The Inevitable Divine

On our way from Dresden to Bad Schlema, the former GDR uranium mining site, we passed several banners advertising the so-called “pro-life” “March for Life”. The region around the Ore Mountains is known for being the “Bible Belt of Saxony”.¹ Christian fundamentalists, respectively evangelicals and anti-abortion activists organize this rally once a year in Annaberg-Buchholz (40min drive from Bad Schlema). Seeing these banners on our way to the former uranium mining site reminded me of the situated religiosity in this region (and the feminist resistance to it). What I however did not previously consider was how theological questions could arise in the context of mining in the Ore Mountains. 

When we entered the „Lehrstollen am Silberbach”, a former mining tunnel, which is now open for educational purposes to the public, I felt a breeze that grew increasingly stronger the further we went into the tunnel. Our guide from the tunnel explained what working conditions used to be like in the tunnel and how important mining was for this region. He deciphered that the breeze we could feel is caused by the air circulation, because today, as in the days when mining was actively carried out here, it is important to get fresh air in the tunnel. Despite this logical explanation for the strong breeze, this place nevertheless felt haunted.

During our visit to the museum of uranium mining at the “Kulturhaus Aktivist”, we were introduced to the history of Bad Schlema and the mining company “Wismut” and the legacy of mining and extraction in the Ore Mountains. Until 1946, the company was called the “Wismut AG”, but from 1954 the company renamed to “Wismut SDAG”, because de jure it was a Soviet German joint stock company between 1954 and 1990. In a staccato-like rhythm of dates and materials, the employee presented us a historical sequence of mining periods: 1255 tin, 1417 copper, 1452 iron – as if this historical sequence and linear history of extraction was the only possible description of history. And then he continued: “(…) In 1471, they started mining silver, but they discovered arsenic in the silver and that was very bad. Around the year 1540 they found cobalt and nickel, and they built a church to ask God for more silver.” The guide showed us a picture. – This evocation of religious practices and rituals in the history of mining irritated me, and at the same time I was reminded again of the situated religiosity in the Ore Mountains.

After the presentation on the mining company Wismut, we were given a guided tour through the museum. We went into a gloomy room, which was supposed to be a replica of a shaft. Ore containing uranium was on display in a corner showcase. This showcase was illuminated brightly and slightly yellowed from the inside. A pane and a safety distance should serve to protect the visitors.  A Geiger counter was attached to the showcase to measure the (permanent) radiation from this piece of uranium ore and to ensure its literal authentic radiation. This piece of uranium ore on display reminded me of the “Holy Grail” in a metaphorical sense: this piece of uranium ore is being sacralized, presenting the sought divine grace. 

We went to the next room in the museum, where we were instructed about the healing function of radon – a radioactive noble gas, that is released from the decay of uranium. Bad Schlema is not only a former mining site for uranium, but also a tourist destination and sanitarium with “healing radon baths”. The decay of radon produces particles that can eliminate functional disorders and pain in the body and stimulate the metabolism, at least this is what we were told and what one can find on the websites of Bad Schlema.² The first healing radon water was dispensed here in 1913. Today, the “common” radon therapy is characterized by the healing radon bath. This healing radon bath again reminded me of religious practices and rituals: the holy and healing bath in the Ganges and the practice of baptism. In traditional Christian religion, children are baptized, but in evangelical churches, baptism happens at an adult age, practiced as an ostensible conscious declaration of their relationship to faith, while being completely immersed in water. Here, one can sense and observe sacred traces, inscribed in the practice of (healing) radon baths in Bad Schlema. 

