In May 2026, Matt Bernico and Dean Dettloff, co-hosts of The Magnificast, published Enough Is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology, an insightful book in which they denounce the idol of capitalist growth and advocate for degrowth socialism from a Christian perspective. Written in an accessible style and packed with shocking figures about our exploitative economic system, Enough Is Enough is a compelling and hopeful take about Christianity and social justice. Matt and Dean met with Catholic Re-Visions’ co-convener Samuel Huard for a discussion about their book, which has been edited here for brevity.
Samuel Huard: Thank you, Dean and Matt, for meeting with me and for publishing this great book: Enough Is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology. To begin, could you tell us about how the project of the book came about?
Dean Dettloff: Well, we kind of started the book by accident. We were invited to pitch something to an editor that we knew. Originally, we had pitched an explainer about Christianity and anti-capitalism. After workshopping it with the editors, it transformed into something else about Saint Francis and anti-capitalism. As we thought more about that, we realized that what we really wanted to do was to discover the balance between these proposals.
We thought that degrowth was a unique way of pulling a lot of these threads together and could also allow us to make a unique contribution to the literature on theology and Christians thinking about economics and climate change. It became a good unifying thread to talk about these interconnected themes: helping Christians understand why capitalism specifically is a problem and trying to tap into some of those radical currents in Christianity, whether it’s Saint Francis or liberation theology. Matt, am I leaving anything out?
Matt Bernico: I think that sounds pretty good. When we settled on this particular pitch about degrowth, we were picking up on some currents within the Catholic social movement at the time as well, where it seemed like degrowth was—maybe not quite in name, but in thought—being articulated. We had actually just come off reading a lot of the big degrowth books that started coming out in 2023. The Future Is Degrowth had just dropped, so that was on the forefront of everyone’s mind. We found that it really was in step with the ways that we were thinking about economics and capitalism, and we thought that it was worth our time to make a Christian contribution to that particular discourse. So, we did.
S.H.: Talking about Christian contributions to thinking about degrowth, the book starts with a document that was published in 2025 just before COP30 critiquing capitalism and asking for a revolutionary climate movement. About this document, you say that it “did not come from the Extinction Rebellion, a socialist party, a leftwing think tank, or a handful of anarchists. It came from the Catholic bishops of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.” Was it a surprise to you that the bishops published such a text? Why did you want to start your book with that publication?
D.D.: Well, they did us a big favour. That was the last thing we wrote; literally the very last thing we wrote in the whole book was probably the first four paragraphs of it. We were struggling to figure out how to introduce the book, and over that summer of 2025, which is right about when we were closing the last draft of the manuscript, that document came out.
In some ways, it was a really encouraging vindication of our project. We were thinking, “well, yeah, there is a connection between degrowth and Christianity and we are going to try to make that happen.” Then here were the bishops giving us, in a way, the permission to do that more confidently than we had already done. And, you know, it is always good when you have the hierarchy of the Church saying something that you too would like to say. (laughs) It’s easy to seize on that moment and try to highlight it and really make it impactful.
We also felt that there was a temptation, from the wider Church, to let that document come and go. It’s a very radical document. We thought that it was not really getting the attention that it deserves, so we thought that that was a contribution we could make in the book too, that is, to amplify that the Church is saying something in a unified way from the Global South about degrowth, and we should attend to that.
M.B.: Yeah, that’s right. It was very kind of them to say that just before we were done writing the book. I don’t think that it was necessarily surprising that they said it. At least not to us, people who have our ear to the ground when it comes to this particular type of stuff. Like Dean said, it is a radical text. In its particular articulation of the problems of the climate emergency, it is radical. But it is expressing fundamentally what Pope Francis expressed in Laudato si’. It’s not a departure from that. It’s maybe a more full-throated articulation of some of those ideas. So, it was cool to see the ways that the words of Laudato si’ were folded into the Catholic Church and then expressed in these really helpful ways.
S.H.: You say that for people used to listening to that kind of discourse, it was not so surprising to hear the bishops of the Global South talk about degrowth. It might not be surprising to hear such a denunciation of capitalism and of the destruction and exploitation that comes with it coming from the Global South. In the Global North, we might be less used to hearing the bishops talk in this way or be less familiar with this tradition of associating social justice with Christianity, even though they go together. Could you tell us more about why Christians should care about degrowth and why it is so obvious that degrowth should be part of how Christians think about the world, see the world, and act in the world?
M.B.: To me, it seems very obvious. But like you said, I think that to a lot of Christians, especially in the Global North, it is not obvious. That is exactly the problem. In my interpretation, Christianity, the way that it impacts my life, has an intertwined social and spiritual aspect that asks me to think about my neighbour, people who are dispossessed, the poor, people who are oppressed under colonial rule. Christianity urges me to think about all of those things.
In the Global North, even in—I’m not Catholic, so there is that—even in liberal-leaning or progressive-leaning Protestant circles, we just lack the tools to think about those spiritual and ethical callings within Christianity in really critical ways. We might have sloganeering and nice sermons but we don’t have the critical capacity to think about economics, or to think about production and consumption. It is just missing from the Church. It is an impoverishment of our thought, and that’s bad (laughs).
