Chartism’s Critical Carbon Theology: What Fossil Power’s Nineteenth-Century Demonizers Contribute to the Ethics of Energy Justice Today

Abstract

Recent scholarship on religion and energy highlights the religious attachments some groups of people form with fossil fuels that have served to facilitate their extraction and use in building socially and economically stratified worlds. This scholarship foregrounds the business owners, managers, scientists, inventors, industrial spokespersons, and other panegyrists of the beneficent, civilizing power of coal and oil. However, little research to date has examined the religious attachments formed with fossil fuels by those who mined them, labored with machines powered by them, and lived in places that were diminished to extract, burn, and waste them. This article builds on the work of Andreas Malm and Terra Schwerin Rowe to examine these “critical carbon theologies”. It focuses in particular on the theological themes in popular literature produced by the nineteenth-century British Chartist movement—the first great social movement led by those who experienced in their bodies, communities, and environments the traumas that accompanied the introduction of fossil fuels as a motive power. These Chartist activist-theologians condemned coal power as a demonic force in history and envisioned a way to exorcize an industrializing society of its demons. This article uncovers and evaluates the largely overlooked theological dimensions of this movement and applies them toward a consideration of the ethics of energy transition today.

Like the ancient Moloch grim, his sire

In Himmon’s vale that stood,

His bowels are of living fire,

And children are his food.

“The Steam King”, by Edward P. Mead [1843]

(Scheckner 1989, p. 287)

How can a sustainable future be built through sacrificing the very bearers of that future, through depriving children’s well-being, and worse even, through depriving children the right to be?

Anonymous Nun in Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo [2023] (Kara 2023, p. 244)

1. Introduction

“Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo” (Kara 2023, p. 5). So begins Cobalt Red, researcher-activist Siddharth Kara’s exposé of the electric vehicle (EV) industry’s shadow side—the hellscape of a cobalt supply chain. Having collaborated with local brokers to slip through the militarized cloak of invisibility hiding the Copper Belt region from outsiders, Kara tells the stories of the people and places where most of the world’s cobalt is mined to source the battery revolution today’s evangelists of ecomodernism tout as a cornerstone of the transition away from fossil fuels and combustion engines. The invisibility—to the outside world—of Congo’s Copper Belt region is enforced through governmental and military means as well as private security firms. As a result, statistics are either non-existent or not to be trusted. Yet, Kara and his informants estimate roughly two-thirds of children in the region work in the informal, “artisanal” mines—think hand tools and no oversight—that exist alongside and often also inside the formal industrial mines. Many of these children in the artisanal mines become sick, wounded, and orphaned; still others are killed in everyday disasters like mine collapses. And despite the payments EV companies make to third-party groups to ensure a clean supply chain, Kara reveals that both formally and informally sourced cobalt ends up in the same flow of raw materials to China and the U.S. Kara narrates the human and environmental impacts of today’s cobalt boom as merely the latest catastrophe in a long line of extractive colonial endeavors, writing, “This system of obfuscating the severity of exploitation of poor people of color at the bottom of global supply chains goes back centuries” (Kara 2023, p. 11). Even though “so much time has passed”, he writes, and the grand stories justifying these sorts of extractive endeavors have evolved from civilizing missions to ecological sustainability, “so little has changed” (Kara 2023, p. 12).

And yet, as nineteenth-century British workers and contemporary historians of British imperialism have recognized, the shadow side of modernizing projects has never been confined to distant locales like the Congo.1 If the word “sustainable” is replaced by words like “modern” and “industrial”, then the comment Kara records by a Catholic nun in Kolwezi—a nun who at great personal risk provided him with evidence of slave conditions and helped him gain access to cobalt miners and their families—could have also been spoken about the children in England’s coal mines and factories during the epochal introduction of coal-fired machinery into England’s industrializing society: “‘How can a sustainable future be built through sacrificing the very bearers of that future, through depriving children’s well-being, and worse even, through depriving children the right to be?’” (Kara 2023, p. 244). Invisibilizing the sacrifice of children for modernizing projects and, when concerned groups make those sacrifices visible, normalizing them as unfortunate-but-just-about-to-be-eradicated-by-better-transparency-policy-and-technology—these have been strategies in the modernizers’ playbook “at home”, in the metropoles of England and the United States, as well as “abroad” in the global peripheries. These strategies to invisibilize, naturalize, and justify human and environmental sacrifices are being repurposed once again, this time for an age that paints over its shadow side in shades of green. The narrative and practical strategies employed by the champions of fossil fuels during the earlier energy additions of coal and oil are remarkably similar to those being used by proponents of today’s “energy transition.”2 Religion scholar Sarah McFarland Taylor has argued that narratives conveyed by popular media of environmental salvation through green consumption preserve the very structures driving environmental problems by promoting an individualized, free-market vision of “green virtue” that is at odds with effectively addressing monumental environmental challenges (Taylor 2019, pp. 4–6). I would add that eco-salvation narratives like these, whether they promise salvation by consumption or technology, also serve to limit even a sustainability-minded public’s moral imagination by directing its attention away from the world’s Copper Belts and toward utopian futuristic visions. It is as if the proponents of ecomodernism are saying, “Don’t look over there, at the children crushed in the mines, the pregnant women washing cobalt in toxic ponds for one dollar per day, or the blighted landscape. Look over here, at this shiny EV and the clean, fruitful, friction-free future it promises. Be the answer. Buy eco-salvation”.3

Today’s evangelists of sleek sustainability—ecomodernism’s boosters—are building on a conceptual foundation that was laid during the epochal energy addition of coal as a motive power for modernization.4 While the addition of coal to wood as a source of heat took place slowly, the addition of fossil fuels to wind and water as a source of motion accelerated in the nineteenth century with industrialists’ widespread adoption of the coal-fired steam engine, first in England and then elsewhere. Terra Schwerin Rowe’s work on “critical petro-theology” uncovers the historically deep intellectual roots of the transcendent, theological meanings fossil power’s panegyrists have invested in modern, specifically fossil-fuel-derived energy concepts and practices. The questions I examine in this article complement Rowe’s work by focusing not on the panegyrists but on the theological meanings of fossil power produced by people like the nun in Kolwezi—people who have either counted themselves among or stood in solidarity with those who have most acutely borne the costs of energy additions in their bodies, communities, landscapes, and spirits. Like the Kolwezi nun, many of those who brought their critique of the new energy regime’s shadow side into linguistic expression are anonymous, for fear of reprisal and repression of their efforts to cultivate care in the midst of otherwise dehumanizing conditions. Many also used demonic images that echo the nun’s image of child sacrifice as they interpreted the tapping of new subterranean powers as a demonic force in human and environmental history.

Why do proponents of what I call “critical carbon theology” associate fossil power not with divine images of blessing, growth, salvation, and progressive human fulfillment but with demonic images of child sacrifice, demons, fiery infernos, mangled bodies, and devils? I call this critical carbon theology, and not critical petro-theology, because it refers to coal in addition to oil and, more significantly, because it differs in one important respect from Rowe’s “critical petro-theology”. Whereas the qualifier “critical” in Rowe’s “critical petro-theology” refers to the scholarly work of uncovering and analyzing how the agents of petro-theology imbue aspects of petroculture “with divine or sacred authority”, the “critical” in “critical carbon theology” refers to the stance toward a fossil fuel energy regime taken by those who denounce certain aspects of it as demonic (Schwerin Rowe 2023, p. 14). What might be learned about energy additions and transitions—adding fossil fuels to wood, wind, and water, and then adding to or replacing these with technologically sophisticated “clean” and renewable energies—by listening not only to their divinizers but also to those who demonize the novel confluences of economic, political, chemical, and mechanical powers that combine in energy additions and transitions? How might contemporary visions of “energy transition” be approached and evaluated if what is prioritized in public debates are not the voices of those who stand to gain the most—in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or Washington, D.C.—but the voices, interpretations, and experiences of those who bear the costs of energy additions and transitions most immediately and acutely in their bodies, landscapes, communities, and spirits?

