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ABSTRACT
The sociologist and theologian Chris Allen develops aspects of both Liberation and Postliberal theologies to launch a critique of the two dominant contemporary Christian responses to British food insecurity: food charity and food justice campaigning. Allen maps an alternative approach: a land activist Church that draws on its own historical counter-cultural practices and takes an oppositional stance to the contemporary state and market nexus. Drawing on the work of the Italian philosopher and political theorist Roberto Esposito, this essay argues that Allen's goals could be more fully realized by investigating with greater nuance Christian ontology, ecclesiology and the role of the state. Turning again to Allen's sources in this essay, the variety and potential of foodbank volunteering along with the legitimacy of food justice campaigns are critically reintegrated into a more radical project, a project which includes but is not limited to the sphere of the ecclesia.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Charles Samuel Christie Pemberton wrote a PhD on the doctrine of creation in the works of John Milbank and Gustavo Gutiérrez, developing these authors to formulate a radical critique of charities that serve homeless people in the context of neoliberalism. Since moving to Durham University, he has been teaching Political Theology and Catholic Social Thought at the department of Theology and Religion and working for the William Leech research committee on a project on food banks, poverty and church action in the north-east of England. He is currently writing a book on food banks, political theology and neoliberalism for SCM.
Notes
1 Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, “Health and Harmony.”
2 Monbiot, “Eating the Earth.” A key issue which I unfortunately do not have space to engage with here is vegetarianism and veganism, as shown in the excellent Fairlie, “Can Britain Feed Itself?”; Mellanby, Can Britain Feed Itself?.
3 See Butterly and Fitzpatrick, “A People's Food Policy.”
4 Lang, MiIllstone, and Marsden, “A Food Brexit.”
5 Dowler, “Food Banks and Food Justice in ‘Austerity Britain’” in Riches and Silvasti, First World Hunger Revisited, 160–75; Clapp, “The Trade-ification of the Food,” 336–3.
6 Lang, MiIllstone, and Marsden, “A Food Brexit.”
7 The most comprehensive and up to date studies on British food banking are Garthwaite, Hunger Pains; and Loopstra and Lalor, “Financial Insecurity and Disability.”
8 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity in Britain,” 373.
9 Monbiot, “We're Treating Soil Like Dirt.”
10 Riches and Silvasti, First World Hunger Revisited, 170.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 171.
14 Butler, “Report Reveals Scale of Food Bank Use.”
15 Trussel Trust, “Our Story.”
16 Trussel Trust, “Foodbank Use Remains at Record High.”
17 Butler, “Food Banks Report Record Demand.”
18 Fareshare, “Charities Serve Up 198 Million Meals”; Smithers, “Huge Rise in Food Redistribution.”
19 Riches and Silvasti, First World Hunger Revisited, 6.
20 Garthwaite, Collins, and Bambra, “Food for Thought,” 38.
21 Ibid., 38.
22 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 361.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 366.
25 Ibid., 369.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 364.
28 Ibid., 361–77.
29 Ibid., 361, 2.
30 Ibid., 366.
31 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 383.
32 Ibid., 383.
33 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 371.
34 Unfortunately Allen does not engage the body of literature which sharply distinguishes between the theological methods employed by Liberation Theology and Radical Orthodox theologians. See: Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 206–56. Scott, “‘Global Capitalism,’” 36–54; Bell, Liberation Theology; and Petrella, The Future of Liberation Theology.
35 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 370, 371.
36 Ibid., 371.
37 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 382; and Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 366–9.
38 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 369.
39 United Nations Human Rights, “International Covenant” A full list of signatories can be found here: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV-3&chapter=4&clang=_en, accessed May 30, 2018.
40 Downing, Kennedy, and Fell, “Food Banks and Poverty.”
41 Riches and Silvasti, First World Hunger Revisited, 165.
42 Garthwaite, Hunger Pains, 87.
43 Shepherd, “This Man Breached an Order to Stop Him from Begging”; Greenfield and Marsh, “Hundreds of Homeless People Fined.”
44 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 373. Arguably hospitality is just as complicated a notion as charity. For Jacques Derrida, hospitality is itself contradictory as being able to share a place, be hospitable, requires one to possess a place to share and, thus also potentially withhold it. See Derrida, Of Hospitality.
45 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 373, 374. See Glynn, Where the Other Half Live; and Allen, “Review: Where the Other Half Lives,” 487–90, for examples of the forced seizure of the poor's housing by state and market agencies.
46 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 375.
47 Butler, “Are Pantry Schemes the New Food Banks?”; and Cooper and Dumpleton, “Walking the Breadline.”
48 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 362.
49 Ibid., 370, 371. See Méndez-Montoya, The Theology of Food; and Wirzba, Food and Faith.
50 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 371.
