Oily Animations: On Protestantism and Petroleum

While predominant articulations of modern Christianity have indeed rendered matter dead and inert, late nineteenth-century accounts of oil in the US complicate narratives of wholesale Protestant disenchantment of nature as well as assumptions that re-enchantment will necessarily serve as an environmentally friendly antidote. Relying on petroculture analysis, early oil narratives convey a sense of oil as animated, agential, feminine, or divine. Consequently, in addressing climate change today religious new materialisms must seek to do more than resurrect dead matter. Rigorously held binaries between life and death must be disrupted while critically attending to both the enchantments and disenchantments of matter. Remapping such binaries to a more relational sense of responsive animation might allow for broader recognition of and proper response to both climate change and the pervasive influence of oil, while opening new relational possibilities for envisioning the sacred.