Abstract
Mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR), which has profound environmental and social effects on the Appalachian Mountain region, represents an urgent ethical issue for Christians. At the foundation of the debate over this practice is a struggle over the meaning of a geographic region. I use the work of Christian philosopher H. Richard Niebuhr as a framework for a Christian ethical response to MTR that attends to this struggle over meaning. He argues that human actions are shaped by our interpretations or imaginations of issues and their contexts and that God-centered or theocentric imaginations respond to all issues as reflecting God’s purposes. In applying this approach to MTR, I address imaginations of power and powerlessness, of insiders and outsiders, and of destruction and reclamation. With each pair of terms, I discuss briefly MTR’s influence on religious responses to MTR, and I describe what I take to be a basic theocentric perspective: an understanding of power that seeks it in unlikely places, a conception of identity that relativizes boundaries between insiders and outsiders and expands the morally relevant wholes under consideration and a notion of reclamation for God that attends to the details of extraction and reclamation in light of the mountains’ ultimate source and that includes symbolic acts intended to mark the mountains as God’s. I provide examples of each imagination taken from activists and communities directly involved in the debate around MTR in Appalachia.
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- 1.
This role of religion, and particularly of mountain churches, such as Pentecostal and Holiness Churches, in encouraging quiescence and dependence, continues to be invoked in discussions of the role of religion in Appalachia and in the debate over MTR. Of course, such a straightforward view of the Church’s complicity, or even the complicity of these particular churches, is overly simplistic (Cf. Almquist 2009; Billings and Samson 2012; Corbin 1981).
- 2.
I acknowledge that the Unitarian Universalist Association is not, strictly speaking, a Christian organization; I include the UUA statement here because it most clearly expresses a view of power that seems more or less operative in the other statements, and because the similarities between this statement and the others are enough that I believe it may be taken as representative.
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Thompson, A.R.H. (2015). All My Holy Mountain: Imaginations of Appalachia in Christian Responses to Mountaintop Removal Mining. In: Brunn, S. (eds) The Changing World Religion Map. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_11
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