God Cares About Dirt
excerpt from Joshua and the Promised Land
by Roy H. May, Jr.
For the landed and economically powerful, the Joshua and Promised Land traditions can be disturbing. After all, their central feature is that God chooses and empowers the landless as they struggle for a hold on the land -- against the big landowners. The struggle of poor people for land is God's struggle. Moral legitimacy is on their side. Furthermore, since God is the true owner of the land, its just distribution and management are ethical imperatives. God gives the land as an inheritance for the purpose of providing the space and fulfilling the needs that life requires. Therefore, land systems and other material arrangements form the basis of a just society. These are not messages that the economically powerful like to hear!
Often these powerful interests will claim moral authority for themselves. They want to show the struggles of the poor as immoral. In Guatemala, for example, representatives of large agricultural interests have paid for radio announcements calling land reform morally wrong because it would require "stealing" people's private property. Such arguments have an impact on the poor. After all, they too are concerned with personal morality. Some evangelicals in Nicaragua have hesitated to receive land through the national land reform program. They believe they would be accepting stolen property. Moral arguments can be powerful, even when they are smoke screens for evil.
The discovery that land reform was essential to Joshua's social restructuring of Canaan provides an "alternative ethics" for the dispossessed. "Alternative" means another way of looking at the same thing, suggesting a different interpretation. Alternative ethics means that, in relation to usual justifications, the same material supports another position. We have seen that the Joshua story has been used by the powerful to morally justify taking people's lands. But an alternative reading of the same story urges a contrary or different moral position. The story still justifies taking land, but not by the rich. The poor are the ones who are morally justified as they struggle to gain or keep land. Alternative ethics turns the tables on those who don't share the land, by making them the immoral ones. An alternative ethical position to the usual readings of the Joshua story puts moral authority on the side of the landless poor. We call this form of alternative ethics the "Joshua ethics," because in the "Joshua ethics," those who own all the land are "impure" or immoral. They are "idolaters" because their deity is not the one who gives land to the landless. "Alternative ethics" not only justifies, but requires that the poor struggle for land. "Joshua ethics" is that of the landless!
For this reason landed interests also talk about the importance of peace (while seldom practicing it themselves). Land movements are conflictive. The powerful seldom miss an opportunity to point that out. They urge that conflict automatically makes such movements morally illegitimate. Because the church usually has taught that conflict is bad, some traditional farmers and Indigenous Peoples might agree. I once met with a group of evangelicals in Honduras who thought that a farmers union would be good to defend their rights and promote their interests. But, they added, "not if it caused conflict." Yet the Joshua story is about conflict. In the Old Testament conflict serves as a tool for justice. This puts peace and conflict in a different light -- one the powerful don't like. For peace without justice is not peace. It is pacification aimed at maintaining social justice.
There are other aspects of these traditions that are not comforting for the landed. For instance, they claim to be the owners of the land. Yet the Promised Land tradition affirms that the earth is the Lord's. If the land is inheritance given to us by God that we might be God's stewards of it, then the landed can't simply do with it as they please. This has implications not only for the just distribution of the land, but even for how the land is used and cared for. Private rights become relative to social needs. It is morally required of the landholder to see that private use of land contributes toward upbuilding the whole community. Inheritance implies limits: the land cannot be destroyed, it cannot be used to hurt others, and it cannot be the basis for social and economic exclusiveness. Rather, land as inheritance is given as a gracious gift for the well-being of all people. It is to be shared and passed on to future generations.
Indeed, to avoid these central features of the Joshua and the Promised Land traditions, the powerful will preach that such concerns really aren't God's concerns. They say that God is interested in spiritual, not earthly things. Salvation, they claim, has nothing to do with how the land is used and distributed. But the Joshua and the Promised Land stories are very earthly. These stories make clear that land distribution and land use are God's concerns. Land and salvation go together, a meaningful connection for directing faith toward social justice. Once, following a Bible study of these texts with a group of rural Pentecostal pastors in Costa Rica, I asked them to tell me one new thing they had learned. A pastor responded, "God cares about dirt." For those who control a lot of dirt, that affirmation can be very disturbing!
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