Reading the signs of the times, U.S. missionary apologist John R. Mott was enchanted by the possibilities of world-wide Christianization. In 1910, serving as General Secretary of the World’s Student Christian Federation and after extensive travel to the missionary sites and colonial outposts of “Protestant Powers” around the world, Mott organized the first ever World’s Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. There, he gathered together prominent Protestant missionaries and colonial administrators from around the world to share testimonies, gather missions data, and organize their momentous efforts at Christianizing the globe. In his publication on the importance of the conference, The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions (1910), Mott explains his reading of the urgent global moment for Protestant missions:
It is a decisive hour for the non-Christian nations. Far-reaching movements—national, racial, social, economic, religious—are shaking them to their foundation. These nations are still plastic. Shall they set in Christian or pagan molds? Their ancient faiths, ethical restraints, and social orders are being weakened or abandoned. Shall our sufficient faith fill the void?[1]
For John R. Mott, this was the plastic age. Thanks to the advances in science, the modern infrastructures of industrial capitalism, and the growing connectivity of global populations, Protestant missionaries not only had access to global spaces previously inaccessible, but these same civilizational forces (in Mott’s well-travelled eyes) were inducing a “weakening” effect on global populations, “shaking them to their foundation” and providing missionaries with a “comparatively short space of time” where non-Christian nations were finally “plastic”—amenable to the pressing efforts of missionary shaping.
It was a moment that missionary networks across the Anglophone and larger pan-Protestant world grew with increasing confidence, if not profound aggrandizement, that the time was emerging when Christians might finally be able to “evangelize the world in this generation.” Whereas for centuries, the powers of Christendom, despite its tectonic role in discovery and conquest had run into barrier after barrier, Mott’s U.S.-based leadership joined forces with missionary organizations in Canada, the UK, Germany, and Scandinavia, convinced the time had come a new world was at hand. A new epoch. A new heaven and a new earth.
In so many ways, the Anthropocene narrative (though there are many) can be seen as a secularization narrative (though there are also many of these as well). Or, a colonization narrative, with its attendant production of group-differentiated expendability (which is to say: race). Or, a capitalism narrative—accumulation through extraction & the commodification of our vibrant agentive ecosystems: land, and water, and so much more. Or, a patriarchy narrative—we could likely keep going. (I like to think of it as a conversion narrative).
It is a giant undertaking to narrate an epoch of the earth—our epoch of earth—these attempts to carefully decipher the anthropogenic techniques that have shaped and moved our present world system, now teetering on its edge, threatening to fall, crashing into some unknown future. It is challenging to decipher, and to account for the relationship between these monumental earth changes, in stratigraphy, climate, economy, religion, politics, and so so much more. Which is to say: the story climate scientists tell us of the rise of Man as the preeminent geomorphic shaper of the earth, mastering the forces of nature, conquering its limits and adjudicating its boundaries feels particularly urgent in a moment of climate catastrophe and massive geopolitical uncertainty. How did we get here and where the hell are we going next? Enter Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization.
Meziane’s narrative seeks to enter into conversation with many of the primary themes, and epochal narratives of my own scholarly archives and theoretical interlocutors, though perhaps from a slightly different vantage. We are both interested in the rise of fossil states—that which emerged both with the imperial nation-state, but also the particular turn it took with the Scramble for Africa and Asia during the era of fossil fuel extraction. One indelible mark of this era for fossil states was the confounding “problem” of Islam, which seemed to confound the disciplinary techniques of secularism—that is until the fateful fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920. For John R. Mott, this combined with the discovery of oil in Persia (with the assistance of U.S. missionaries) and the larger crashing of the industrial West into “the Moslem world” signaled a Muslim downfall and an opportunity for “Protestant Powers” to finally remake the world. Meziane, too, has his finger on the pulse of 19th century Orientalism and the role of fossil fuel in the acceleration of 19th century imperialism. But rather than my Protestant, mainly Anglophone archives, Meziane offers an Arab/North African perspective on the colonial dimensions of the Anthropocene.
And so, how to parse these developments alongside the grander narratives we attempt to tell? I have found that like the secularization of race narratives, of which I attempt most to untangle in my work, these narratives have their use and their limits. Like Meziane, I too argue that secularism was neither as de-Christianization nor the continuation of Christianity as such. And yes, “imperial powers turned efforts toward secular civilizing missions, pursuing eschatological perfection on Earth through industrialization and fossil fuel extraction.” That claim is central to my own. But studying the shifts in missionary science reveals not so much a rejection of religious conversion—or even its failure—but rather its adaptation into the realm of the biopolitical. Which is to say: Protestants, at least in my archives, actually seized the tools of industrialization and fossil fuel extraction as techniques in the reshaping of human subjects for life or death across its colonial states. How can we be more carefully attuned to work secularization does across geopolitical borders despite the tectonic scale of fossil capitalist changes?
[1] My emphasis. Mott, The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions, 238.
One indelible mark of this era for fossil states was the confounding “problem” of Islam, which seemed to confound the disciplinary techniques of secularism—that is until the fateful fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920. For John R. Mott, this combined with the discovery of oil in Persia (with the assistance of U.S. missionaries) and the larger crashing of the industrial West into “the Moslem world” signaled a Muslim downfall and an opportunity for “Protestant Powers” to finally remake the world. Meziane, too, has his finger on the pulse of 19th century Orientalism and the role of fossil fuel in the acceleration of 19th century imperialism. But rather than my Protestant, mainly Anglophone archives, Meziane offers an Arab/North African perspective on the colonial dimensions of the Anthropocene.