The alliance between Appalachian churches and the coal industry has brought Appalachia to its knees. For over two centuries, Appalachian ministers and priests have pressured their congregants to sell land, manipulate papal documents, exploit church properties for personal gain, and frame incomplete economic data regarding the coal industry with sound theological arguments. In response to this institutional corruption favoring the coal industry, a new theory of Appalachian liberation theology needs development to break the coal-church alliance. Through examining papal documents, (...) theological work by Michael Iafrate and the Catholic Committee of Appalachia, and jobs and economic data from agencies like the Appalachian Research Commission and Energy Futures Initiative, liberation theologians can begin to chart the first contours of Appalachian liberation theology. Such a theology involves the exaltation of the local church, grassroots change, support for green energy, and the empowering of youth voices through granting them positions that enable institutional change. (shrink)

Since the global financial meltdown in 2008, moralizing stereo- types of white working-class citizens have proliferated across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australasia, and Europe. Both conservatives and liberals use concepts such as the Appa- lachian hillbilly, the council estate-dwelling chav, and the outer- suburban bogan to allege white working-class citizens’ failure to adapt to the demands of the globalizing political economy. As recent commentators on the Appalachia “problem” note, such moralizing obscures more than it explains, and does (...) so in the service of economic privilege and political power. Comparative examination of the actors and actions behind the erosion of citizenship as a political category in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia helps to link contemporary moralizing about the white working class to reaction against the democratic excess that working-class movements directly and indirectly provoked in the mid-twentieth century. Today in Appalachia and beyond, conservative and liberal moralizing about the white working-class “problem” undermines democrats’ capacity to recognize and respond to these efforts to displace citizenship as a political category with the moral category of the individual. (shrink)