The Green Good News, by T. Wilson Dickinson, presents a post-neoliberal (i.e., “post market-based”) view of Christianity, released from the constraints imposed by Empire which have “…left many of us injured and feeling incapable” (p. 121). It urges a non-competitive, egalitarian world-view that returns to the early Biblical principles of Sabbath rest, jubilee release and related deuterocanonical norms. In simple terms, using themes and metaphors taken from the world of agriculture and food, it calls us all to treat each other according to the Golden Rule, cease mammon-worship and watch out for each other’s interests.


Dickinson writes: “He is a Lord that calls for the kingdom of God, a new creation of mutual service and love rather than an army of slaves who serve a few elites” (p. 10). The problems with slavery have been well-attested, but there’s a bigger problem when, as Aristotle observed and Dickinson would probably agree, slaves come to like their own slavery, which they may not even perceive to be slavery at all.


The Christian message has been so sanitized and gentrified however, Dickinson asserts, that even those who should find it most challenging, if not downright threatening, can appropriate it in its new habiliment and feel comfortable. This should simply not be so, but it is. It is high time for the message to be proclaimed in its fulness. This book illustrates some modest steps in that direction.


The book is weakened in places by surmise and generalization. An example is Dickinson’s story about the fan he purchased.  After a paragraph of indignation and hand-wringing, Dickinson writes “Though I do not know the particulars of the human injustice or the ecological destruction upon which it [the fan] was built, I can imagine.” That won’t do. No one cares what you or I might imagine injustices to be, but we care deeply about the documented realities that are destroying our world and its inhabitants.


I’d invite Dickinson to spend a bit of time becoming familiar with initiatives like ISO 14000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_14000), an international effort that directly addresses the entire cycle of how things are created, starting with extracted raw materials, through production, use and final disposal. He may find that system problems share something important in common with gospel proclamations. It may, too, help provide him with some insight into the composition and dynamics of that liminal space between individual and group action, and those of larger, even global scope.


Of course, if we’re simply destroying “the system,” then it certainly doesn’t matter whether we’re making efforts to improve it. Dickinson seems to believe that “going green” is merely the Empire’s lip service to gospel values that present us with a false sense of freedom. A more radical transformation is required. “…we should be seeking conversion. Those who are midstream between the few elite and the mass of poor should be finding communities of solidarity and transformation that help them to understand how the world could be different” (p. 131).


Poignantly, Dickinson writes that “We are out of practice with being and working together” (p.134). Taken with a few comments shortly appearing thereafter, his initial failures at organizing, and the way he uses language, I wondered whether the author was lamenting the pain of an ache of an entirely different provenance within his own heart.


There are a number of interesting exercises at the back of the book, with thought-provoking questions. They could easily form the core of a modified lectio divina session for people interested in the issues Dickinson highlights.


I would recommend this book to anyone who might wish to configure his or her life more strictly to Christian principles rather than to market-based forces which, as Dickinson notes, can take on the character of the demonic. Disagreement with Dickinson’s interpretations of parables and other Scripture should not obscure the deeper value of this book, which challenges our apprehension of the Gospel message itself.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.