After the research studio, I tried to get access to the picture the guide showed us during his presentation on the history of mining in the Ore Mountains. I asked other participants of the research studio, and I contacted the museum. But until today, I cannot get access to this picture. I must acknowledge this data loss, but it also let to some constructive results: one the one hand it acts as evidence for the difficulties of sensing and collecting data at toxic and haunted former mining sites. On the other hand, it opened a (metaphorical) tunnel to the afterlife. Following my re-search on the picture the guide showed us during our visit to the museum, an employee of the museum told me about the legend of the great silver finding at the St. Georg mine in Schneeberg (10min drive from Bad Schlema). This silver finding from 1477 is also referred to as the “legendary discovery of silver” in Schneeberg and was the finding the Duke Albrecht had been praying for.³ In a letter dated on August 11^th, 1471, Duke Albrecht wrote: “[…] that in a short time, if God wills, a considerable amount of silver should be made at Zwickau, and that this will improve every day by the grace of Almighty God […] [original in German, translated by the author]”⁴. But in 1477, not only was the great silver finding from Schneeberg recorded, but also the legend of the Holy Supper at the silver table in the mine is said to have taken place.⁵ The great silver finding in the region was partly responsible for the construction of magnificent churches in the region. An example of this is the St. Anne’s Church in Annaberg-Buchholz, whose paintings by Hans Hesse portray the mining landscape and the mining life in the 15^th and 16^th century.⁶

To what extent do religious practices, religious elements and religious belief systems play a role in the legacy of mining and extraction in the region of the Ore Mountains? This is a region that has undergone radical political and economic transformations in recent years and is still going through demographic, economic and social transformations. It is also a region, that was part of the “actually existing socialism” of the GDR between 1949 and 1990, which wanted to break the power of the churches.

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In a recently published special issue of Religions on “Religion in Extractive Zones” (2025), the editors and authors Terra Schwerin Rowe, Christiana Zenner and Lisa H. Sideris address the mutually dependent relationship between religion and extractive regimes.⁷ Based on Eduardo Gudynas (2016, 2020) understanding of extractivism/extractivismo⁸ and Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) research on extractive zones⁹, the authors ask to what extent religion and extractive regimes have been co-extensive and co-developed.¹⁰ In their view, religion proliferates in extractive zones, because the modern concept of religion itself emerged in and through extractive zones, based on a particular temporality of stadial evolution of civilization and emerged from a European gaze in a transcultural colonial context¹¹: 

“Such temporal assumptions of linear civilizational development mean that seemingly distinct rhetorics of both religion and extraction can amplify one another. […] For example, presiding Euro-American Christian tropes of manifest destiny, freedom, expansionism, exceptionalism, millennialism, and final frontiers have been historically invoked and continue to be touted as justifications for the further exploitation of people and resources, with an assumed inevitability of divinely ordained progress (Bentancor 2017; Dochuk 2019; LeMenager 2005; Rubenstein 2022).”¹²

For Rowe, Zenner and Sideris, this framework lays the groundwork for an understanding of religion as structuring imagination of matter and culture, even when it seems to work within a non-religious or secular register.¹³ In this context, post secular and political theologies or belief systems and ritual practices do not have to be undeniably religious to function as a legitimization and justification for extractive strategies.¹⁴

In the same special issue, Amanda M. Nichols wrote a piece on uranium mining, Christian religion and linear, conditional, colonial temporality in the United States in Navajo Tribal Land in the desert Southwest.¹⁵ In this article, she emphasizes the role of religious rhetorics in American nuclear discourses (i.e. uranium extraction, energy production and waste storage). Her key argument is based on a critique of a Western understanding of time: 

“Western religious beliefs have informed the ways that time is conceptualized and understood. In turn, how we understand time shapes the ways that we make sense of the long-term implications of uranium extraction.”¹⁶

In her view, a critical reflection of this entanglement

“shifts thinking about extraction away from colonial notions of time which understand extraction as an ‘event’ that occurs at a particular time and place. Instead, it underscores that ‘events’, such as extraction, are temporally complex and enmeshed in geological, biological, reproductive, and evolutionary processes.”¹⁷

A considerable amount of literature can be found on the relationship between religion, theology and extraction, especially in the context of oil extraction, Energy Humanities and studies on Petrocultures, particularly in the Anglo-American context.¹⁸ Although the existing research literature on religiosity is quite revealing, it cannot be directly adapted and used as a framework to explore the history and legacy of mining in haunted ghost mines in the Ore Mountains. The religious hauntings and religious elements in the in the mining discourse must be politically, culturally and historically situated and studied.

