I just finished writing a review of Robert H. Nelson’s book, The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America (Penn State University Press, 2010) that will appear later this year in Calvin Theological Journal. It is a good book. It is a timely book. There are flaws, but overall there is much to learn from Nelson’s analysis.
I found a good summary passage that appears as a footnote on p. 171:
The terms ecology and economics have common linguistic origins, both derived from the Greek word oikos for home. Both offer grand theories of the world that reflect a vision of the actual relationship of human beings and nature. The largest “ecology” and the largest “economy” are in each case the whole world, including all its creatures, human and nonhuman. There are then many subecologies and subeconomies that ecological theory both seek to integrate within their respective overall systems of thought. It has proven difficult, however, to apply mathematical and other rigorous scientific methods to understand the workings of the largest economic and ecological systems, thus often encouraging in both cases those who do undertake such efforts to interject their own strongly held values and beliefs in implicit ways—that is, to turn economics and ecology into metaphors of religious thought.
That should give you an idea of what Nelson means when he describes economics and environmentalism as competing secular “religions.” I expect to post a series of reflections on the book in this venue in the coming weeks, as it is a significant work that merits more comment and attention than could be devoted to a short book review.