These questions first emerged during my study of activists who opposed mountaintop removal coal mining in central Appalachia. In this region, many activists, musicians, artists, and journalists have used demonic imagery to describe the realities of mountaintop removal coal mining: clearcutting forests, blowing up mountains, filling valleys with debris (“overburden”), scraping off layers of coal, and creating giant dams filled with toxic coal slurry. Mountaintop removal results in the annihilation of towns and family burial grounds, the elimination of flora and fauna, an increase in cancers and birth defects, and the literal reshaping of Appalachia’s iconic and culturally significant landscape—all to generate about 3% of the country’s electricity supply at the height of mountaintop removal coal mining.5 In 2020, country musician Steve Earle released his hit song “Devil Put the Coal in the Ground”, which also became the title of a documentary about the region’s progression from coal country to ground zero in the opioid crisis (Earle 2020; Hutchison and Sabean 2021). Another artist sings about Appalachian coal mining as a deal with the devil: “Daddy worked down in the mine, and at night he ran a still, selling moonshine when he had to just to try to pay the bills, ‘cause the man who owned the coal mines and the devil had a deal. They polluted all our mountain stream and stripped it of its life. They stole away a young boy’s dreams and made a coal miner for life” (Ratliff 2006). Reworking an old labor song, an Appalachian duo theologizes the region’s transformation: “Come all you good people / bad news to you I’ll tell / of how the coal companies / turned heaven into hell. / Which side are you on?” (House and Howard 2006). Writing about a prayer gathering to save Gauley Mountain in 2008, local activist and broadcaster Robyn Kincaid writes that the group was “surrounded by employees of the coal company. They had come to demand the sacrifice already under way be completed—the sacrifice of our community to Mammon. They swore. They cursed. They screamed at the priest as he tried to deliver his sermon on the flank of that hill.” In a play on words with potentially anti-Islamic undertones, Kincaid writes that in this pro-MTR religion, “There is no god but Coal, and Mountain Removal is its Profit” (Kincaid 2009).6 Lastly, a protester’s sign at the 2010 Appalachia Rising march in Washington, D.C., read, “Stop Mountaintop Mining, it’s the work of the devil” (Witt 2016, p. 133).

A similar note is struck by critics of oil, particularly in Latin America. In one prominent example, as he foresaw the impact oil would have on Venezuela’s economy, one of the Venezuelan co-founders of OPEC proclaimed in 1975, “Oil is the devil’s excrement” (Gudynas 2016). This sentiment is reflected by those who talk of an “oil curse” as a specific type of resource curse (Ross 2012; E. Berry, forthcoming). Uruguayan political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas, thinking with these concepts, argues that oil extractivism is a kind of demonic religion with its own “ecopolitical theology” that is embodied and enacted through liturgies, seminaries, and rituals that serve to naturalize petrostate political ecologies and justify their social and ecological impacts (Gudynas 2016). Likewise, political geographer Anthony Bebbington treats with academic seriousness the oft-repeated claim that the proponents of oil extractivism in Latin America are making “a bargain with the devil” when, against the weight of the evidence that oil has been more of a curse than a blessing, they nevertheless pursue petro-extractive economic policies (Bebbington 2011).

As these few examples demonstrate, some of those who have grappled with the shadow side of fossil power have used the religious concepts of curses, devils, demons, hell, idolatry, and false sacrifices when grappling with their human and ecological impacts. What do the demonizers of fossil power mean when they demonize coal and oil? Is there any wisdom to be gleaned from these demonizers of fossil power for thinking about the ethics and politics of energy justice and transition today?

My limited goal in this article is to begin to answer these questions by learning from the history of the last great energy addition, when the fossilized “buried sunshine” of coal and oil was added to the surface sunshine of wood, wind, and water flows (Mitchell 2009, p. 401). As a religious ethicist, I study how people coordinate religion with their descriptions, analysis, and actions to address environmental problems—in short, their environmental practical reasoning. For example, more than mere rhetorical flourish, describing the powers harnessed and utilized by the champions of coal and oil in demonic terms is also a way of theologically and ethically reasoning about what these powers mean, the nature of the problems they produce, how to evaluate them, and what should be done about them and by whom. For reasons that I explain below, I focus in particular on the critical carbon theology produced by poets and writers who, in the midst of the traumatic changes wrought by the introduction of coal power and coal-fired machines, joined the Chartist movement to democratize Britain’s industrializing society. I argue that the Chartist movement’s demonizers of coal power identified, analyzed, and developed a response to a problem—what I call, heeding their demonizing language, a “damned thing”—that has returned again at a time of contentious debate about “energy transition”. I argue further that in order to avoid repeating the same damned thing, contemporary debates about energy and the need to transition away from fossil fuels should learn from this earlier movement and its (partially successful) attempt to exorcize coal power’s demons and deliver its victims through a vision and practice of energy justice. After situating this study within scholarship on religion and energy and sketching a methodological framework for reading Chartist literature as theology, I then examine the demonic theme in Chartist verse and conclude by reflecting on its relevance today.

2. Carbon Theologies

This study is intended as a contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the historical and conceptual intersections of religion and energy. The point of departure of my study of Chartist carbon theology is the recognition that there are multiple and even conflicting carbon theologies that have emerged since the introduction of coal as a source of motive power in England. Scholars of religion and energy who have examined the last great energy addition have primarily focused their analytical attention on the meanings of this energy addition generated by those who stood to gain the most from the new powers it afforded: the industrialists, capitalists, ruling elites, and progressives who narrated the power of coal and steam as a beneficent, even divine, force in human and world history. As many of these champions saw it, coal power would bring to fulfillment human and civilizational development. For example, in the words of one champion of the coal-fired steam engine, “It might be said to have given a new power to the human race”. Another specified the nature of this power, writing that it “has accomplished more than any other machine for the promotion of the comfort, convenience, and well-being of mankind”. The author of a steam engine manual added that it had the power to move not only machinery; it also “may be said to be a great moral power. It will lead to important changes in the moral structure of society” (Malm 2016, p. 206). I call these champions fossil powers’ panegyrists, because they either ignore or never fully reckon with fossil power’s shadow side. In their studies of these panegyrists, historian Andreas Malm calls them proponents of “steam fetishism”, and theologian Terra Schwerin Rowe calls them exponents of a “petro-theology” of creation and redemption (Malm 2016, p. 224; Rowe 2023). Studies of fossil power’s panegyrists, such as those by Malm and Rowe, are driven by concerns about the human and ecological impacts of fossil power, especially the impacts on those who have disproportionately borne its costs in their bodies, environments, communities, and spirits. However, the panegyrists were never the only ones making moral and religious meaning of fossil power in publicly significant ways. So too did those who dwelt and worked in its sacrifice zones (Juskus 2023). More scholarly attention should be given to examining the meanings of and responses to fossil power generated by these social actors. Malm began such a project as part of his historical study of the roots of climate change. He theorized not only the “steam fetishism” of the panegyrists but also the “steam demonology” of the working classes and their allies who, during the tumultuous industrializing years between roughly 1812 and 1860, interpreted the socially and environmentally destructive powers unleashed by this energy addition as diabolical, demonic, and idolatrous (Malm 2016). The wager of the present study is that the workers’ demonization of coal power is best understood not as a negative version of steam fetishism, as Malm theorizes, but, following Rowe, as a form of theology, an analysis of which can inform contemporary debates about the ethics of energy justice and transition.

