The foundation of any good Sunday school education is the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). In the parable, a lawyer challenges Jesus, asking him what they have to do to receive eternal life. Jesus answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer replies by asking a question, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus then tells the parable of the good Samaritan, which I’ll circle back to momentarily. But first, the question of “Who is my neighbor?” is worth more of our consideration.

This is a question that the entire apparatus of our capitalist political economy makes hard to figure out. Global supply chains obscure who our neighbors are and what their struggles are. For example, the fact we can buy a product in the United States even though it is made in another country under terrible labor conditions allows us to abstract ourselves from the ways in which we contribute to exploitation on a global scale. Workers with names and families become abstracted as labor power to be bought and sold. As a result, capitalist production hides the exploitative conditions that make our lives possible.

In response, Christians need better analytical tools that can help us parse out the systems of global exploitation. These systems keep us from loving our neighbors from every nation, which is a central emphasis of the gospel. For example, investigating who is producing the products we buy and under what labor conditions they work can show us where our neighbors are hurting and how we’re implicated.

Here’s a case study: We have our work cut out for us when it comes to climate change. Unless humans cut carbon emissions drastically, our planet will heat up, causing catastrophic floods, droughts, more intense storms, and mass extinction events for all kinds of creatures. So far, the world’s governments have punted the problem of carbon emissions to the markets. The hope is that consumers will wean themselves off of fossil-fuel-reliant technologies and move toward “green” alternatives like electric cars and bikes. While electric vehicles seem integral to a green future, they also carry a troubling human cost that is hidden away in the machinations of the market.

Cobalt, an essential metal in the production of lithium-ion batteries (which power everything from power tools to electric cars) is predominantly mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Congo holds 3.4 million tons, or nearly half, of the world’s cobalt supply. Cobalt mining is an industry with many documented human rights violations. Dangerous working conditions, child labor, sexual abuse, and devastating effects on local ecosystems are all features of how electric vehicles and other consumer electronic goods get their batteries.

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