Introduction to the Special Issue: Religion in Extractive Zones

1. Editorial Preface

Religion and extractivism—like other aspects of a petroculture (Petrocultures Research Group 2016; Wilson et al. 2017)—hide in plain sight. As with extractivism more broadly, modern society depends on narratives of backgrounded religion. Yet where extractivism remains obscured in order to maintain a magical illusion of self-sufficiency, religion and ceremony are either backgrounded as a remnant of a pre-scientific, previously enchanted world or constrained to the personal and internal in accordance with the contract of modern politics. The concealment of both is a condition of modernity. Blatant expressions of religion in extractivism—like those of Zion Oil or the evangelical fervor of Trump’s plans for energy dominance—emerge less as exceptions than as intensifications in their reactionary nature, emboldened by their claims to disenfranchisement predicated on these conditions. Simultaneously, ceremonial modes of resistance to extractivism rooted in the sacrality of land—as evidenced in the Apache Stronghold and #NoDAPL protests—consistently go unrecognized as religious and thereby remain legally unprotected even in a nation fixated on upholding rights to religious freedom (LaDuke 2016).1 This Special Issue on “Religion in Extractive Zones” aims to centralize the analysis of extractivism in religious studies, both through the theoretical frameworks presented in the co-editors’ peer reviewed lead essay and in the specific mode of each contributor’s essay.

2. Spill Stories: Reflexive Extractivist Religious Studies

In mid-August 2024, the editors of this Special Issue met in Santa Barbara, California, to think and write collaboratively about the relationship between extractivism and religion. The three of us had been engaging with these issues individually and collectively as members of the steering committee for an American Academy of Religion seminar on Energy, Extraction and Religion (EER). While each of us has been trained in various aspects of religious studies, our areas of expertise span ethics, philosophy, energy humanities, water humanities, science and religion, and environmental studies.

The site where we gathered to edit this Special Issue and collectively write its orienting essay is a storied one, featured prominently in narratives of extraction and activist responses to disaster. The story usually goes like this: On 28 January 1969, a blowout on a rig six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara spewed nearly 100,000 barrels of oil into the channel. The infamous Santa Barbara spill, which lasted ten days, killed tens of thousands of birds and suffocated untold numbers of marine creatures. Crude oil and tar washed onto beaches up and down Santa Barbara County. Media coverage of what was then the largest oil spill in the U.S. gave rise to a new national focus on environmental protection. Prominent visitors to the spill, including then-President Richard Nixon and Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, were moved to call for environmental action, education, and legislation. The first Earth Day, often linked to this disaster, took place on 22 April 1970, and a drumbeat of grassroots support for environmental causes led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, under Nixon’s auspices. A new interdisciplinary Program in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Barbara quickly coalesced in the wake of the spill.

As key initiating voice in petroculture studies Stephanie LeMenager explains, the Santa Barbara spill is often narrated as an “originary incident,” a catalyst for a popular awakening to the environmental crisis and the dangers of oil extraction (LeMenager 2014, p. 24).2 But as LeMenager emphasizes, the narrative of Santa Barbara as an originary incident in environmentalism also obscures the tensions and ambiguities involved in a highly affluent coastal community’s forced reckoning with the extractive enterprise that has defined the culture and values of Southern California. Indeed, Polyanna Rhee specifies that Santa Barbara marks an initiating moment for the consolidation of a particular kind of environmentalism—what she calls “propertied environmentalism” primarily driven by and oriented around the protection of private property. From this perspective, the Santa Barbara incident originates at least two orienting shifts: a recognition of oil and extraction as key threats to ecological sustainability and a response to that threat primarily oriented around the protection of property. As Rhee explains, a commitment to the protection of the environment as extensions of domestic life and private property help account for key historical and ongoing divides between the environmental movement and environmental justice efforts (Rhee 2025).