By “following Rowe”, I mean examining the conceptual and historical ways in which modern ideas about energy have been constituted together with particular theological ideas and how these energo-theological entanglements shape present realities. Rather than accept the idea that moral and religious evaluations of energy issues come only after the facts and artifacts have been presented by scientists and technologists, Rowe convincingly argues that the energy technologies, fuels, and sciences at the center of today’s climate and energy crises “have already been influenced by religion in their construction” (Rowe 2023, p. 11). More specifically, very particular Christian theological ideas have played an outsized role in shaping both the contemporary concepts of energy science and desires for extraction (Rowe 2023, p. 14). Rowe examines how particular theologies of the human person, God, grace, and redemption continue to influence contemporary “secular” energy imaginaries and politics. Rowe’s critical experiments in petro-theology therefore challenge scholars in the energy sciences and humanities to examine the norms and values about race, gender, and coloniality that have been baked into some of the basic “facts” about energy that have propped up modern scientific secular knowledges and societies. Adapting the intellectual-historical methods of political theology for these purposes, Rowe challenges popular understandings of secularization and disenchantment often associated with modernity, revealing these as concepts that conceal the ways particular normative theological concepts, such as human and historical development, undergird energy relations and therefore power relations in modern societies. Failure to grapple with, or even see, these complex energo-theological entanglements is already leading to proposed solutions to today’s climate and energy crises that are no solution at all. According to Rowe, what ecomodernists propose as “alternatives” to fossil fuels are often “more of the same—energy additions that continue to delineate genres of humanity” (Rowe 2023, p. 159). In other words, unless they grapple with the norms that have been baked into modern energy sciences, technologies, and desires, proposals to address our energy and climate crises may simply reproduce inequalities.

A similar approach could be taken to examine the theological norms baked into the words and actions of fossil power’s demonizers. In other words, the political-theological approach Rowe takes to examine fossil power’s panegyrists can also be applied to the social actors whom Malm identified as the proponents of “steam demonology”—those who organized to counteract the ways in which fossil power was being harnessed and employed to siphon off benefits for one class only by concentrating the environmental, spiritual, and psychological harms of a carbonizing world in another.7 In this sense, while I am indebted to Rowe’s critical approach to petro-theology, I nevertheless aim to draw attention to what I think is missing from Rowe’s analysis, namely, alternative carbon theologies that emerged alongside and in tension with those of fossil power’s panegyrists.

The frictions and tensions that existed between different theological perspectives on fossil fuels and fossil power in nineteenth-century Britain were not confined to that tumultuous era of rapid industrialization. Even today, Christian views on fossil fuels and fossil power are multiple and varied (Dochuk 2019; Gish 2020; Pogue 2022). They have evolved over time and through the frictions and tensions that exist within a tradition as complex as Christianity. What historian Eileen Yeo wrote about scholarship on Christianity in the Chartist movement in nineteenth-century Britain—a movement that I interpret in this article as a proto-environmental justice movement—could be said about Christianity in the context of movements for social and environmental justice today: scholars “have taken too little account of Christianity, not as the possession of any one social group, but as contested territory” (Yeo 1981, p. 109). This is as true of, say, contemporary American evangelical Christianity and its diverse views on fossil fuels as it is for Christianity writ large.8 Otherwise stated, the Christian petro-theology of fossil fuels’ panegyrists is but one carbon theology—albeit a powerful one—among others. The theological contributions of the largely suppressed and forgotten proponents of a more critical carbon theology should also form part of the analysis of how we arrived at where we are: a petroculture that keeps trying to solve a fossil fuel problem with simply more of the same damned thing9.

Some Christian theologies have undoubtedly contributed to this reproduction of the same damned thing, but others challenge this cul-de-sac of the imagination. The pioneering scholarship of Rowe, Malm, Cara Daggett, and Darren Dochuk on the historical and conceptual entanglements between religion and energy clearly demonstrates the degree to which Christian concepts, thinkers, and leaders have contributed to overly optimistic understandings of modern fossil-fuel-derived energy as an uncontested good in human history. In what follows, however, I focus on a movement within Western modernity, particularly during its intense and conflictual decades of energy addition, that generated imaginaries, analyses, and strategies that can inform contemporary deliberations about a just energy transition. Through analysis of the critical carbon theology represented by writers in the Chartist movement, I hope to show that an examination of the meanings and movements that emerge from energy sacrifice zones can inform a more transformative vision of energy transition: one that is more than simply the same damned thing.

3. Reading Chartist Literature as Theology

How does one attend to the carbon theology generated by those who dwelled and worked in the last great energy addition’s sacrifice zones? After all, no treatises were written on the topic. No Chartist writer claimed to be doing critical carbon theology. So, aside from contributing to debates about energy justice and transition, one potential upshot of this study is a methodological framework for studying the intersections of religion, energy, and extraction that builds on previous scholarship in this area by reading the religious themes in popular writings produced by those who dwelled and worked in fossil fuels’ sacrifice zones, as well as those who supported them, as carbon theologies. In this section, I make the case for the contemporary relevance of examining Chartist literature, primarily Chartist verse, and I argue that it represents a religious form of environmental practical reasoning about how to live in a carbonized, industrialized world that has, in many respects, been reshaped by fossil power.

Critical carbon theology is well represented by this article’s first epigraph from a poem entitled “The Steam King”, written by Edward Mead. Mead was a Chartist poet at the height of working-class opposition to the new coal power regime of mines, mills, and factories that allowed for the concentration of bourgeois power and profits by channeling the new regime’s environmental harms into the bodies and immediate environments of workers. Mead personifies this coal-powered regime as a demonic despot of doom that, like the biblical idol Moloch and his “bowels…of living fire”, demands child sacrifices, enslaves the working class, drinks blood, pollutes the atmosphere, and, while promising heaven, brings hell on earth.

Echoing Chartist literature in general, Mead’s poem does not stop at portraying coal power in demonic terms, as if the rhetorical force of this religious imagery were sufficient to address the problem it describes. After fleshing out and meditating on the demonic imagery in detail, Mead ends his poem with a particular call to action for this-worldly deliverance from demonic tyranny that bears witness to an eschatological reality of universal freedom and justice: “Then your Charter gain and the power will be vain / Of the Steam King’s bloody band. // Then down with the King, the Moloch King, / And the satraps of his might; / Let right prevail, then Freedom hail! / When might shall stoop to right!” (Scheckner 1989, pp. 287–88).

The “Charter” Mead refers to was the People’s Charter, a set of demands aimed at democratizing political and economic power in industrializing England. The Chartist movement, at its height from 1838 to 1848, revolved around these democratizing demands. While the People’s Charter was not immediately adopted, and the movement dissipated after setbacks and internal divisions, it greatly impacted British society as well as industrializing societies in Europe and the Americas. Most of the Chartist demands were eventually adopted into British law, contributing to Britain’s democratization and the rise of the welfare state. The movement also inspired working-class movements and democratizing social movements far beyond Britain, including in the United States.

Why focus on the literature and meanings produced by the Chartist movement? After all, there are good reasons not to: few readers of this journal will likely be familiar with the movement and its significance, and those who are familiar with Chartism probably consider it a “secular” movement that was “political” in nature, thus having little to do with either religion, ecology, or energy. The movement, having taken place in Britain well over 150 years ago, is historically distant. What is more, literature, especially Victorian literature, tends to refer to the literary productions of the educated elites and upper classes that were largely removed from, and critical of, the political agenda of popular social movements. However, as I mentioned earlier, Chartism is arguably the world’s first collective response to the last major energy addition that was led by those who inhabited and worked in fossil power’s first sacrifice zones. As the first movement to emerge from coal power’s sacrifice zones, the Chartist movement was anything but “secular”, and it was much more than just a “political” movement. It was, according to historian Edward Norman, “a social and religious movement with a political programme” (Norman 1987, p. 10). As historian Eileen Yeo writes, quoting a piece in the Manchester Observer from 1819, the alignment of many church officials with the ruling class at the time “provoked many radical Christians to spell out a counter-Christianity, in an effort ‘to deliver the religion of Jesus Christ from the disgrace brought upon it’” (Yeo 1981, p. 110). And in the decades leading up to the Chartist movement, these radical Christians spread their “labour-value theology” in working-class chapels and periodicals, foremost among them The Northern Star. This journal, edited by the Swedenborgian minister Rev. William Hill, is described by Malm as “the lifeblood of the Chartist movement” (Yeo 1981, pp. 111–12; Malm 2016, p. 238).

