Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo crafts an op-ed article arguing for us to rethink our orientation around land ownership, calling for a theology of land. Regardless of religious, spiritual orientation, or lack thereof, Melo’s essay reminds us that no thing exists without the earth. How might we reshape our thoughts and practices to reorder the land as sacred in our lives?

I know possession to be a curse. The notion that one can possess the earth, or stake a private claim upon it as one’s property haunts our world. The maddening greed that possesses private developers to hoard what was originally given as a gift is the root of many of today’s problems. As a theologian, I find myself ruminating on how the modern notion of land ownership continues to be a matter of intense contestation. One need not look any further than the current genocide of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. A recent death toll has numbered more than 30,000 slain, including over 10,000 children. These are horrific numbers that parallel other nations currently experiencing warfare and genocide in Yemen, Congo, Sudan, Ukraine, and other places. In many such cases of bloodshed, the question of land comes to the fore. Land becomes a tapestry of conflict. It becomes the site of violence, bloodshed, detonated warheads, and bullet shells.

Such violence signals the importance of reconfiguring how one thinks and practices. The term “theology of land,” wherein land is understood not as a thing to be possessed, but as that which is fundamental to any sort of creaturely gathering, becomes important. Land is the matter of all mattering, for without land, there can be no thing. All life, any kind of creaturely living or breathing, ceases when land is taken out of the picture. Much of modernity has taken this for granted—land is simply a given for our modern sensibilities. The challenge is now to reconfigure such sensibilities away from the distortions that withhold them. Current socialities make land invisible since land can only be conceived in modernity as property. The question now becomes: How does one practice outside of modern frames that take land for granted?

It all comes down to the problem of possession—of real estate. The problem we face is the privatization, individuation, and territorialization of land as a means of enclosure. Rooted in the settler project of European pursuits, Indigenous peoples were pushed out of their ancestral lands or genocidally exterminated for early settlers to draw lines upon the soil and claim possession of land: private property. Settlers enslaved alien labor—Black labor—to work stolen, privatized lands in plantation economies that depleted both Black bodies and Native soils. When enslaved Africans were later emancipated, another alien presence arrived to work the stolen, privatized land under conditions of harsh exploitation: Asian migrants. All, now, have become engrafted into this political economy founded on the primary matter of settler colonial land theft.

What I am proposing is a theology of land that knows soil, water, trees, and our entanglements with the earth as a theological reorientation toward a different kind of dwelling. This is a dwelling that understands the cruciality of land as before any sort of creaturely gathering, as before being or existence. Land is the reason we receive breath from trees, meals from the earth’s fruit, and drink from flowing streams. Land, in this regard, is the reason we have life.

In other words: the sacred is in the land, and not outside of it.

Native American scholar of religion Vine Deloria Jr., in his groundbreaking text God is Red: A Native View of Religion, argues that what has undergirded much of European colonialism’s operations is a faulty view of land. The spiritualities of many Indigenous peoples, Deloria Jr. contends, are completely unlike the religious disorientation that Western so-called Christian settlers have with land. Tracing various rituals and communal practices of many Native American tribes, Deloria Jr. shows that many Native Americans are spiritually attuned to the land as imbued with the divine. Specifically, they had no dichotomy between the divine and creation—both were inseparably enfolded within one another.

The problem, for Deloria Jr., was that Western Christian settlers imposed a logic of dualism: the divine was divorced from creation so that land could be desacralized and, thus, possessed as commodity. This, then, is one of the primary reasons behind not only the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their sacred ancestral homes but geared the segregation and commodification of land as property. It is because the sacred has been displaced from the earth, that various violent distortions were geared to exploit the earth and its creatures. This curse of possession is the problem we are up against, being one of the most fundamental sins of modernity.

One of the primary ways we can get at this is to understand that our imaginations, the ideas we hold, and especially the theologies (and policies) we build and construct, are not only concepts in themselves. They are also tools—means to certain ends. Often, we have seen dangerous theology and policy deployed toward violent means. Dangerous theology and policy must be avoided, taken seriously for the violence it has wrought, and rightfully discarded in search of better means.

Yet, it is not only our concepts that must be reconfigured, but how we practice such concepts. Even our practices must bear the fruits of reciprocal living. Hence, when we see our world filled with toxic fumes from detonated warheads and military violence, then, our theologies and policies must be practiced in ways that directly address such violence, gearing our hearts and bodies toward the refusal of violence as such in any and every form.

Now, there is always the possibility of widespread social abolition that ends regimes of destructive politics on the level of the U.S. government itself. Of course, many politicians and activists have been seeking radical transformation in that regard. However, for many of us who have little to no political power, options for social change are limited to our small towns and local neighborhoods. While such limitations can feel constricting, I believe that possibilities for living alternative lives in our local contexts can prove fruitful if faithfully pursued.

Many migrant communities that arrive in the U.S. with very little resources continue to care for one another and their surrounding communities with whatever means they have. Such is the reality at Redeemer Community Church, an Asian American immigrant community in a historically marginalized part of San Francisco. In his book Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, Jonathan Tran recounts how the immigrant families of Redeemer established programs that challenged the oppressive realities of U.S. racial capitalism. One such initiative the church helped fund provides services such as “radical economic sharing and redistribution, divested wealth, just labor practices, and personal liberation.” In this regard, communities like Redeemer, while holding limited political power due to their status as a community of immigrants, endure to work with the limitations that they have to enact alternative ways of being in this world. They attempt to be conduits of generosity and care in a land that is not even theirs.

Indeed, through small attempts to make local communities better places, possibilities toward alternative forms of living on the earth are made open. Crucially, one can practice reorientation toward real practices, on the ground, that enact alternative spaces of healing and resurrection. This is the call against the curse of possession, toward the possibility of dwelling. It must begin with the land—local land. There can be no dwelling, no making of any homes or meals, without the land and its gifts. And this must be understood clearly: There can be no existence without the land. Only when we grasp this reality can we truly begin to practice sharing the earth with another. Only then can we practice real reciprocity in a world filled with utter violence.

Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo (he/him) is a writer from Cagayan de Oro, Philippines, whose work has been featured in Christianity Today, Sojourners, Bittersweet Monthly, Geez Magazine, Inheritance Magazine, Interfaith America, and more. He is currently pursuing his Masters in Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studies the intersection of race, religion, and ecology.
Sacred Sonder
@yananrahim