Our own embeddedness in petrocultures and introduction into environmentalism through what mainly would pass as propertied environmentalism was palpable as we gathered in the summer of 2024. As we hashed out ideas about and definitions of extraction, the asphalt scent of petroleum from naturally occurring oil seeps in the seismically unstable Santa Barbara Channel wafted through the windows on an otherwise perfect summer day. Our own stories connect us to far-flung corners of the U.S.; our interests in extraction were piqued, in part, by the vagaries of the academic job market that landed us in oil-rich regions like Texas and California, and financial epicenters like New York City where histories of wealth are often consonant with, if physically removed from, sites of extraction. (See the final section of our lead essay in this Special Issue for further analysis of positionality in this moment of higher education in the United States.) We recognized the irony of working within a petroculture such that collaborating to analyze and counter it required cross-country flights funded by institutions with historical and ongoing reliance on extractivism and related practices of dispossession. We noted as well the privilege of collaborating in a context that has been broadly sanitized of aesthetic reminders of an extractive zone and—consistent with a propertied environmentalism near an extraction site—carefully monitored for toxic exposure.

Yet this is the point of the incisive analytic of the petroculture: that its pervasive reach and infiltration into any and all aspects of society—including even modes of its resistance—demands coordinated, collective, systemic and institutional responses and cannot be answered by claims of grounds for moral purity outside the reach of petroculture. What could be seen as irony instead illuminates conditions of possibility within petroculture.

Recognition of the expanse of extractivism (including and beyond petroleum) does not indicate equal culpability or equivalently distributed precarity, but it does suggest the need for something like reflexive extractivist approaches. The term “reflexive extractivist” is Carolyn Fornoff’s, presented in her analysis of artists Fritzia Irízar, Débora Delmar, and Minerva Cuevas who employ “reflexive extractivist aesthetics” (Fornoff 2023). These artists recognize that calls for divestment of fossil fuels by museums and art festivals do not go far enough if the mediums, disciplinary histories, enticed desires, and imbrications with the production of commodities in art are not also critically and creatively engaged. Fornoff illuminates the ways these artists “lay bare the collusions, implications, and frictions that embroil fine art and extractivism” (39) and employ this positionality as a means and starting point for “considering what it means to make art and live in a world structured by extractivist capitalism” (39) as “reflexive extractivist aesthetics.” Under these conditions the illusory nature of an “outside extractivism” becomes clear, and the necessity of situating contestations from within it is revealed.

This Special Issue and our collectively authored, peer-reviewed lead essay serve as a call for reflexive extractivist religious studies. We encourage readers to start with the editors’ collaboratively written lead essay, “Religions in Extractive Zones: Methods, Imaginaries, Solidarities,” which makes the case for the importance of religious studies in analyzing extractivism and vice versa, thus serving as both incitement for further exploration and proposed scaffolding of methods, perspectives, histories, and sources that might be employed in its pursuit. As editors, we set out to write the lead essay collectively as a gesture of and invitation toward building broader coalitions that seek to analyze, interrogate, and resist increasing amplifications of extractivism. As groups of scholars like After Oil, Petrocultures Research Group, Mayapple Energy Transition Collective, The Zetkin Collective, and E.E.R.K. have demonstrated (Vemuri and Barney 2022; Bell et al. 2020; EERK Collective 2024; Petrocultures Research Group 2016; Zetkin Collective and Malm 2021), forming and writing as collectives can provide important modes of counter-extractive knowledge production. While extraction significantly overlaps with energy humanities and petroculture studies approaches, and while several of the essays in this Special Issue engage specifically with energy extraction, our aim in the lead essay is to remain focused on extractivism and religion more broadly, given that several studies have recently brought attention to the imbrications of energy, hydrocarbons, and religion more specifically (Berry 2026; Berry and Rowe 2024, 2025; Brunton 2022; Daggett 2019; Dochuk 2019; Grau 2018a, 2018b; Rowe 2023; Sideris 2017). We also asked all authors in the Special Issue to engage Eduardo Gudynas’ notion of extractivism as a consistent touchstone and suggested Macarena Gomez-Barris’ term “extractive zones” for broader expansions of the term to facilitate consistency and rigor in the use of the terms “extraction,” “extractivism,” or “extractive zones” in this Special Issue. (Please see the lead essay for detailed theoretical engagement with these and other terms in and beyond religious studies.)