In addition to having strong religious elements, the Chartist movement was attuned to ecological matters before the latter became the subject of a scientific discipline. Considering a number of environmental themes, such as the Chartist leader’s Land Plan to provide an agricultural alternative to industrial life in the factory towns and redistribute political power through land redistribution, the workers’ strong critique and targeting of coal-fired steam power, and the environmental themes in Chartist literature, Malm is right to conclude that Chartism was “proto-environmentalist” (Malm 2016, p. 244). I would go a step further and argue that it was an instance of what Joan Martinez-Alier calls “the environmentalism of the poor”—a type of environmentalism that emerges in response to ecological distribution inequalities and conflicts, often equated in the U.S. with the environmental justice movement (Martinez-Alier 2012). As Malm spells them out, these ecological inequalities included the rapid loss of flora and fauna and the loss of sunlight in industrial towns as well as the concentration of “excessive heat, heightened concentration of carbon dioxide, air pollution by smoke and the risk of sudden explosive disasters” in the immediate environments of the British working class (Malm 2016, pp. 246–48). While, as I demonstrate below, the Chartist poetry of Ernest Jones marries recognizably environmentalist themes about reverence for nature with those of environmental and social justice, Martinez-Alier’s thesis is not that “as a rule poor people feel, think, and behave as environmentalists” but that “in the many resource-extraction and waste-disposal conflicts in history and today, the poor are often on the side of the preservation of nature against business firms and the state” (Martinez-Alier 2012, p. 514). This is an accurate description of Chartism, which, as Malm argues, supplied the intellectual basis of “the greatest revolt of the British working class in the nineteenth century”—the general strike of 1842. The strikers of 1842 roamed through England’s factory and mill towns literally pulling the plugs from coal-fired steam engines and stopping the smoke-belching machines, bringing “the fossil economy” to a standstill for a few weeks in August of that year (Malm 2016, p. 234). This is why Malm argues that “steam stood at the centre of the Chartist analysis of class rule” (Malm 2016, p. 238). In other words, Chartism’s social analysis revolved around a critique of coal power’s social and environmental impacts.

Even if it is true that the Chartist movement had deeply religious elements and that it can be understood as a movement with proto-environmentalist and proto-environmental justice components, why does it matter that Chartist poets regularly demonized coal power—often represented by the steam engine—in working-class literature? The answer is simple yet, for those who associate poetry with high culture, surprising: poetry was among the most popular media of mass communication among the working class and as such was one of the primary vehicles for constructing a British working-class identity and culture. Scholar of Chartist literature Peter Scheckner writes that Chartist poems, written primarily by industrial or artisan workers, “were read every week by hundreds of thousands of active Chartist workers and supporters throughout England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; the ideas and commitment behind these works were translated month by month into political action” (Scheckner 1989, p. 15). This unique form of verse evolved from the street literature of ballads and broadsides that functioned like a working-class press, giving “a very large number of people access to current events, trade customs, local legends, and culture”. Prior to the advent of the popular press in the 1850s, journals like The Northern Star “played a central role in enabling working people to identify themselves as a class and in defining their political and cultural objectives” (Scheckner 1989, p. 25). For instance, Scheckner estimates that in 1841, two or three million working people out of a total British adult population of about ten million read The Northern Star, which between 1838 and 1852 published 1500 Chartist poems (Scheckner 1989, pp. 16–17; Malm 2016, p. 241). Often sung at trade gatherings, these poems were written in simple form with easy-to-remember rhyme schemes. Chartist poetry was unabashedly public in nature, showing little interest in expressing the private state of mind. While its artistic value pales in comparison to Romantic poetry, for example, Scheckner argues that the view of Chartist poets was that verse “should not only interpret the world, but change it” (Scheckner 1989, p. 28). In short, workers across Britain wrote, read, debated, and responded to poetry with collective action, and this is what makes it valuable for my purposes.

But to accept, as I do, that these poets produced theological ideas about the emerging regime of coal power is to make a methodological claim about the study of theology and religion, including what they are, who produces them, and where they are practiced. Scholarship on religion since at least the mid-twentieth century has largely focused on what is sometimes called “official religion”, that is, the religious ideas, practices, and rituals of religious leaders and institutions such as priests, academically trained theologians, and churches. Such a view depends on a conception of “the secular” that means that which is not religious or which happens outside of particular religious places and times such as Sunday morning church services. It also tends to focus on beliefs and on defining the border between morally and politically “good” or “bad” religion. However, I follow the lead of scholars of “lived religion” and “lived theology” who study what religious people do, or rather, how religious ideas, practices, and formations are expressed in and influenced by the living of everyday life.

For this reason, while many of the intellectual and cultural influences on Chartism came directly from churches and ministers, there is no good reason to exclude from religious analysis the theological interpretations of lay persons, including self-described non-religious persons, or religious leaders in social and political spaces. For example, what historian David Corbin writes about religion in the early-twentieth-century Appalachian coalfields applies equally well to many of the workers in early industrializing Britain who often had a complicated relationship with the established churches: “The coal miners’ distaste for company religion and their nonattendance at the company church did not represent an absence of religious values, but the opposite; they held Christianity dear enough not to make a sham of it”. Corbin points to the case of Fleet Parsons, “an active UMWA organizer in Kanawha County, who ‘never professed a religion in his life’ and claimed ‘preachers were phonies’”, and yet Parsons daily “rose before sunlight and read the Bible by firelight” (Corbin 2015, p. 155). Corbin concludes that “[b]asic to the miners’ autonomous religious proclivities was their development of their own spiritual leaders—miner-preachers—separate from the company church” (Corbin 2015, p. 158). Many Chartist poets fulfilled a similar role for workers who felt abandoned by churches that promoted ruling class theologies, providing spiritual guidance, theological interpretation, and moral instruction outside the official churches, often because the latter were hostile to the workers’ political goals, even when they otherwise sympathized with the workers’ plight. In this era, before the working class had Karl Marx or socialist agitators to provide them with a vision of freedom and justice, they had the dusty old Bible to provide them with an image of what a free and just society should look like, and they made liberal use of it.

Granted, demonizing certain features of industrializing British society was not unique to working-class poets and writers of that particular era. The radical Christian thinker William Blake wrote two generations before the Chartist movement about the “dark Satanic mills” and “Satanic wheels” (a machine’s cogwheels) years before coal and steam-powered factories dotted England’s towns and cities (quoted in W. Berry 1984, p. 219). And John Ruskin wrote a generation after the Chartists about the “Manchester devil’s darkness” in his famous “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (Ruskin [1884] 2012). As ruling metaphors for organizing fundamental relationships, Blake even juxtaposed the “Satanic wheels” of machinery, which turn in opposition to one another (“wheel without wheel”), to the “wheel within wheel” spoken of by the prophet Ezekiel—wheels that freely revolve in harmony and peace with one another (W. Berry 1984, p. 220). However, neither one of these celebrated cultural and literary figures experienced in their bodies the deteriorating environments of mines, factories, and mills, and neither one acted in concert with others to “go and stop the smoke” in the way the plug pullers did in 1842 or to organize for the distribution of political power as the Chartists did. While the plug pulling saboteurs who jammed a wrench into the machinery of the “steamocracy” in 1842 would not necessarily have all identified explicitly with the People’s Charter, Malm argues that Chartist literature is the best way to understand what the working class thought of coal, steam, and the emerging fossil power regime at the time (Malm 2016, p. 237).

