‘Farming God’s Way’: Evangelical Cosmologies of Land and ‘Crisis’ in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Social conditions in post-apartheid South Africa have been widely seen as marked by persistent and often racialised inequalities. The country has also been viewed through the prism of crisis, in economic, social, ecological and political spheres. Such language of crisis is increasingly reflected today among religious actors that reconstitute religious publics in the post-apartheid dispensation. Focusing on the growing public presence of Pentecostal-Charismatic and Evangelical Christianity, this article analyses how cultivating food ‘God’s way’ interplays with discourses of crisis in South Africa. The study employs ethnographic observation and interviews of practitioners and instructors of the Farming God’s Way network, a parachurch organisation operating in promoting regenerative agricultural principles as authentic Christian practice. Biblically authorised land practices address Christians’ emotional attachments and personal histories of agricultural production, land use and ownership. The study argues for understanding such farming as encompassing a space of both mediation and contestation between hopes of restoring an ideal past based on a biblically based agrarian and ecological order and frustrations with attempts at transforming a morally degraded present. Addressing Farming God’s Way as an emotional project entangled in discourses of (non)belonging and questions of change reveals tensions around representations of race, class and gender in Charismatic Christians’ approach to biodiversity. Here, adherence to regenerative farming principles reveals practices through which Christian farmers attempt to remake themselves as moral citizens through ecological care. Rearticulations of the responsible steward, however, pinpoint the persistence of racialised tropes at the core of the religious public project of redeeming the present.