The contributors to this Special Issue vary widely in their approaches to religious and environmental studies, as well as their positionalities within higher education, but they share a commitment to questioning common assumptions about the necessity or naturality of extractivism as well as its status as foundational to widely received designators for “the good life”, whether as individual pursuit (i.e., the American Dream) or collective (i.e., the project of civilization as bulwark against barbarism). Four key themes emerge from the Special Issue lead essay and the contributing essays: (1) theories of religion in contact and extractive zones; (2) religion as a mode of legitimation, dispossession and resistance; (3) racialization at the intersection of religion and extractivism; (4) and coloniality, de/anti-coloniality and reparative justice.

2.1. Religion in Contact/Extractive Zones

Palpably resonating with the introductory essay’s foregrounding of contact zones as extractive zones productive of religion, Richard J. Callahan’s “Between Whale Teeth and the Moral Uses of the Sea: Considering Religion in the US Whaling Industry’s Extractive Zone” attends to the ocean as extractive zone through whaling practices. He follows the journey of whale teeth as they slide between waste, commodity, and ritual object: whaling industry waste becomes items of trade in the global market, transformed into ritual objects in Fiji. Callahan thus demonstrates how religion informs extractivism and conversely how extractivism produces new modes of religion. Along similar lines, Rebecca Janzen’s, “Lay Religious Associations in Extractive Zones: A Case Study of Diamantina, Brazil” theorizes religion in extractive zones as contact zones through the work of religion scholar Charles Long. Janzen focuses on the extractive/contact zone of mining in Diamantina, Brazil, as interpreted and interpolated by Afro-Brazilian Irmandade, a Catholic lay religious association.

2.2. Religion as Mode of Legitimation, Dispossession and Resistance

In Jacob McLean, Emily Laxer, and Efe Peker’s contribution, “Taking Alberta Back: Faith, Fuel, and Freedom on the Canadian Far Right,” the authors highlight a lack of attention to the role of evangelical Christianity in Canadian pro-petro movements like Take Back Alberta. In response, they examine Take Back Alberta documents, social media and speeches, finding that evangelical Christianity contributes to an “extractive populism” both organizationally and discursively. Where current scholarship, as emphasized by McLean, Laxer, and Peker’s conclusions, focuses on religious attachments to fossil fuels, in “Chartism’s Critical Carbon Theology: What Fossil Power’s Nineteenth-Century Demonizers Contribute to the Ethics of Energy Justice Today”, Ryan Juskus foregrounds the 19th c British Chartist movement whose proponents employed religious resources to condemn coal power, criticize business managers, and generally exorcise industrial society’s demons. Along similar lines, but in the current context of lithium extraction in Chile, Cristián Borgoño applies an aspect of Pope Francis’ integral ecology, the critique of the technocratic paradigm, to analyze lithium mining. In “Catholic Integral Ecology: Perspectives on Lithium Mining–Building Common Ground and Action with Indigenous Communities”, Borgoño suggests that integral ecology provides resources not only for critique, but also for a cooperative project in solidarity with lithium mining’s frontline Indigenous communities where current Roman Catholic–Indigenous collaborations are scant. Marion Grau and Lovisa Mienna Sjöberg collaborate in Arctic contexts in “Fish, Fetishization, and Faith in the Arctic Ocean.” Their constructive essay gives an account of comparative and disjunctive interpretation of biblical and Sámi oral tradition, ultimately offering a decolonial ecotheological account of ocean extraction as a desecration of the Deep, an apophasis of creaturely divine presence, creativity, and interrelation. Finally, in “Extraction, Exploitation, and Religious Surplus in the Capitalocene”, Joerg Rieger highlights a non-reductive material turn in the study of religion and theology and employs this approach to more closely examine points of connection and distinction between exploitation and extraction.