Finally, even if it is accurate to describe Chartist literature about coal and steam as environmental and religious, why read it as theology? Why not read its religious themes as mere class ideology wrapped in religious garb? The latter is Malm’s preferred interpretation: the religious elements—in particular, what Malm rightly identifies as the three subtropes of the engine as an agent of despotism, degradation, and ultimately doom—are a form of “steam demonology” (Malm 2016, p. 225). While I am indebted to Malm’s work on the religious and environmental themes in Chartist literature, I nevertheless depart from Malm on this point. Malm’s theorization of Chartist religious meaning making as “steam demonology” reduces religious reasoning to economic class conflict: working-class demonization of coal and steam is merely the negative image of the “steam fetishism” of the industrial bourgeoisie. Both “steam fetishism” and “steam demonology” are social projections onto the coal-fired steam engine. They both project onto a material artifact a force of its own. The difference is that in the “steam fetishism” of the liberals and industrialists, this force works for good, whereas in the “steam demonology” of the workers, it works for evil. “Moving its limbs with inherent vigour, a formidable current of energy hidden within its body, the engine appeared to be possessed with an uncanny, almost diabolic power”, writes Malm (2016, p. 224, emphasis mine). In other words, this “almost diabolic power” that works for evil is but an ideological projection onto the engine. Discourse about divine and demonic powers in relation to objects, like coal and steam engines, is simply a site of economic class struggle. However, this reductive approach has a number of problems. On the one hand, it is based on a projection theory of religion that originated in European imperialism and colonial anthropology.10 On the other hand, it does not treat the interpretations of working-class writers with the seriousness they deserve as instances of practical reasoning about what to make of and how to respond to the sacrificial dynamics that coal power seemed to hypercharge in British society. A different approach is needed.

Therefore, rather than treat religious themes in Chartist literature as mere clothing for class-based ideology, my alternative interpretation of working-class demonization of coal power is to read it as an instance of Christian theological production. By this, I mean treating it as theological reasoning about the world and how to orientate oneself and one’s actions within it. In other words, it is an intellectual mode of religious interpretation and analysis that evaluates and makes meaning of an industrializing, carbonizing society through sustained engagement with biblical and theological concepts in order to orientate a people and their activity around reality.

According to the environmental humanist Timothy Morton, this kind of approach is warranted. Morton does something similar to what I am doing in their recent book Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. In Hell, Morton thinks constructively with Blake’s ecopoetic theology, particularly his image of the “dark Satanic mills” out of which “Jerusalem” will be built. Morton calls what is commonly referred to as the Anthropocene “Hell” (Morton 2024, pp. xxviii, 31–32). Morton agrees with Blake on the matter of Hell: “we do live in Hell, the demonic angel version of Hell”. The pressing question is as follows: “So how do we start to live in Hell, instead? How do we get the demonic angels off our backs? How do we start to live in a Hell of angelic demons?” (Morton 2024, p. 42). Morton’s “demonic angels” are those who keep reproducing the same damned thing as if it were a solution. If these were once the divinizers of fossil power, among the “demonic angels” today would surely be the ecomodernist divinizers of renewable, “clean” energy who would paint over their sacrifice zones and sacrifice populations with shades of green. This is Hell. For Morton, as for Blake, Hell is not just a religious concept but “a political reality that we have to engage with”, and we are in it (Morton 2024, p. 61). Rather than pursue one escape tactic after another, each one just digging us in further, Morton concludes, “I might (as well) just get on with it. Do my best to be kind. Smile” (Morton 2024, p. 70). So just as Morton thinks with Blake’s theology and demonology, I now turn to think with the Chartist writers who, like the nun in Kolwezi who figured these hellish dynamics using the image of child sacrifice, made meaning of and evaluated their situation vis-à-vis demonic figures like Moloch and Mammon.

4. Chartist Carbon Theology

I begin with the figure of Moloch, who is a very particular deity king, or idol, in biblical literature and Christian history and who figures prominently in Chartist literature. In his short story “The Factory Child”, published in the Owenite New Moral World, Douglas Jerrold writes about a working girl who is “united—fast married—to the giant steam”, forced to supply her “infant bones and sinews for the Moloch engine” (quoted in Malm 2016, p. 225). Anglican priest Charles Kingsley, who would go on to become one of the founders of Christian socialism, combines Moloch with other idols and hellish imagery in a novel about a young London tailor who becomes a Chartist militant after becoming conscious of the “hopeless struggles against Mammon and Moloch, amid the roar of wheels, … amid endless prison-walls of brick, beneath a lurid, crushing sky of smoke and mist”. This tailor’s London was “resonant of the clanking of chains, the grinding of remorseless machinery, the wail of lost spirits from the pit” (quoted in Scheckner 1989, p. 27). A Chartist activist arrested during an uprising in 1839, in which 24 people were killed and many more arrested, used the pseudonym Iota when publishing their poetry, such as their Sonnet III, published in The Northern Star in 1840. The sonnet is about the vision that drove one of the leaders of the uprising, who was arrested and later charged with high treason: “When men no more should be the slaves of gain, / Nor infants die to fill the Moloch maw / Of despot lordlings—tyrants of the loom, / Who yearly hurt their thousands to th’ untimely tomb” (Scheckner 1989, pp. 164, 334–35). Iota thus links the agents of coal power (“tyrants of the loom”) to the child sacrifice that characterizes the cult of Moloch.

Edward Mead’s “The Steam King”, the poem from which the first epilogue in this article comes, and perhaps the best example of connecting the themes I am tracing between coal/steam, demonology, and deliverance, identifies Moloch with coal power no less than three times. The opening lines introduce the poem’s subject: “There is a King, and a ruthless King, / Not a King of the poet’s dream; / But a tyrant fell, white slaves know well, / And that ruthless King is Steam”. “Steam”, as should by now be apparent, is a poetic personification of the coal-fired steam engine that at that time was at the center of a great shift in social, political, economic, and ecological relations that has sometimes been known, though not without question, as the Industrial Revolution, the origins of climate change, and the birth of the Anthropocene. Mead’s “Steam King” is fossil power personified—coal’s motive power that doubles as economic and political power. With his “iron arm”, he is Moloch in the Valley of Gehenna (or “Hinnom’s vale”, which Mead spells as “Himmon’s vale”): “Like the ancient Moloch grim, his sire / In Himmon’s vale that stood, / His bowels are of living fire, / And children are his food”. Mead’s idol Moloch is not disconnected from social and historical forces: “His priesthood are a hungry band, / Blood-thirsty, proud, and bold; / ‘Tis they direct his giant hand, / In turning blood to gold”. After exploring this contemporary priesthood further, Mead’s poem turns toward a call to action: “Then down with the King, the Moloch King, / Ye working millions all; / O chain his hand, or our native land / Is destin’d by him to fall”. When through gaining the People’s Charter these “working millions” render “the power…Of the Steam King’s bloody band” vain, deliverance will be achieved: “Then down with the King, the Moloch King, / And the satraps of his might; / Let right prevail, then Freedom hail! / When might shall stoop to right!” Both the deity Moloch and his human governors and stewards (“the satraps of his might”) will be vanquished by freedom and justice (Scheckner 1989).

Who is this Moloch of whom the Chartists write? In the biblical tradition, Moloch is a deity king who rules over the underworld of the dead and demands the sacrifice of children by burning them. The cult of Moloch and its prohibition hold a unique place in the Bible. As Bible scholar Jacob Milgrom argues, the cult of Moloch did not only involve murder; it was also a form of idolatry, as it was incorporated into the popular religion of Israel and thus into the worship of YHWH (Milgrom 2004). In a single day, an Israelite could make a child sacrifice to Moloch in the Hinnom Valley, just south of the walls of Jerusalem, and then ascend the hill to worship YHWH in the Jerusalem temple in the afternoon. In the prophetic tradition of Jeremiah, the Hinnom Valley thus became known as “the valley of slaughter”. It later became a place where the trash from the city, including the animal carcasses from the temple sacrifices, was burned. Therefore, by the time of Jesus, the valley of burning trash, known also as Gehenna, became an image of this-worldly hellish reality. The figure of Moloch and the place of sacrifice therefore have a textured and intricate set of connections that tie together biblical themes of false sacrifice, idolatry, the demonic, false kingship or authority, murder, hell, heat, fire, and the future (offspring). In view of how this place “outside the gate” of Jerusalem is described in the New Testament—as a place where the unpleasant things, like burning trash and carcasses and executing people, took place so that life could go on inside the walls of the city—one could call it Jerusalem’s sacrifice zone (Hebrews 13:12). Moloch was the demonic figure associated with this spatial distinction between the sacrifice zone outside the gates of the city and the social zone inside the city’s walls.

