“In what way does religion challenge or support extractivism?”
Scholars of theology and religion have struggled to articulate ethical and theoretical approaches to human-nature relations. How do we avoid tendencies toward provincialism? How do we account for the ways religious imagination and religious practices are shaped—and limited—by our bodily and intellectual entanglement with the earth? How do elements of religion justify various modes of exploitation or motivate resistance to exploitation?
Recently, scholars have taken promising approaches. Richard J. Callahan traces the “moral uses” of the natural world, Terra S. Rowe invites us to examine the enchantment of energy originating long before European modernity, and a group of scholars addresses the varieties of “Religion in the Extractive Zones.”
Joining these voices is University of Warwick sociologist Claire Blencowe, author of Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism, and the Geology of Race. Blencowe is attentive to what Joerg Rieger frames as the “religious surplus” of the extractivist regime. But her cautious analysis of the universalist theology of Methodism and the notion of “rebirth” draws her attention to bodily disciplines and implied metaphysics of race. She sees these forces operating not only for the sake of imperialist eugenics but for projects of redemption.
I spoke with Blencowe about John Wesley’s theology, her family’s proximity to Methodism, the “good colonialism” thesis, civilizing education, and the implications of this research to #BlackLivesMatter. The full video interview can be found on the PTN YouTube channel; here is an excerpt of the transcript:
Abel K. Aruan: Tell us how you came to this research project.
Claire Blencowe: There are at least two stories: one scholarly and one more personal. Back in my PhD, I was very much writing as a Foucauldian sociologist or historian of ideas. My first book, Biopolitical Experience, was about the concept of biopolitics, thinking about the impact of evolutionary theory and eugenics. Then I became interested in recognizing that religion has also been incredibly important in shaping and structuring race and race relations. But at the same time, like many critical scholars, I became increasingly aware of the need to think of it from a planetary perspective and in relation to ecology.
Secondly, the specific interest in Methodism and John Wesley partly comes from a family connection. That is the church I am closest to; my grandparents and parents were connected to it, and I went there as a child.
The other origin of the book was in 2020, during lockdown: the #BlackLivesMatter movement. In Bristol, my home city, at least 10,000 people went into the center of town, mounted a protest, and pulled down the statue of a slave trader, Edward Colston (1636-1721). This created a moment of reckoning for people in Bristol and Britain, particularly on how to deal with the past. One response came from the John Wesley Museum. They saw the removal of Colston’s statue as a moment to say, “Look at our statue of John Wesley over here,” and presented him as the anti-Colston – Wesley, the one who campaigned against slavery and did great things for the world.
At the same time, there have been practices of child abuse in the United States, including state-sanctioned child abuse and enforced family separation, and I was reading about the Indian residential schools. I have been engaging with the works of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who also talks about Methodist mission as being at the forefront of attempts to eliminate and obliterate people. So while Methodism was being celebrated as the anti-racist hero of Bristol, I knew it had also supported other structures of racism at another time.
I see. While you were speaking about the celebration of Wesley, I was reminded of Schleiermacher’s gentler take on the original inhabitants of Australia and the Dutch colonial rule, with their “ethical” turn. Is Wesley unique in this sense?
Great question. Absolutely, one of the really central concerns of the book is understanding and detailing this “good colonialism” thesis, this performance or this idea that we are going to do colonialism in a truly Christian way, and that therefore it is not only good in itself but also makes up for the sins of the past. It’s “redemptive” of the colonial project itself.
Is Wesley unique in that? I really doubt it. People are very rarely unique, and histories are always multiple and plural. But that said, I think the positioning of Methodism (and Wesley in particular) as an anti-racist theology is significant. A kind of staging of an opposition between Calvinism, its idea that some people are already destined to damnation, and a liberal Methodist position that opposes this is significant, too. Wesley has been influential and has shaped some easy assumptions about what it means to be anti-racist, and some of the assumptions that have enabled institutions to present themselves as anti-racist, as about empowerment, as about the good, while actually committing horrendous violence.
I think the “civilized”/“savage” discussion is important in your book. People often think the distinction between the two is easy to pin down: Europe vs. its others. But in Chapter 1, you highlight that this is not necessarily the case. Can you tell us why?
First, these Methodist missionaries were most concerned about the grip of Satan – the potential savagery – within themselves, and the question of how they themselves can escape Satan and become truly Christian. Transformative encounters with racialized others were thus as much about the missionaries developing strength of faith and saving themselves as they were about saving savage Others. Second, the concepts of the “savage,” the “heathen,” and the “poor” in eighteenth-century Britain were applied domestically as well as to people of color around the world. The ideas of “foreign mission” and “home mission” were treated as kind of parallel. One clear example I trace in the book is that Wesley and the early Methodists claim to prove themselves as “true” missionaries by working with the supposedly “savage” miners of East Bristol.