That’s why the book is trying to convince Christians in the Global North that liberation theology, that the ethical calls within Christianity, have something to offer us in the Global North, right? It is not just about the Global South or thinking about economics in some far-off places, but it is about how we liberate all of us from the bad and troubling climate-chaos-causing mode of consumption and production that we all have to take part in.
D.D.: Yeah. I think there is also something about what it means to be a Christian person in the Global North when you start to understand not only that there are poor people, but that there are reasons that there are poor people, that there are structural causes of poverty. The more you try to figure out why there are people who are poor, the more you also learn that poverty is the flip side not only of wealth but of the kind of system that we have, one that drains wealth from some places and absorbs it into other places in the Global North.
I don’t mean to erase the massive inequalities that exist here too. But as lots of sociologists have said, we have an imperial mode of living, that is, our daily life is made possible by a global means of extraction and exploitation that uniquely benefits economies in the Global North, and benefits all consumers to some degree in the Global North. As we say in the book: even if you are a person who is quite poor for one reason or another, in the North, if you buy cheap coffee at the gas station, that coffee is brought to you by the extreme exploitation of even poorer people in other parts of the world.
I think that for Christians who want to really deal with the injustice of poverty, if you live in the Global North, at some point you are going to have to reckon with the way in which our own lives are made possible by this web of exploitation. That thought can lead to a lot of really challenging feelings of guilt or debilitation or lack of motivation because the scale is so high or so large. But at the same time, what I like about degrowth is that it is a network of people trying really hard to think about what we should do about that. What are the tools that we could access to organize our societies differently so that we don’t live lives that require the extreme burdening and violence that they currently require?
Degrowth is a message of liberation for us too. Most of us don’t want to live lives that are premised on the destruction of people and the planet. We would prefer not to do that if we had the choice. And yet we don’t have that choice. So, we need to be free of a different kind of violence. That’s important for us to hear too.
S.H.: People who are familiar with your podcast will know that it is about Christianity and leftist politics. Your book is a great testimony to that intersection. It is not only about critiquing capitalism and advocating for degrowth socialism, it is also deeply concerned with the will of God and our communion to it. As you were saying, as a Christian, you should want not to oppress your neighbour. But also, by engaging in acts of solidarity, by questioning the oppressive system in which we live, we are better able to encounter God and to get rid of this layer of oppression that is obscuring our ability to be with God and to do God’s will.
This ties into another big dimension of your book, which is the denunciation of the idol of growth, a typical prophetic intervention. Yet, on p. 10, you say that “capitalism can handle a prophetic word.” So, you see prophetism as itself not enough, as something that capitalism can absorb. Do you see your own intervention in this book as going beyond prophetic denunciation?
D.D.: That is a good question. The book is a prophetic intervention to some degree, as we are calling out the structures of injustice. Maybe that’s all it will ever be, and that will be too bad for us as far as we are concerned (laughs). I don’t think that there is enough in the book to catalyze a social movement that is unique. That is not what we are doing. We are not inventing a new labour union or a new political party for Christians who do degrowth. But I do hope that the book encourages someone to put it down at the end and then go find a group of actual living human beings who are trying to activate that kind of call in some way or another. As we say in the chapter we have on organizing, there are actually many ways to do that.
Progressive Christians know that capitalism is not good. It’s not hard to convince people about that. But it is very hard to say “and that means that it’s good that a labour union goes on strike, for example, and we have to do the hard work that is needed to increase labour density in a country.” This is a chain of reasoning that is more challenging to follow and to create. The hope of our book is that it doesn’t only provide a prophetic word but hopefully also provides the motivation for someone to get out and find others, to associate and organize with others.
M.B.: There is no organizing manual within the book. There is no script for talking to your coworkers about the union, unfortunately. But like Dean said, it is a tool for Christians to use to start unpacking some of these problematic relationships that the Global North has with the Global South, to start thinking through how to intervene in them.
We also spend quite a bit of time in one of the chapters that is called “Christian Tools for Conviviality” just unpacking the history of a particular strand of Christian thought that recognizes that private property is not immutable; that the final destination of goods is in God’s hands and that maybe we should live like that a little bit. In uncovering some of the histories, some of the ideas, of people like Gerrard Winstanley or Thomas Muntzer or Rosa Luxemburg—
D.D.: Matt is citing all the non-Catholics in this chapter!
M.B.: (laughs) Yeah, that’s right! Just the ones I like! Hopefully that chapter gives to Christians who are reading it a sense that you could diverge from the path of middle-of-the-road liberalism or lukewarm progressivism, that you could have a more radical thought, that you could take the spiritual and the ethical ideas that Christianity is giving you and you could follow them to their logical conclusions, which is socialism. This is a toolbox, a book that should catalyze Christians to do something and give them permission to also think about their faith in a deeper way, and hopefully one that leads towards some kind of action.
S.H.: To your credit, you also give a lot of examples of organizations, cities, states that are doing things differently. I think that’s inspiring. That shows that it’s possible to do otherwise, which we can sometimes forget. We can think that capitalism is inescapable. That’s turning it into an idol. You do a great job at warning against that; that’s part of the prophetism of the book.
In the second part of the interview, our conversation will continue with exchanges on the apocalypse and on the hope that stems from organizing.