Chartist carbon theology’s oft-used equation of the steamocracy with Moloch represents a counterpoint to the theology of coal power’s panegyrists, who, as Daggett and Rowe have shown, invested progressive industrial forces with divinity (Daggett 2019). While the panegyrists associated the first law of thermodynamics with divine beneficence and the second with evil and the Devil, the critical carbon theologians, seemingly unconcerned with the laws of thermodynamics, were nevertheless deeply concerned with the laws of society. In particular, they were existentially interested in the laws operating on industrializing society. For example, they supported laws to limit the work day and improve mine and factory conditions, and they opposed laws based on the liberal political economy of scarcity. To the critical carbon theologians, the demonic was not the abstract dissipation of energy—the second law of thermodynamics—but the concrete death, dismemberment, and degradation of human life, embodied in its most extreme form in the lives of children. In the critical carbon theology, the ruling-class-sanctioned machinery of industrialization literally eats children and burns them alive. Many would enter the mouth of a mine and into its hot bowels never to exit alive. Poisonous gasses filled the atmospheres of workers in the mills and mines, and smoke shrouded industrial cities, like Manchester, where they lived, while the industrialists lived outside of town in the clearer, cleaner, greener countryside (Malm 2016, p. 246). In other words, the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century saw the intensification of a spatial separation that is still with us today: a carbonized world divided between green zones and sacrifice zones, each one maintained by the other.

This Moloch ecosystem of sacrifice was also expressed in other demonic terms. Another figure who frequently appears in Chartist literature about steam and coal is Mammon. When capitalized, Mammon refers to a demonic figure associated with material riches. Mammon, sometimes translated in the New Testament gospels as “money” or “unrighteous wealth,” is juxtaposed to God, as in Jesus’ sermon on the mount: “You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:9–13). Whether or not Jesus figures “mammon” in personal terms as a demon (often signaled in Christian tradition by a capital “M”) or more mundanely as money, Chartist writers reflect the common Christian practice of equating material wealth and the personal demon associated with its acquisition. Frequently, as in the Charles Kingsley example cited above, Mammon and Moloch are even paired together in order to directly link industrialism’s routinized child sacrifice to the worship of money. Just one month after the defeat of the Chartist-inspired 1842 general strike, The Northern Star published an article under the pseudonym “Hungry Handless” about how supposedly “civilized” and “scientific” Britain was filled with hungry people: though “rich with all the choicest gifts of creation…the working man has been debarred by a forced competition with the Mammon-made machine; that with its eternal thump, thump, thump, has been reducing, under the piston of the steam-engine, the poor to powder” and, like the giant of fairy tales, “grind[ing] his bones to make my bread” (quoted in Malm 2016, p. 237). Hungry Handless continues, “In the insolence of presumed power, the millowners told the working men to bow down to the steam idol or starve”, and, of course, they ended up having to do both.

Whereas Mead is the example par excellence of figuring coal power as a Moloch system, Ernest Jones, the most well-known Chartist poet and then the movement’s leader during its waning years, was fond of the Mammon theme. In the mid-1840s, when Jones joined the Chartist movement, Jones scholar Simon Rennie writes that he was in the midst of a journey away from the Anglicanism of his family and his youth and toward Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and other nonconformist, dissenting forms of Christianity that “had strong links with political radicalism in the mid-nineteenth century” (Rennie 2016, p. 6). Exemplifying what Roy Vickers, another Jones scholar, describes as a “broad, non-sectarian Christianity” that could appeal to the many Christian elements within Chartism, Jones revealed Chartism’s biblical roots, namely, “that its battle with inequality and injustice is a Christian struggle” (Vickers 2006, pp. 61, 64). In his poetry, Jones shows in Christian terms the moral basis of Chartism as well as the moral depravity of the ruling classes. As Vickers concludes, “His poems show how Christian discourses could act as important authorities by which the working classes might justify their fitness for the franchise, using the Bible as an argument for complete political renewal” by way of democratization (Vickers 2006, p. 78). But Mammon stood in the way of this renewal. Mammon appears twice in one of Jones’s most famous poems, “The Factory Town”. In factories and factory towns, Jones uses a range of demonic and hellish metaphors to represent the plight of workers, especially children, who are mangled and spiritually diminished: “Woman’s aching heart was throbbing / With her wasting children’s pain, / While red Mammon’s hand was robbing / God’s thought-treasure from their brain!” The industrialist, of course, is inured to this reality of “bloodless slaughter.” Britain’s idyllic life in nature, such as a nighttime summer scene, “where the moon, the fairies’ mummer, / On distant fields enchanted lay!” is withheld from the worker: “On the lealands slept the cattle, / Slumber through the forest ran, / While, in Mammon’s mighty battle / Man was immolating man!” And in an unnamed nod to Mammon’s link with Moloch, Jones laments “Young lives—sacrificed in vain”, “Trampled by thy fierce steam-horses” (Scheckner 1989). The linking of Mammon and Moloch once again theologically ties the making of green zones—industry-derived wealth for Britain’s ruling classes who can afford to live in clearer, cleaner, greener corners—to the idolatrous sacrifice of children.

Beyond Moloch and Mammon, Chartist poets interpret coal power as a curse, which in Christian tradition is closely connected to hell and demons. Jones, once again, in “The Factory Town”, writes, “The factories gave forth lurid fires / From pent-up hells within their breast” and asks about Britain’s industrial tyrants, “What have they, but Gold and Hell”. In “The Cornfield and the Factory”, Jones strings together a host of demonic theological concepts in reference to “the demon god of factory and loom!” with “His thousand temples’ burning altars rise. / Curses and groans his ear like anthems greet, / And blighted lives are cast beneath his feet”. After an idyllic scene in England is interrupted by the dark, degrading, and destructive cloud of coal-powered industrialization, Jones continues: “The very sun shines pale on a dark earth, / Where quivering engines groan their horrid mirth, / And black smoke-offerings, crimes and curses, swell / From furnace-altars of incarnate hell! / The demon laughs, and still his arm he waves, / That thins the villages, but fills the graves” (Scheckner 1989). Likewise, Robert Lowery’s famous poem “The Collier Boy” has much the same to say about the child coal miner as Jones says about the factory worker: “Oh! curse upon that love of gold / For which the young heart now is sold, / With care and sickness withering / The sunshine of its early spring. / Oh! shame upon that barbarous state / That toil for infant years create, / Whose accursed influences destroy / The mind and form of the Collier Boy” (Scheckner 1989).

This theme of coal and steam power as a curse hearkens back to the biblical account of the entrance of suffering and strife into a good creation repeatedly blessed by its creator. It is a direct refutation of the panegyrists’ idea that the steam engine would bless humankind with morality and progress. Theologian Kelly Johnson notes that the curses in Genesis 3 do not revoke the good creation’s life and creativity but instead endow it with misery: “The humans and animals and earth now no longer share blessings but become enemies, fearful and hostile to each other’s well-being” (Johnson 2013, p. 8). Interpreting coal power as a curse suggests that it is caught up in the creature’s rejection or twisting of the creator’s original blessing—the blessing of a good creation that is oriented toward flourishing in relationship with other creatures and its creator—such that relations between creatures become hostile to life. In the poems by Jones and Lowery, the type of work performed in mining and burning coal is a twisted version of labor that, instead of communicating blessings between creatures, deforms, degrades, and destroys the flow of goods that support life.