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Religiosity

By religious hauntings, I refer to the concept and metaphor of nuclear ghosts by Karen Barad, which she uses to describe the persistent and often invisible effects of nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants on people and the environment, that are not only material, but also social, ecological and cultural.¹⁹ In this sense,  and with reference to Rowe, Zenner and Sideris, one can think of religious hauntings as persistent and often invisible religious discourse elements in mining and extractive technologies. Therefore, one can speculate on religious, secular and post-secular elements in the context of legitimization and justification of extractive strategies in the Ore Mountains. Speculating on religious hauntings do not superficially deal with unrealized potentials and futures that have failed to materialize, but with often invisible religious elements from the past that materialize in our present social world.²⁰ But which religion, respectively belief system do we have to study in the context of mining in the Ore Mountains? What forms of Christianity were and are present in this region, and how did these forms change, especially during the time of the GDR? Can religious or theological discourse elements be found in the GDR discourse of mining? To what extent must the GDR nuclear discourse be linked to the Soviet nuclear discourse, since the uranium extracted in the Ore Mountains was the raw material for the Soviet nuclear industry? Why are the Ore Mountains called the “Bible Belt of Saxony”, and to what extent can we trace entanglements between these sensed religious hauntings, the legacy of mining in this region and the so-called Bible Belt of Saxony? There are only a few studies on the religiosity in the Bible Belt of Saxony²¹, and there is no research on the relationship between religiosity and extraction in the region of the Ore Mountains.

Political Economy

The role of religion is directly linked to the political economy, as the region of the Ore Mountains was part of the socialist GDR between 1949 and 1990. For this reason, the question must be asked whether the concept of extractive zones is the right term to examine the situatedness of religious hauntings in the Ore Mountains, as this concept is connected to colonial and capitalist modes of production and extraction, not to planned economies and socialist modes.²² However, this is not necessarily an argument against the concept of extractive zones or an analysis of the zone ²³ for three reasons: First, the GDR as such was a literal zone, a “zone of soviet occupation” and communist extrastatecraft. Even if the concept of the zone refers to capitalist economies and free-trade zones, the entanglements between GDR and Soviet Union economy can challenge and extend the conceptual capitalist understanding of the zone. Second, socialist economies do also have histories of extraction of raw materials and labor, which were justified by a greater (communist) good. As already mentioned above, secular and post secular belief systems do not necessarily have to be religious to function as legitimization for extractive strategies. And third, the research literature shows that postcolonial theories can be used to examine the former Soviet space.²⁴ In this context, one should note that the joint stock company Wismut AG/SDAG and mining in the Ore Mountains was not welcomed by all members of the public. Critical environmental movements were also formed in the Ore Mountains, and it is important to mention that the peaceful revolution of 1989 was initiated by parts of the church movement and the environmental movement of the former GDR.²⁵ Taking all this into consideration, it must be asked how to situate the Ore Mountains in this political-economic context, or rather between these various historical and political layers and entanglements since the beginning of mining in the 13^th century to the present, – but without conceptualizing the environmental histories and the histories of extraction in this region as a linear and inevitable. 

