On multiple occasions in the late 1970s president Jimmy Carter delivered jeremiads in which he stated that energy is not just technological or economic or political in form, but that it is existential and theological. Carter refers to the fight for its better handling by humanity the “moral equivalent of war”. These words, among other statements from political as well as spiritual leaders in the US, highlight how petroleum and energy are not merely material concerns, but cultural ones that have been confronted, imagined, mythologized, and politicized by people who place their power in faith.
In this talk, professor Darren Dochuk will present how the charge to make energy a moral matter in the 1970s and 80s led to “Tri-faith” (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish) America realigning internally, resulting in divisions over energy and environment within parishes and steering the politics of oil and energy (and environment) externally into an intractable culture-warring mode that is so consequential today in the age of Trump.
The full title of Dochuk’s talk is “The Moral Equivalent of War: Energy Crises, Petro-Wars, and the Culture-War Politics of Energy in the Age(s) of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (and Donald Trump)”.
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