In the United States, the rural communities of Appalachia are consistently characterized by their (historical) reliance on extractivist professions such as mining and forestry. In order to improve the historiography of Appalachia, the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History has published a significant number of oral history projects it conducted between 1970 and 2010. These interviews are part of various projects focusing on a broad range of topics relating to life in coal mining communities. To improve the project’s conceptual saturation it will draw on interviews from a wide range of topical projects conducted by the Nunn Center. The stories told in these interviews detail life in rural coal mining communities during the 20th century. The centrality of the church, both as a community locale as well as a religious institution, is a repeated pattern in all of these narratives. The church serves as a place of worship, but also as a place of social interaction. In a reflection on social life in Appalachia’s coal camps during the Great Depression, an interviewee states: ’There wasn’t anything but just church and schools (...) We had a Baptist church and a Holiness church and we went to both. Peggy liked the children that went to the Holiness church, but my son liked the Baptist church the best. But we attended both’ (Nunn Center for Oral History, 1993). For this interviewee, it is not the dogmatic or theological affordances of a church that determine her attendance, but rather the more profane concerns of social life: religious life as determined by social praxis. Robert Orsi’s notion of ‘lived religion’ captures this phenomenon. Orsi argues that ‘religion comes into being in an ongoing, dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life,’ redirecting our focus away from grand traditions and denominations and ‘toward a study of how particular people, in particular places and times, live in, with, through and against the religious idioms available to them in culture’(Orsi 2021, p.7). Through lived religion the agency of individual believers (as opposed to powerful institutions) in shaping their faith becomes apparent.
In this paper, I propose to analyze the place-based narratives of Appalachian extractivism through the lens of lived religion. The primary research question is: how does extractivist practice structure narrative notions of religion in Appalachian oral history? As such, this paper is interested in how Appalachian ’place’ interacts with religion and extraction. I aim to generate an exploratory theory of how Appalachian extractivist community cultures shape religion, but also how extractivism is in turn shaped by religion. The oral history projects of the University of Kentucky record various stories of social and religious life in Appalachian mining communities, which I analyze to understand the interaction between religion and extractivist culture. This paper is specifically interested in Christian religious practice. Christianity is the religion most commonly referred to in the Nunn Center’s interviews, and it is also the most common religion in Appalachia. Additionally, as I will expand upon below, Christianity has spurred on the development of an ideology justifying extractivist practice. Hence, I believe the interaction between extractivism and religion will be more pronounced in Christian communities.
Terra Schwerin Rowe elaborates on Christian conceptualization of nature, and in turn, energy cultures. Schwerin Rowe argues that Christian theology emphasized the complete dependence of nature on God, which imbued extractive practice with a God given righteousness she calls ‘petro-theology’ (Schwerin Rowe 2023, p. 133). I expect that this will also become apparent in the oral histories, in which religion is used to give extractivist practice a divine foundation, but also in order to make sense of the dangers that coal mining poses to human life. Interestingly, Joseph D. Witt points to the impacts of Christian ‘place’ on Appalachian anti- mountain top removal activism in furthering the environmental movement (Witt 2016). While Christian, Eurocentric culture has generated a philosophy of energy justifying its extraction, Witt demonstrates how certain Appalachian Christians are able to subvert this into environmentalist practice (Witt 2016). Witt also repeatedly highlights the importance of ‘place,’ and its religious, social and cultural entanglements, drawing attention to the gendered figure of the masculine miner (Witt 2024, p. 4 and 7). Building on Witt, I hypothesize that religion in extractivist communities will also bring about particular imaginaries of place in the community, functioning as a form of identification beyond extraction that is sensitive to the natural world around them. This tension between the importance of the natural environment for identification and the reliance on extractivism is underwritten by scholars. J. Todd Nesbitt and Daniel Weiner point out that natural resources are crucial for cultural production and history in Appalachia, and that governmental regulation is perceived as an outsider’s attempt to claim the land for inappropriate uses such as tourism (Nesbitt and Weiner 2001). There exists, then, an ambiguous relationship between Appalachian natural environmental imaginaries and the importance of extractivist practice of cultural identification.
The paper applies inductive narrative analysis in order to generate a new model of Appalachian religious extractivist practices. The model will elucidate how extractivist livelihoods interact with religion, and what role religion plays in structuring descriptions of extractive livelihoods. In doing so, this paper contributes to discussions on how extractivism and Christianity interact with each other, offering a nuanced new perspective on how Christianity both generates petro-theology as well as deep rooted connections to the land.
References:
Nesbitt, Todd J. and Daniel Weiner. ‘Conflicting Environmental Imaginaries and the Politics of Nature in Central Appalachia,’ in Geoforum 32, 2001.
Nunn, Hazel, interview by Randall Norris. November 19, 1993, Appalachia: Women Of Coal Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries.
Orsi, Robert “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion”, in Lived Religion in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Terra Schwerin Rowe, “Petro-theology: Critical Engagement with Theologies of Energy and Extraction”, Dialog, 2023.
Witt, Joseph D. Religion and Resistance in Appalachia: Faith and the Fight Against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining, Place Matters: New Directions in Appalachian studies. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2016.
Witt, Joseph D., “Religion, Extraction, and Just Transition in Appalachia”, Religions 15, no. 10, 2024.
This paper analyzes how Appalachian communities reliant on extractivist livelihoods structure narratives of religious life. It does so by drawing on Robert Orsi’s concept of lived religion,’ which argues that the daily activities of believers shape religious practice. By conducting inductive narrative analysis on oral histories of life in Appalachian coal camps and villages in the 20th century, the paper demonstrates how religion, place, and cultures of extractivism influence each other. I expect to find that religious practice acts as a divine justification for extractivist livelihoods, as protection for precarious and dangerous forms of labor, but also giving it religious significance. However, I expect that the role of land in religion is important as source of religious identification beyond extractivist practice. The oral histories analyzed in the paper are part of various projects of the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History.