2.3. Racialization at the Intersection of Religion and Extractivism

While logics of race and racialization are consistent threads throughout these essays, two authors foreground race in imperial–colonial dynamics in religion and extractivism. In “The Changing Muslim World: Energy, Extraction, and the Racialization of Islam in Protestant Missions”, Matthew J. Smith examines Anglo Protestant missions in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of the 20th century during the rise of oil extraction in that context. In particular, he focuses on missionary-led racializations of Islam as a monolithic unit incompatible with modernity and thus in need of colonial governance. And where predominant genealogies of modern energy have foregrounded the British Industrial context as pivotal, J. Brent Crosson reframes this lens with a genealogy rooted in the racialized Caribbean in “Toward a Caribbean Genealogy of Energy: Cosmologies of Energy in Modernity’s First World.” Crosson’s reframing emphasizes modern energy’s roots in colonial and imperial projects of extraction and poses extractive energy capitalism as an ongoing manifestation of racialized enslavement and plantation logics.

2.4. Coloniality, De/Anti-Coloniality and Reparative Justice

Our last four contributions focus especially on religion and extraction through the lens of coloniality, de- or anti-coloniality, and reparative justice. In “Patron Saints of Meat and Tallow: Sacralizing Extractivism in the Colonial Cattle Industry of Yucatán, Mexico”, Chelsea Fisher focuses on the role of saints and cows in colonial Yucatán as they were conscripted for dispossession in Mayan farming communities and extractivist ranching practices. In doing so, Fisher extends existing conceptualizations of the plantation as a site of domination and interspecies collaboration outside masters’ control to include supernatural entities as allies for both colonial extractivism and its refusal. Amanda Nichols focuses on uranium mining for nuclear technologies in “Uranium and Religion: Toward a Decolonial Temporality of Extraction.” She examines how colonial–religious worldviews have informed concepts of time that interpret uranium extraction as an event. This temporality, she emphasizes, obscures how the effects of uranium extraction are not localized in time and space, but globally dispersed with transgenerational implications. In Joshua Ramey’s contribution, “Elemental: Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Raw Materialist Justice,” he elaborates Ferreira da Silva’s arguments in Unpayable Debt about the imperative and immeasurable debt owed in the form of reparations to the formerly enslaved and colonized world. He then articulates her elemental stakes of global justice through an interpretation of the Afrofuturist mining film, Neptune Frost. Finally, in “Religion, Extraction, and Just Transition in Appalachia”, Joseph D. Witt emphasizes the importance of focusing not only on economic and political dimensions of extraction in Appalachia, but also attending to the role of religion in a broader ethos of extraction. The essay challenges many stereotypes of Appalachia, some recently reaffirmed in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, by foregrounding grassroots anti-extractivist communities in the region. This work, he argues, can also inform academic approaches to reparative ethics and anti-extractivism.

These essays collectively offer a rich and varied set of approaches to religion and extractivism. Nevertheless, we are aware that our selections are not all-encompassing—either in terms of religious representation or geographical regions. Christianities are the focus of many, but not all, of the essays. Western-hemisphere scholars and geographies remain most widely represented, mainly as a result of the editors’ scholarly areas of expertise. Our hope is that this Special Issue brings focused attention to religions in extractive zones in a way that future scholarship can expand on.

We are grateful for many modes of support that have made our collaboration and this scholarship possible. The SI editors’ gathering in Santa Barbara to edit the contributions and write the first draft of the lead essay was supported by UCSB Faculty Enrichment funds earmarked for work that advances diversity and justice. Commitment to those objectives and awareness of our own positionalities (and tensions between these two things) guided our framing of this issue and the scholarly values and publication process that we articulated for ourselves and our contributors (detailed in our lead essay). Given the collecting and consolidating work around religion in extractive zones that has been catalyzed through the EER Seminar, we would like to thank invited speakers (Willie James Jennings, Cara Daggett, Farhana Sultana, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Mohamed Amer Meziane) and the many participating members of the EER Seminar for fruitful and thought-provoking conversations that have shaped this Special Issue. In a focused way, we would especially like to thank our fellow steering committee members for conversations and insights in planning our seminars that have also greatly informed this Special Issue: Evan Berry, J. Kameron Carter, and Judith Brunton. Finally, we thank Devin Singh, who supported the project in the capacity of a consulting editor by reading and responding to drafts of the introduction and providing guidance on editorial feedback for select essays.