CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Claire Blencowe Religious Biopolitics on the Extractive Frontiers
My research highlights religious biopolitics. Biopolitical racism – with its determinations of who should flourish, and who should be diminished, constrained, or killed for the betterment of the life of all – has often operated along religious lines. In the historical context of British Imperialism, Evangelical Christianity was a crucial source of ideas, infrastructure and (wo)man-power for biopolitical governance.
In my new book, I argue that Evangelical Christian biopolitics, which accompanied British Empire, should be understood as intimately connected with the specific experience and demands of the extractive industries. Biopolitical racism enabled Methodist missionaries to racialize miners and peoples displaced by mining in ways that supported the expansion of the extractive industries, whilst the resonance between extractivism and evangelical theology helped both to flourish. This also generated a kind of quasi-deification of the extractive industries. Arguably, religious biopolitics is an emanation of the lived-apocalypse on the extractive frontiers. During the fellowship I am exploring how these dynamics operate in the present, analysing two discursive sites. First, the lobbying of Evangelical Christian libertarian think tanks that support the fossil fuel industries whilst also promoting violent suppression of environmentalist campaigners. Second, the discourses of Neo-Pentecostal Churches in Brazil in relation to opening indigenous and Quilombo territories in Amazonia to (further) mineral extraction. Evangelical Christians and other religious voices are present on both sides of these struggles. Thus, I not only ask how biopolitical religion enables world-destruction, but also what religious and spiritual movements emerge at the extractive frontiers that enable people to survival, resist, and escape lived-apocalypse.