Crucially, the demonic, hellish, and diabolical themes in Chartist literature are always closely tied to contrasting themes of freedom, justice, and healing. Jones, the master of Chartist verse, also exemplifies well this crucial shift in Chartist literature from demonization to deliverance. The context of one of his references to hell already mentioned demonstrates the point: “Up in factory! Up in mill! / Freedom’s mighty phalanx swell! / You have God and Nature still. / What have they, but Gold and Hell”. Further on, he writes, “Then up, in one united band, / Both farming slave and factory-martyr! / Remember, that, to keep the LAND, / The best way is—to gain the CHARTER!” (Scheckner 1989). In Jones’s critical carbon theology, while the divinizers of industrial society might talk as if God is on their side, God and the created order are rather affirmed to be on the side of the workers and the democratic Charter; therefore, the workers should act in accordance with these theological truths. A better, more succinct, and fully theological example of Martinez-Alier’s “environmentalism of the poor” would be near impossible to find. The clear prominence of the deliverance theme is why some scholars of Chartist history and literature describe the Chartist movement not only as a religious movement but Chartism also as a “theology of liberation” that recognizes this-worldly deliverance from oppressive conditions as God’s work and will (Vickers 2006, p. 60; Yeo 1987). Moreover, following Daniel Castillo, and considering Chartist literature’s strong ecological themes about polluted atmospheres, degraded countrysides, and the unequal distribution of ecological harms, it could be called “an ecological theology of liberation” (Castillo 2019).

The deliverance theme is clear in Jones’s poetry, but it is just as clear in Chartist literature more broadly. Alexander Huish’s poem “The Radical’s Litany” is a series of industrial maladies, each of which is followed by the refrain “Good Lord deliver us”, including “With all that’s hostile to the Charter, / Good Lord deliver us” (Scheckner 1989, pp. 161–62). In the anonymous “The Black and White Slave”, which identifies the suffering of the African slave in the Americas with the misery of the factory child, this-worldly deliverance is demanded of God: “Then I knelt me down, in that vision wild, / And raised my hands to God: / I breathed a prayer for the man and child / Who groan ‘neath the tasker’s rod. // Great God! like thy pure and balmy sir, / Let all thou hast made be free, / And blot from thy fair and beauteous world / The ban of slavery” (Scheckner 1989, p. 76).11 In his poem “All Men are Brethren”, George Julian Harney describes the problem of industrial tyranny in a way that is by now familiar: “The earth they have plunder’d, / Mankind they have sunder’d, / Nation ‘gainst nation excited to war.” But deliverance is what all of his description of the problem has been aiming at: “As Bright as the sky when the tempest is ended, / As fair as the earth when the winter is o’er- / Shall glory and freedom for ever be blended, / When the dark freezing reign of oppression’s no more, / The happy communion, / Of nations in union, / The serpent of selfishness never shall mar. / Then sing, brothers, sing, / Let the chorus loud ring, / Men are Brethren! hip! hip! Hurrah!” (Scheckner 1989, pp. 156–67).

The note of deliverance is what makes Chartist literature—what I have been treating as Chartist ecopolitical theology in verse—worthy of renewed attention in the midst of discourses about energy justice and transition. Those who inhabited the last great energy addition’s sacrifice zones envisioned and sought to realize a more salutary social project than the one that served the gods of money and child sacrifice—Mammon and Moloch. In other words, they sought to exorcize a carbonizing society’s demons. The deliverance that is the realistic hope at least of the religious Chartist poets is anchored in a particular set of truths about the world: it is a good and purposeful creation that is currently being held captive by social-historical agents of coal-powered industrial capitalism that are also inextricably intertwined with transcendent, demonic forces of death, degradation, despotism, and doom; yet, the grain of the universe is designed for human freedom, sociality, and justice together with the well-functioning and beauty of all creation; therefore, working people should unite in a movement to democratize these new powers and, through democratization, to harness and channel newly tapped energy sources for a common good. Stated in this way, the Chartist ecopolitical theology that demonizes coal power can be understood as an integral aspect of a popular form of practical reasoning about coal power in industrializing Britain. It provided a description of the core problem generated by coal power, morally evaluated multiple aspects of that problem, clarified the nature of that problem, articulated truths about the moral, social, and natural world to which people could anchor their hope for change, and pointed toward a specific set of collective actions to address it, namely exorcism from demonic bondage to coal power through democratization of British politics, culture, and the economy and allowing for the damage to heal. It was as much a spiritual issue as it was a social and economic one, for deliverance depended on trusting in theologically derived truths about oneself and the world that were not affirmed by the wider society and its ruling powers. Likewise, considering the frequent focus on children and the need to restore a healthy, nature-engaged childhood in working-class communities, the healing necessary would be as much spiritual as it was physical.

5. Theorizing Critical Carbon Theology

I can now briefly examine a number of observations from this study of Chartist carbon theology and consider how it might relate to our current climate and energy crises. In particular, I identify three topics for analysis.

The first observation is that a Chartist vision of energy democracy emerged in response to the rapid changes brought about by the introduction of coal as a motive power. Reading Chartist theology in view of the historical fact that most of the demands outlined in the People’s Charter were widely adopted—albeit far too slowly for its protagonists to feel themselves successful—the energy addition of coal should be seen as having conditioned the emergence of a theological vision from below of democratic society. Given the role of coal in this process, theirs could be called a theological vision of energy democracy from below. Proponents of critical carbon theology affirmed that God was not on the side of unjust coal power—those who concentrated the human and environmental costs of industrial coal into the bodies and landscapes of workers—but was instead on the side of those struggling to create a livable world in the midst of a rapidly carbonizing society that would sacrifice them in the name of human progress.

There is an odd aspect to this observation that needs further attention. One could read it as suggesting that the introduction of coal as a motive power for industry and development was partly responsible for historical processes of democratization. However, I think it suggests something rather different, something akin to Timothy Mitchell’s analysis of “carbon democracy”. A scholar of oil’s impact on global politics, Mitchell observes that the politics that historically formed around coal differed from the politics that formed in relation to oil. Whereas the former seems to have conditioned the emergence of social democracy, the latter appears to have conditioned democracy’s limits. Mitchell theorizes that at least part of this difference can be attributed to the different materialities of these two energy sources: one is hard, traditionally extracted in underground mines, and transported on fixed railways, while the other is liquid, extracted at the surface, and transported along variable shipping and pipeline routes. The materiality of each energy source and the technologies used to extract and move them conditioned the possibilities for political action. In the case of coal, workers could organize around chokepoints, shut off the flow of energy resources, and ultimately bargain for better pay, safer working conditions, and other goods that have become hallmarks of social democracies. In the case of oil, it has been something of the opposite story (Mitchell 2009).12 Regardless of the accuracy or not of Mitchell’s theory, his analysis of the conditions and limits of democracy vis-à-vis energy sources can helpfully be applied to the case of the Chartist movement. The ways in which coal was mined and burned during the early decades of industrialization allowed workers to pull the plug on coal power and assert their—eventually successful—democratizing demands. In the industrializing countries, gains for democratization since the nineteenth century have been indebted not to coal per se, as if coal’s panegyrists were right that it would bring about human advancement, but rather to the movements that emerged in response to the horrors and traumas brought about by the introduction of coal as a motive power. And, as I have shown, one of the most significant of these movements theologically interpreted coal power in such a way that it condemned energy advancements that were achieved only through shifting and concentrating the costs of energy addition in the lives of the economically impoverished. Put differently, through movements that sought to make the historical processes of industrialization, urbanization, and mechanization more livable for workers and their communities, there emerged realms of human life that the working poor and their allies perceived as under threat and therefore in need of protection: the social and, in a more inchoate fashion, ecological realms. Chartist activist-theologians contributed to the emergence and discovery of these spheres of the social and the ecological as necessary for a full human life. Energy justice, then, as they enacted it, would require safeguarding certain social and ecological conditions from the new threats introduced by energy addition. These were seen to be realms of human life to which markets and states should be held accountable.

