Hope That Resists Despair

In a time of rising eco-anxiety and political backlash, Dr. Johnson does not serve up false optimism. Instead, she grounds hope in action and integrity:

“The fundamental reason to keep going is your own integrity, your own truth…Not as an individual, but as part of a community of caring people that see a value in loving the earth rather than destroying it.”

What matters, she says, is to “push for that, and resist in every possible way the political rolling back that’s going on… The important thing is not that we succeed, but that we die trying.”

Takeaways for the Moral Revolution

• Anthropocentrism is not only ecologically dangerous, but distorts Christian faith itself.

• Humans belong in a community of creation, not perched at the top.

• Ecological stewardship must be mutual, humble, and kinship-based, not just managerial.

• Integral ecology means “the cry of the earth” is bound to “the cry of the poor.”

• Feminist theology is essential to freeing our imagination of God and our sense of justice.

• Hope endures in collective action, not outcomes. Integrity matters, and the next generation is counting on us.

If you’re looking for wisdom that connects faith, science, and the ethics of planetary care, you’ll find much to ponder in this conversation. Listen to the full episode for even more insights from Dr. Johnson, and join us in the ongoing work of moral—and ecological—revolution.

What resonated with you most? Join the conversation in the comments, or share your thoughts directly—let’s keep building this community of care!

What Christians Miss About Stewardship

Johnson’s theology turns upside down centuries of thinking about our relationship with the Earth. Traditionally, Christian stewardship has often meant managing the world on God’s behalf, in a kind of “CEO for God” way. But Johnson cautions that this still puts humans, and our interests, at the center. She insists that true stewardship isn’t dominion (as in the famous wording of Genesis 1:28 which many use to this day to justify an extractive, exploitive mindset towards creation), but a call to community and kinship with all living things. We are not managers standing above creation but members within the web of life, answerable to one another and to something greater than us.

Where Finance Gets Stewardship Wrong

Let’s turn to the world of finance, where I’ve spent much of my career. Stewardship has become a trendy word there too, especially as investors wake up to climate risk. But in practice, stewardship in finance often boils down to one thing: the pursuit of short-term financial returns for shareholders. The legal system in the United States reinforces this. “Fiduciary duty”, the duty of managers to do right by their clients or shareholders (i.e. the owners of capital), has been interpreted mostly as a duty to maximize profits, even when those profits accelerate deforestation, drive up emissions, or destabilize communities.

Other countries, like Canada, have tried to broaden the definition of fiduciary duty to include the environment and the public good. But in the U.S., attempts to legally require companies and investors to account for systemic risks like climate change have largely failed. The system is built not for the common good, but for the individual account statement at the end of the quarter. Profits over flourishing and capital above labor, nature, and everything else.

Why This Matters Now

The upshot? The finance world’s idea of stewardship is profoundly inadequate to the challenges we face. The stakes - rising seas, raging wildfires, mass extinction - are not confined to a financial quarter or shareholder meeting. They’re systemic, generational. Johnson’s vision, where stewardship is about belonging, humility, and solidarity with all creation, offers a moral horizon radically unlike today’s market orthodoxy.

Toward a New Stewardship

To tackle the climate crisis, we must move from stewardship as property management to stewardship as participation in a web of life that requires care, dignity, and mutual responsibility. Investors, business leaders, and everyday people must challenge the narrow view that our only duty is to maximize short term financial returns of the shareholder class. Our shared survival, and flourishing, as a community of creation depends on it.

If a “moral revolution” is to mean anything, it must be rooted in a stewardship that answers to the whole, not just the self.