Ranging from small city parks to large tracks of wilderness, America is blessed with an abundance of public lands. These lands offer the American people a wide range of benefits—economically, agriculturally, ecologically, recreationally, culturally, spiritually and even medically. It is impossible to quantify the extraordinary value of these lands. Meanwhile, proponents of transferring federally owned public lands to state and private ownership continue to gain political traction, a scenario that threatens to divest from Americans many of the benefits these lands provide while subdividing them among corporations and private individuals.
Because of the immense value and importance of public lands, and the threat to their continuation, numerous community, conservation, angling, recreation, and hunting organizations advocate for their protection. However, little work has been done to advocate for public lands drawing from biblical theology. Underlying the potential of such work is the ideal of commonwealth coursing throughout the land traditions of ancient Israel and Luke’s accounts of the early Christian community. This biblical ideal of holding land and resources in common—with all of its political, social, and economic implications in the times of ancient Israel and the early church—can help American public land advocates within Christian communities argue for the importance, utility, and faithfulness of holding lands in common today.
But before the promise of a biblical theology rooted in commonwealth can be realized, Christian advocates of public lands need to address the tragic reality that ancient Israel’s common land came through (at least as the Bible tells it) genocidal conquest. They also need to acknowledge American common lands likewise came through conquest that was in many respects genocidal. Further drawing together these troubling parallels, they also must contend with the truth that Israel’s conquest—this biblical model of conquest—was the justification many of our American ancestors used to frame and promote their God-given, manifest destiny to colonize their new “promised land.” The resurgence of this rationale among Christian nationalists today underscores the importance of this recognition. The land traditions of the Bible provide both notable promise and peril.
This paper will overview the conceptional and volitional resources the biblical ideal of commonwealth has to offer those pursuing public lands advocacy within Christian communities. It will also argue that the acknowledgment of conquest in both ancient Israel and colonial America, the misguided theology which legitimated it, and the tragic consequences surrounding it, must be engaged in order for a biblical theology of public lands to have integrity and to reach its potential as resource for Christian communities. It will elaborate four reasons in support of this claim.
First, the calling to acknowledge and repent from the injustices we have committed is elemental to the biblical witness, from Moses and the prophets to Jesus and the rest of the biblical tradition. To ignore the injustice of conquest, or to hide it under white-washed versions of our biblical and national histories, or to celebrate colonization within a Christian nationalist founding narrative, while at the same time claiming to articulate a biblically informed advocacy of public lands, would be an act of hypocrisy. Second, and relatedly, we must acknowledge not only that the biblical stories have been used in the past to legitimate oppression, but that the Bible itself as a context-bound document embodies and legitimates patterns of oppression—even while it also offers strident denunciations of injustice and earnest instruction to safeguard human dignity and thriving. Third, our acknowledgement of conquest, and an accompanying awareness of how our American ancestors have acted in the past to divorce one group of people from the land they occupy in order to claim it for themselves, may serve the very useful purpose of helping us recognize when and how others are seeking to colonize our public lands today. Finally, our acknowledgement of how we have sinned against our indigenous neighbors, and our serious consideration of what we might still do to repent of that sin, may open within our hearts and minds avenues for them to grace us with their insights on what it means to hold land in common and in communion with all of its inhabitants.
This paper will overview the conceptional and volitional resources the biblical ideal of commonwealth has to offer those pursuing public lands advocacy within Christian communities. It will also argue that the acknowledgment of conquest in both ancient Israel and colonial America, the misguided theology which legitimated it, and the tragic consequences surrounding it, must be engaged in order for a biblical theology of public lands to have integrity and to reach its potential as resource for Christian communities.