Religious Hauntings and Temporal Nodes

Forensics of religious hauntings in ghost mines in the Ore Mountains not only includes an examination of the multilayered history of mining in this region. Mines can be understood as temporal nodes of space and time²⁶, and for that reason, it is important to observe the present and sense possible futures of mining in this region. During our tour to the tunnel, the guide told us that currently there a discussions about lithium mining in the Ore Mountains, but they are not going to start anytime soon, he said, because it will take around ten years for planning a lithium mining site. These lithium resources can be found in the Zinnwald, precisely on the German Czech border between Zinnwald-Georgenfeld in Altenberg (Germany) and Cínovec (Czech Republic). As a result of the widespread digitization and the use of “clean technologies”, such as e-cars, energy storage, solar cells and wind power plants, the demand for lithium is increasing 21-fold and the demand for rare earths is increasing 6-7-fold, as a report by the European Commission from 2024 shows.²⁷ The state Saxony emphasizes the quick need for lithium mining, because it would ensure an “independent and sustainable supply” for critical raw materials, the competitiveness of Saxony and potential for the transformation of mobility and energy sectors.²⁸ The guide from the former mining tunnel also noted that lithium mining in the Ore Mountains is geopolitically important, and Germany could keep up with the global players, if we would start to mine lithium soon. Lithium mining in the Ore Mountains will be “gentle on surfaces” as well as “sustainable, low disturbance and low risk” says the managing director of the lithium mining company “Zinnwald Lithium GmbH”, subsidiary of the “Zinnwald Lithium LPC”, which is based in London.²⁹

The narrative about the region one could observe during the research studio is that the Ore Mountains are “naturally rich” in raw materials, as if this were a “given”. The political legitimization of lithium mining is often based on the growing social and geopolitical need for these materials. This narrative and the political legitimization are, I suggest here, interrelated: The resources have been “given” to us and now, we must manage them and use these resources productively for the good of the region, the nation and European sovereignty – the inevitable divine. The religious hauntings and religious elements in the Ore Mountains sensed during the research studio seem to have caught up with reality and they materialize in the present. Yet, these religious hauntings do not seem to be emancipative and democratic, rather they materialize socially and technologically conservative interpretations of the world. A critical reflection of religious hauntings in the Ore Mountains can help to understand religious discourse elements and religious rhetorics about given raw materials, a divine transcendence and the destiny of a region. Praying to God for silver, uranium ore as the holy grail, the healing radium bath, the fatefulness of a region with a natural deposit of earth metals and consequently the future of a region in which lithium is to be mined. All these examples can be understood as materializations of the supposed transcendental divine and a world in which the Anthropocene no longer exists.

But is this not a little bit too naïve? If we consider the resistance against these lithium mines, we can see assemblages of heterogenous political actors. And perhaps one could speculate on coils of religious hauntings that remember the protest against mining in the GDR and materializes in the present as democratic and ecologically and socially just futures.