51 Ibid., 371.
52 Méndez-Montoya, The Theology of Food, 151.
53 Frei Betto, quoted in Méndez-Montoya, The Theology of Food, 151.
54 Barret quoted in Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 375.
55 Allen’s position here is problematic: not only does he homogenise the diverse history of the concept of “human rights,” itself a very diverse set of demands, norms and expectations, he also at the end of his essay affirms kinds of food sovereignty. Ibid., 375. On the diversity of the human rights tradition and its various communal or individual presuppositions see de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts.
56 Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity,” 369. Raising the capacity of the British poor to pay for higher priced food would be beneficial for the world's poor, many of whom work within the agricultural industry and are kept in abject need by suppressed food prices, see McMahon, Feeding Frenzy.
57 Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 69, 70.
58 Cloke, May and Williams have worked on a number of projects together over the last 8 years in which they have consistently pointed out that the principles of hospitality and generosity embodied by faith based organisations are deeply at odds with the dominant neoliberal paradigm. See Cloke, May, and Johnsen, Swept Up Lives?; Beaumont and Cloke, Faith Based Organisations and Exclusion; Cloke, Beaumont, and Williams, Working Faith; Cloke, May, and Williams, “The Geographies of Food Banks,” 703–26; and Williams, Cloke, May, and Goodwin, “Contested Space,” 2291–316.
59 Williams, et al., “Contested Space,” 2292.
60 Ibid., 2293.
61 Ibid., 2294.
62 Ibid., 2294.
63 In which “a range of ‘welfare professionals’ are tasked with determining who is eligible for food,” those deemed eligible receive a voucher (with a maximum of three in a six month period) which can then be exchanged at the food bank for a three day supply of food. Ibid., 2295.
64 Ibid., 2294. In Trussell Trust food banks, vouchers are given to those needing an emergency food parcel by “welfare professionals” who are adjudicated to have the expertise to decide on who is in need. Voucher distributors include the Citizens Advice, Job Centre Plus, and local and national charity groups. The vouchers can then be redeemed at a food bank for an emergency food parcel.
65 Ibid., 2294. The agency of food banks clients is still widely contested, see Pat Caplan, “Big Society or Broken Society?,” 5–9.
66 Williams, et al., “Contested Space,” 2294.
67 Ibid., 2295. They list Foodcycle, Food not Bombs, and the pop-up food banks of UK Uncut. Ibid., 2295, 2296.
68 Ibid., 2296.
69 Ibid., 2296.
70 Ibid., 2297, 2311.
71 On system transitions see: Haxeltine, et al. “A Conceptual Framework,” 93–114; Geels and Schot, “Typology of Sociotechnical,” 399–417; and Damian Maye and Duncan, “Understanding Sustainable Food System,” 267–273.
72 On “translation” and public theology see Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place.
73 Although there are sympathetic accounts of the particular community of the church and a careful reading of the socio-political tensions that are present in parts of patristic theology, Esposito”s work is primarily concerned with the rejection of transcendence and an explication of the Deleuzian “plane of immanence.” The claim, central to Esposito”s account of Christianity, that Christianity “tended to widen the gap” between “the subject and the biological substrate underlying it” requires further investigation. For example, Esposito”s claim that Augustine “assigns a clear primacy to the soul over the body, conceiving of them as substances that are not only dishomogeneous but also opposing” has certainly been challenged by recent Augustinian studies. See Esposito, The Machine of Political Theology, 60–75, 83–101, at 95; Esposito, Third Person, 7, 75; Langford and Esposito, Law, 120–7; and Cooper and Leyser, “The Gender of Grace,” 536–51.
74 Ferrante and Piasentier, “From Outside.”
75 Esposito, The Machine of Political Theology, 69.
76 Agamben, Homo Sacer; Esposito, Third Person, 64–103; and Esposito, “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics,” 83–90.
77 Ferrante and Piasentier, “From Outside.”
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Campbell, “‘Bios,’ Immunity, Life,” 4.
82 Ibid., 4.
83 Ibid., 4.
84 Esposito, Communitas, 9–11.
85 Ibid., 2.
86 Ibid., 6.
87 Ibid., 7.
88 Ibid., 9–11.
89 Ibid., 10.
90 Ibid., 10. Emphasis in original
91 Ibid., 10.
92 Ibid., 11.
93 Ibid., 11.
94 Esposito, Two: The Machine, 69.
95 Ibid., 69.
96 Meloni, “Biopolitics for Philosophers,” 553.
97 Shildrick and MacDonald, “Poverty Talk.”
98 Ibid, 291.
99 Ibid., 293–300.
100 Ibid., 300.
101 Esposito, Communitas, 122.
102 Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 26.
103 J Milbank, The Future of Love, 112.
104 Ibid., 117.
105 MIllbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, 152–6. On Christian vegetarianism see Grummett and Muers, Theology on the Menu.
106 See Butterly and Fitzpatrick, “A People's Food Policy.”
107 Esposito, Political Theology, 15.