But this is not just the 18th century. It carries on through the 19th century and into the 20th, with racialized concepts being applied to the poor and to criminals as much as to phenotypically racialized peoples.
So, a kind of imperial boomerang argument like that of Aimé Césaire or Hannah Arendt?
Yes, absolutely! Césaire is making a point about quite a bit later in history, particularly in understandings of the Holocaust and the far right in mid-20th-century Europe, as a rebounding of colonialism. But if you look at someone like Wesley, you can see that happening right back in the 18th century, or before. Vron Ware’s book The Return of a Native addresses the workhouses and the extreme violence meted out against the poor, arguing that this was a direct application of the skills of the same landowners in rural Britain who had served in colonies and colonial armies or worked for the East India Company, then came back and applied those same techniques of extreme violence.
That’s fascinating. I want to touch more deeply on what happened in the extractive mining sites. In Chapter 2, you draw on the work of Kathryn Yusoff and Elizabeth A. Povinelli to speak of the extractive moment as a sort of energetic moment, where materials rise from the depths into the light. How could thinking about extraction help us understand race?
I should have mentioned that Yusoff’s work was definitely a very important part of the trajectory of the book. Others also try to get us to pay attention to geology as a science, but here specifically to mining as a practice, as an economic practice, and as one of the most important sites for understanding the histories of race, racism, and colonialism.
In Methodism, you see a real, let’s say, fetishization [of saving miners].
Or valorization?
Valorization, yes! There is a valorization of, or a weird affective investment in, the idea of saving miners and working with miners in early Methodist history. Then, in mining regions like Cornwall, their culture came to be strongly defined in the 19th century in terms of Methodism, and by the ways miners took up Methodism. So, there is an empirical connection between the moment Methodism is articulated and where it is most successful, where it explodes, and who it speaks to. That made me ask, “Why is that? Why does it speak to them?”
And it has something to do with the literal materiality of mining. The conception of redemption that is being put forward, the idea of rebirth, conversion, and redemption as becoming born again, with constant references to movement into light, and particularly the centrality of exorcism, all matter here. This was so prevalent in Methodist narratives.
You can think of the idea of escaping demons as movement into light, and as a rebirth that gives new capacity, perhaps more activist capacities, to do things and transform things. That parallels the idea of taking metal from the earth, releasing it from a kind of demonic depth, moving it to the surface, bringing it to the light, and then having the capacity to do all the incredible things copper can do. The same argument can be made about coal being moved to the surface and burned, with its energetic capacity.
I want to go to the last part of your book, Chapter 3, where you bring readers to Turtle Island, especially with the issues of civilizing education. You quote Eve Tuck, saying there is a kind of “damage-centered” research that can reproduce the racialization of Indigenous peoples. What is the difference between your approach to civilizing education and the damage-centered one?
The problem is that when you have a structure of power representing some people as incapable and then building subjecthood and agency on the basis of that incapacity, that incapacity becomes part of the power structure itself. Michelle Daigle points out that acknowledging such an incapacity as being created by colonial violence does not change the fact that you are still talking about incapacity.
The other influence for me was Amitav Ghosh writing about the history of Indonesia. He makes the point that people keep talking about how Indigenous people have survived the end of the world many times. But, he points out, white people also survived those world endings, and white people took the lesson that whiteness survives.
That creates a real challenge for researchers: how do you write about this history in a way that acknowledges the violence without adding to narratives that end up saying white people survive and Indigenous people are incapable? So, I was trying to do that with three things.
First, I want to make it clear that the problem is settler culture, colonial culture, and extractive culture—not the poverty of the poor in Britain or the poverty or incapacity of Indigenous people. This is critical whiteness studies rather than poverty studies. Second, I place Indigenous people’s agency at the center of the narrative. Third, I do not want the book to conclude with the story of damage done. I want it to conclude with the ways contemporary activists are resisting and refusing dispossession. That is why the book concludes with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Glen Coulthard’s concept of grounded normativity as a refusal of dispossession.
Beautiful. Just for the readers, you are referring to the final part, where you write,
Where extractive exorcism entails departure and flight, grounded normativity entails attention. The affirmation and practice of grounded normativity—loving connection with and learning from the land and all its life—are not only the reversal of dispossession, but also the refusal of extractivist exorcisms, evangelical pedagogy, and the civilizational metaphysics of race (p. 172-3).
Yes, thank you!
For more from the interview, including a preview of Blencowe’s new project that looks at the U.S., Brazil, India, and Indonesia, visit the PTN YouTube channel.