1. Jennifer Stange, “Evangelikale in Sachsen: Ein Bericht,” in Schriften zur Demokratie, ed. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Sachsen, 2014 (https://weiterdenken.de/de/2014/06/01/evangelikale-sachsen-ein-bericht). ↩︎
2. “Radon – The natura remedy“, Sächsische Staatsbäder GmbH, last access: 31.07.2025, https://www.saechsische-staatsbaeder.de/bad-brambach/radon/; “Special radon cure in Bad Schlema”, Erzgebirge. Die Erlebnisheimat, last access: 31.07.2025, https://www.erzgebirge-tourismus.de/cs/subnavigation/rezervace/offer/radonspezialkur-in-bad-schlema/angebot.html; Bad Schlema. Das Radonheilbad des Erzgebirges, last access: 31.07.2025, https://www.kurort-schlema.de.  ↩︎
3. Jens Kugler, „Der Silberfund und das unterirdische Gastmahl 1477 in Schneeberg – Legende oder Wirklichkeit?“, Schloßbergmuseum Chemnitz, last access: 31.07.2025. https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~fna/09kugler.pdf. ↩︎
4. Jens Kugler, „Der Silberfund und das unterirdische Gastmahl 1477 in Schneeberg – Legende oder Wirklichkeit?“, Schloßbergmuseum Chemnitz, 3. ↩︎
5. See Jens Kugler, „Der Silberfund und das unterirdische Gastmahl 1477 in Schneeberg – Legende oder Wirklichkeit?“, Schloßbergmuseum Chemnitz. ↩︎
6. See Ralf Hanselle, “Arbeit ist das ewige Leben“, Monopol. Magazin für Kunst und Leben, 09.07.2020, last access: 31.07.2025 (https://www.monopol-magazin.de/kunst-kirche-altar-sachsen-kulturerbe-industrie-annaberg-buchholz). ↩︎
7. Terra Schwerin Rowe, Christiana Zenner and Lisa H. Sideris, “Religions in Extractive Zones: Methods, Imaginaries, Solidarities,” Religions 16 (2025): https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16070820.  ↩︎
8. Eduardo Gudynas, “Teología de los Extravismos,” in Tabula Rasa 24 (2016); Eduardo Gudynas, Extractivisms: Politics, Economy and Ecology (Fernwood Publishing, 2020). ↩︎
9. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017. ↩︎
10. Rowe, Zenner, Sideris, „Religions in Extractive Zones“, 3. ↩︎
11. Rowe, Zenner, Sideris, „Religions in Extractive Zones“, 4. ↩︎
12. Rowe, Zenner, Sideris, „Religions in Extractive Zones“, 2.  ↩︎
13. Rowe, Zenner, Sideris, „Religions in Extractive Zones“, FN 11. ↩︎
14. Rowe, Zenner, Sideris, „Religions in Extractive Zones“, 5, cited from Gudynas, “Teología de los Extravismos”. ↩︎
15. Amanda M. Nichols, “Uranium and Religion: Toward a Decolonial Temporality of Extraction,” Religions 16 (2025): https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16010016. ↩︎
16. Amanda M. Nichols, “Uranium and Religion: Toward a Decolonial Temporality of Extraction,” Religions 16 (2025): 3. ↩︎
17. Amanda M. Nichols, “Uranium and Religion: Toward a Decolonial Temporality of Extraction,” Religions 16 (2025): 3. ↩︎
18. Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil (Petrocultures & West Virginia University Press, 2016); Sheena Wilson, Carlson Adam and Imre Szeman (eds.), Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017); Terra Schwerin Rowe, Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-Theology (T & T Clark, 2023).  ↩︎
19. Karan Barand, “Nuclear Hauntings & Memory Fields, For the Time-Being(s),” Apocalyptica 1 (2023). ↩︎
20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the state of the debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International (Routledge, 1994). ↩︎
21. Jennifer Stange, “Evangelikale in Sachsen: Ein Bericht”; Veronika Albrecht-Birkner, “Der sächsische Bible belt als Konstellation diskursiver Aushandlung zwischen religiösem Expert:innen und Lai*nnenwissen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 53 (2023).  ↩︎
22. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone.  ↩︎
23. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014). ↩︎
24. f.i.: Epp Annus, Soviet Postcolonial Studies. A View from the Western Borderlands (Routledge, 2018). ↩︎
25. See “Historischer Hintergrund: Umweltverschmutzung und Umweltbewegung von der späten DDR bis in die Transformationszeit“,Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung, last access: 31.07.2025 (https://www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de/de/recherche/dossiers/umweltverschmutzung-und-umweltbewegung-der-ddr/historischer-hintergrund). ↩︎
26. Orit Halpern, „Golden Futures,“ Chokepoints 10 (2019). ↩︎
27. Directorate-General for Energy, “In Focus: Clean energy technologies”, European Commission, 2024 (https://energy.ec.europa.eu/news/focus-clean-energy-technologies-2024-05-15_en). ↩︎
28. Pressesprecher des Sächsisches Staatsministeriums für Wirtschaft, Arbeit, Energie und Klimaschutz (Press Officer of the State Ministry of Saxony for Economic Affairs, Labour, Energy and Climate Protection), “Sächsische Staatsregierung betont die Wichtigkeit des Miliardenprojekts Lithiumabbau im Erzgebirge“, 2025 (https://www.medienservice.sachsen.de/medien/news/1085956). ↩︎
29. MDR Sachsen, „Untertagemine für Lithium in Zinnwald für 2020 angepeilt“, 31.03.2025, last access: 31.07.25 (https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen/dresden/dippoldiswalde-sebnitz/lithium-abbau-altenberg-zinnwald-kritik-anwohner-100.html). ↩︎