A second observation is that Chartist activist-theologians did not demonize coal. Rather, they associated many aspects of an emerging coal-based economy and social order, like working in the mines and factories or living in industrial towns, with demons, devils, and doom. But I have found no instance in which coal itself is demonized. Rather, the coal-fired steam engine is often personified as representing the confluence of economic, political, chemical, and mechanical power that I have been calling coal power. In this sense, what Chartists demonize in their writings are the political and economic agents who without sympathy or moral concern concentrate the human and environmental burden of an increasingly coal-based economy and society—its pollution, physical risks, and spiritual diminishment—into the bodies, spirits, and environments of other human beings, most egregiously children. In short, it is the social and political dynamics through which an emerging coal-based economy’s sacrifice zones are sharply differentiated from their green zones that is demonized and therefore made the object of exorcism and deliverance.

In theological reasoning, the telos of demon talk is exorcism and deliverance. For example, in the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus, demons are exorcized in order that those tormented by them would be liberated and healed to contribute as agents to the building of a social realm that supports flourishing. Political theologian Luke Bretherton underscores the political implications of Jesus’s healing ministry when he argues that the exorcisms and healings Jesus performs in the Gospels restore people to a sense of agency. “The primary achievement of healing”, he writes, “is not simply the restoration of sight or the ability to talk; it is the restoration of the ability of those currently excluded to be involved in the formation of a common world” (Bretherton 2019, p. 109). In this sense, deliverance from bondage to demons and demonic structures frees people for a constructive task that cannot be possible without physical and spiritual healing. “If exorcism is the expulsion of demonic activity and the abolition of oppressive forces”, Bretherton continues, “then deliverance is their replacement by a new animating spirit and direction, one orientated to flourishing, not to harm”. This dynamic is also at work in Chartist theology, where the deliverance theme points in the direction of making a common life in the midst of new energy sources, technologies, and infrastructures that does not require sacrifice zones.

This leads to my last observation, which is that Chartism’s critical carbon theology exposes and challenges progress narratives that would invisibilize, naturalize, or rationalize cost-shifting—a damned thing. In this sense, it directly challenges the carbon theology of coal’s panegyrists, which associates coal power with progress toward human improvement. These progress narratives function to draw people’s attention away from the new forms of risk, suffering, and degradation introduced by the new coal energy regime by drawing it instead to the brilliant new world coal will help bring about. It says, “Don’t look at those sacrifice zones over there. Look at the future we’re building”. In contrast, critical carbon theology draws attention to those new forms of vulnerability, diminishment, and disfigurement in order to reorient the moral calculus of energy addition and transition: those who bear the heaviest burden ought to have a greater role in directing the newly tapped energies. This vision of energy democracy and justice does not negate the notion of human progress, and neither does it negate the idea that coal energy could be harnessed by the masses for democratization.13 Rather, it negates the kind of strategy that today is associated with greenwashing: communicating an ethical, humanistic vision while producing and reproducing environmental sacrifice zones.14 I think this is the damned thing that critical carbon theology puts in question and to which it responds with a vision of and practices oriented toward energy justice.

6. Conclusions: Energy Transition or Transformation?

These three observations derived from my study suggest that talk of energy transition may be just that, talk about transition without transformation. Changes in a society’s energy sources, technologies, and infrastructures may simply reinforce and even intensify social visions that serve to entrap rather than liberate, to shift and concentrate costs rather than grapple with and reduce them. If so, then this would be little more than the same damned thing dressed in the language of progress and advancement. As I claimed in my introduction, this possibility stands before today’s proponents of environmental and climate sustainability as a temptation that ought to be named and rejected. As the nun in Kolwezi implied, a better future cannot come by way of sacrificing today’s marginalized and excluded. More urgent than a great shift from combustion engines to batteries is the need to consider anew what contributes to human wellbeing and flourishing. The latter is not synonymous with economic growth, miles per gallon, or EV range. Rather, it is far closer to what coal’s Chartist demonizers held sacrosanct about childhood: enjoying being alive and in life-giving, spiritually salutary relationships with others and the earth. Pursuing an energy transition that prioritizes the wellbeing of those who inhabit energy sacrifice zones would be transformative in this sense.

I can recap my argument by returning to the present moment. There is a growing mass of people from many corners of the planet who, like Siddharth Kara and the nun in Kolwezi, are raising concerns about a sacrificial dynamic that is overlooked, or is perhaps even intentionally covered over, by the evangelists of sleek sustainability. They are right to raise these concerns. This is a problem in the cobalt mines in the Copper Belt and also in the South American Lithium Triangle and in places like Thacker Pass in Nevada. As I have argued, it is not an entirely new one. Rather, it is one that was identified by Chartist carbon theologians as a damned problem over 150 years ago—sacrificing children for profit and abstract greater goods—and it is one we are at risk of reproducing in the name of energy transition and climate sustainability. But Chartist theologians also identified the goods to be sought, primarily the social and ecological conditions necessary for a full, spiritually healthy human life, and they developed a response, namely exorcism and deliverance through energy justice and democracy. In order to prevent reproducing the same damned thing and make energy systems serve substantive goods, we would do well to listen to those most affected by big ideas pursued in the name of abstract greater goods. Energy justice and democracy today will not look the same as it did in industrializing England, but it should continue to aim at making energy systems, technologies, and infrastructures serve the goods of human flourishing and environmental care.

My analysis and argument dovetails to a great extent with Timothy Morton’s in Hell. Morton is right that William Blake was a prophet who foresaw, perhaps better than anyone, what was coming to “England’s mountains green” and its “pleasant pastures seen”—that is, “dark Satanic mills” (quoted in Morton 2024). Morton is also right to think with Blake about our present situation with climate change and ecological degradation: we are living in a kind of hell of our own making, and so many of the big ideas to improve the situation simply make it worse. They are little more than the same damned thing. Finally, Morton is right about much of today’s environmentalism: it lacks a dream, a vision of what might be, beyond reproducing the same cursed cycles. However, while Blake may have foreseen what was coming and tried to imagine an alternative to it, the working class in early nineteenth-century Britain experienced it when it came, the Chartist writers interpreted and analyzed it, and the Chartist press imparted their ideas to working class communities to make collective sense of their experience. This is how a working class culture and identity was forged in those tumultuous years, eventually flowering into a religious and cultural movement with a democratizing political agenda represented by the People’s Charter. The Chartist movement did not lack a dream. The dream of its religiously engaged poets, who have been the object of my study, was grounded in a creator God who delivers people from bondage to demonic forces and wills to lead them into healing, freedom, and justice in harmony with the natural world. Chartist leaders appealed to this dream time and again to solidify the creation of a working-class culture and a political agenda to exorcize from an industrializing society its bondage to demons that would dress up the worship of money and the sacrifice of children as human progress.

Chartism’s critical carbon theology does not demonize fossil fuels or even fossil power so much as it imagines and enacts an exorcism: delivering a social ecology formed with and through fossil fuels from the modes of entrapment and bondage that they made possible. Critical carbon theology, as represented by Chartist writer-activist-theologians, does not demand the cessation of fossil fuel use (though I think today we should demand such a cessation, or at least its circumscription to certain limited uses); rather, it draws attention to the possibility of harnessing social and earthly energies for more creative and generative ways of living together while holding the economic and political powers unleashed by new energy sources accountable to the realms of the social and the ecological. It demands that transitions in energy and the economy be held accountable to the needs of the social and the ecological, for these have been given by God for persons and personalities to flourish.